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An interplay of story and analysis links this investigation into old age and family politics in four neighbourhoods of the Indian city of Varanasi with the events and processes around India and the world. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, this text encompasses not only the ageing body but also larger cultural anxieties, combining insights from medical anthropology, psychoanalysis and contemporary South Asian studies. The author responds to what he sees as the impoverishment of both North American and Indian gerontologies - the one mired in ambivalence toward demented old bodies, the other insistent on a dubious morality tale of modern families breaking up and abandoning their elderly. The reader's attention is shifted towards how old age comes to matter in the constitution of societies and their narratives of identity and history.