Why grandparents are better off in India

My grandmother lived with our family until she died. After all, she was our family, too; it seemed the natural thing. When I was small she lived next door, in a terraced cottage that was a second home for me and my sisters; when we moved from the suburbs into London, my parents built her a little house above the garage joined to ours.

I bet she was pretty useful as a babysitter, but she gave us much more than that. Her presence was the very fabric of our lives. She was the only one who had a television, so we were always clustered around it in her sitting-room; she had a piano and taught us to sing; she took us to church and told us about God; she took us to plays and introduced us to culture; she cut out patterns and taught us to sew.

But most important of all, she was always there. Our parents were physically there, but they were busy working - they both wrote books - and they spent long hours at their desks. Granny had time. Time to listen to us, in the non-judgmental way of a generation at one remove. Time to hear the stuff we couldn't tell our parents. Time to put a certain perspective to things, the perspective that comes from a life begun in 1890. We adored her. It was a love unmuddied by the complex feelings we had towards our mother and father during our tumultuous adolescence. After all, you can rebel against your parents but you can't rebel against your granny.

She also opened a window into the past. In her case it was a past defined by the great tragedies of the 20th century. Her first husband had been killed in the First World War, along with her brother and 11 cousins; she'd had a disastrous second marriage from which she bolted after a couple of years and slipped down the social ladder from comfort to penury; her son, who became a Communist, committed suicide when Germany and Russia signed the Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. How she could survive this and still be capable of love and laughter was an inspiration, and certainly put one's own problems into proportion.

Her lifetime spanned a period from a golden Victorian childhood to Punk Rock, a rich, full life with happy memories as well as tragic ones. She was born in Keats's house in Hampstead, and remembered playing under the tree where he wrote his poetry. The local Everyman cinema was a dance hall then, and she remembered going into the ladies and seeing the king's mistress, Alice Keppel, pull down her dress and rouge her nipples. Hard to forget that one. She remembered her second husband, who was a doctor in the New Forest, doing his rounds on horseback. She was a semi-professional musician and remembered singing for the troops at the London Colosseum in 1914. Her son had been a surrealist poet and magazine editor and she remembered Dylan Thomas's sour breath and terrible teeth. She remembered blackouts and rationing through two world wars. And more, much more.

Through her, we not only became acquainted with the past, as vividly as if it happened yesterday, but with being around an old person. As she became more frail we looked after her, just as she had looked after us. With our keener eyesight we plucked the whiskers from her chin and powdered her nose. We were also friends with her friends. It was natural for us to take their arm when we went for a walk. These wrinkled acquaintances weren't a different species, they were just older versions of ourselves.

In other words, our Granny wasn't just a kindly tolerated dependent, she was the heart of our family. In fact, she held our family together; when she died, my parents' marriage collapsed and our lives unravelled.

I give this as an example of what we lose when we banish old people from our families, as we do so often nowadays. When we put them into residential care it's our loss as well as theirs. Of course this is sometimes necessary for all sorts of reasons; of course we often feel guilty about having to do it, but basically this is what usually happens in our society.

It doesn't have to be the case. Other cultures in Britain - Muslim, Jewish - still respect their elders and keep them at home. I don't want to romanticise this too much - I'm sure it can result in all sorts of strains and tensions - but now I'm a grandmother myself, I would certainly prefer this than to be considered surplus to requirements. On the most practical level, our kids need us more than ever; they're working so hard just to keep their heads above water that grandparents can be incredibly useful, especially as we're so strong and healthy nowadays, 70 being the new 50 and all that. Besides, we don't charge any money.

How we treat the elderly was in my mind when I wrote my novel These Foolish Things - now reborn as a film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was released this week, just as a call was issued for health workers to sign a new code of conduct to ensure pensioners are treated with dignity. Indeed, the chances are most of us will end up in a home. If it happens to me, however, I don't want to do it the British way. I don't want to be shunted out of sight, staring at a ploughed field or the rain-lashed sea. It seems perverse that the more immobile someone becomes, the further they're removed from the action. More than ever, I would want to be surrounded by life, with stuff going on around me. And I'd much rather it was called a hotel - as Madge, one of my characters says, "the word hotel still has possibilities".

And I decided that if I couldn't be within the bosom of my family, I'd like to be somewhere hot. India sprang to mind for many reasons. We outsource everything else there; why not the elderly? It's hot, it's cheap, and there's plenty going on outside one's window. The streets in India are teeming with life. And if one does venture out, it's safe. In England, certain sections of society - hoodies, for instance - have been so demonised by the media that old people are terrified of them. In India, by contrast, teenagers are respectful and obedient. They look up to the elderly, who are considered founts of wisdom - true, we are! English is spoken everywhere too, and our historic connection with the country makes it weirdly familiar - more so, in some ways, than England, which for many people feels like a foreign country now. Flights are cheaper than extortionate British rail fares… the list goes on.

Underlying this idea, of course, is the looming collapse of any means of funding the elderly in this country - the pensions time-bomb, the strain on the NHS. We're all living too long and there's no money to pay for us, and it's going to get worse. My solution - to send the elderly to developing countries - actually makes sense.

And it's already happening. Spurred by the film, there's been a spate of articles about new retirement homes being built, not just in India but in other developing countries like the Philippines, where labour is cheap and there's year-round sun. Of course, it's a long way from home and it wouldn't suit everybody, but there are huge advantages, especially if families are scattered around the globe anyway, as is often the case. How strange that what began as fiction is turning into fact!

I think we're seeing a shift in consciousness. Life doesn't end with retirement; it can be a new beginning. If we're open to new experiences, we can find ourselves transformed. And let's stop calling ourselves old; I prefer very grown-up indeed.