We women want so many things,
and first we call for happiness —
The careless boon the hour brings,
The smile, the joy and the caress.
And when the fancy fades, we cry.
— Edith Wharton
I
We are not done at the ophthalmologist’s yet. I keep eyeing the decor of the room. There is a dour feel about it which is not unusual as waiting rooms go. The walls are crowded with laminated photographs of children with deep, questioning glances with the top right corners lettered with pertinent aphorisms. Some are contemplative – “The eye sees only what the mind is willing to comprehend”, some consolatory – “No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight” and one pretentiously Latin – “Oculi, tanquam speculatores, altissimum locum obtinent”. We were alone that day, my wife and I. We seat ourselves by the door. A gentle breeze wafts in and kisses her brown eyes but passes by oblivious of me.
She asks me if it were closing on six and I tell her it is. I have stopped asking her how she could know for fear of entering into another didactic Baker Street session. She is in a cream Bengal cotton saree that is slightly crumpled at the frays between her knees. There is little else by way of accoutrement on her person other than the mangalasutram around her neck which she guards ferociously as it slides into her blouse. She offers a perfectly photogenic stance with her upright posture and hands placed statuesquely on her lap. Her jet-black hair runs in a single braid almost all the way along her spine. There are wavy strands of hair about her right ear as she neatly sweeps them with her fingertips over the mount. Her cheeks are wan and her voice subdued – possibly on account of the cold she is still convalescing from. Her breathing is relaxed as evidenced by the slow metronomic surge of her bosom and her navel peeks out tantalisingly from the tug of her saree. She knows I am looking at her very minutely right now and she seems to like it though she never looks at me as she talks possibly because she is uncertain if she would succeed in making eye contact. This gives me the distinct advantage of being an invisible and distant admirer, quite in the manner of the priest making his remote communion with God embodied in the idol of black marble.
She likes dressing bright as if to sympathise with the world that cannot see her and must make do with only the colour of her attire. She is not particularly discerning about them though her personal preferences are rather esoteric – lemon chiffon, blanched almond and honeydew. I remember the long session we had one evening trying to look up colours for her to associate objects with. I would quiz her on the colour of the steel cabinet, of the bedroom almyrah, of the gas cylinder and she would enquire of the colour of the ugly mulberry leaf in summer, of the reviled cicada as it buzzes about her and of my clumped fist as she would bunch the fingers tightly. She is still finding it difficult getting used to her blindness and so she likes to romanticise about the things that she misses. She hates having to use the stick if only for what it represents and would rather ensconce herself in the lock of our arms. I joke to her often that this makes us look like a content middleclass couple going in to the Talkies to catch a soppy college romance after a busy Sunday afternoon shopping experience. We did go to a movie once but it was a disaster as she never ceased to ask questions about the plot and what all the actors looked like until she got a reprimand from a jumpy middle-aged woman sitting in front of us.
We spend Saturday evenings at the Gateway of India. She loves the cool splash of water as it crashes on the boulders and reaches for her bare ankles. And then, there are the millions of pigeons that have now come to view this spot as an exalted amphitheatre in which they perform their flashy ensemble acrobatic displays to the applause and wide-eyed amazement of their audience. As they swoop down en masse threatening to topple us, she fishes out the bag of grains and peanuts from her handbag and sprinkles them around and no sooner than that is done, the coos and the guturgus increase in pitch and tension.
She suffers from macular degeneration. The macula is the part of the retina that contains the densest concentration of photosensitive cells which help in colour differentiation and close vision. The degeneration causes many of these cells to malfunction thereby impairing central or detail vision and ultimately causing total blindness if not checked. The disease is more prevalent amongst Caucasians and those with blue eyes and normally does not affect people aged under fifty-five but there have been rare cases in other instances as well. What was atypical about her case was the speed with which it struck and caused the rapid loss in her eyesight. Even though she is almost completely blind, she has been required to visit Dr. Murthy once every month for another year should a miracle manifest itself.
While she is in, I count out the minutes looking at the weary sun setting behind the banyans and sucking the birds to their roosts in its vacuum.
II
We were wed three years ago in a simple ceremony at a temple close by. I was stubborn in my stand against celebrating the occasion and so the entire ritual lasted for only a little more than three hours with a handful of my acquaintances from the university and her friends from the press in addition to our families in attendance. The priest uttered the mantrams in somewhat suspect incantation, I tied the turmeric-starched necklace (mangalasutram) around her neck, ran a dash of vermilion along the parting of her hair and that was it.
I was twenty-seven then and she was five years younger at twenty-two. It felt like committing a crime, marrying someone that young. What made it worse was that we had been playmates many years ago at a time when I was still young enough to enjoy playing with girls, pulling Their double plaits and pony tails but old enough to realise that funny things were starting to happen to Them. We would play hopscotch much against the wishes of my embarrassed elder brother who would squirm as he would pedal past us on his way back from college. Of course, cynical maturity kicked in pretty soon and I started shunning all of Them, not even wanting to look at Them in class. The boys were the smart ones and the girls the inveterate lackeys tailing neatly coiffured teachers like theatre pages. Any socialising with Them meant complete ostracisation. Slowly but steadily though, our antipathy waned and while most of my classmates were able to make the transition from misogynists to flirts most effortlessly I somehow stayed behind, partly out of confusion and a reluctance to cede the upper hand and partly on account of my own insecurities in approaching Their company. That sense of discomfiture stayed with me throughout school and through college and it was unthinkable now to confront Kamakshi, one of Them, and accept her as someone I was going to have to live with. But my mother would not wear it; she feared I was spiralling towards irreversible bachelorhood with my newfound fascinations for theology and spiritualism. Besides, Kamakshi’s parents were known to our family for close to fifteen years now and in the rather trite manner of honouring old friendships our alliance was fixed and, I might add, swiftly executed.
Soon after the wedding, I obtained a position as a faculty member at the Bombay University. The Hindu, where Kamakshi worked, did not have any openings in its Bombay office and so she decided to go freelance which meant devoting a good measure of time in constant travel and researching.
In the formative years of our relationship each of us saw the other as an awkward fixture in our existence. Coming from different professional backgrounds did not help much either in terms of fostering conversation. I ought to have felt vexed with myself that as the elder of the two I was not as forthcoming in initiating dialogue but being diffident and somewhat the indefatigable fatalist, I left it to time to work things out. But time there was scarce, especially during the weekdays what with my busy teaching load and her frequent wanderings about. If I was to get to the university in Matunga by nine, I would have to make the 7.43 Local. The station was two kilometres away, so that meant having to leave the flat by 7.10. She had no such constraints and so we never managed to rendezvous with each other in the mornings although she would be nice enough to get up early and make breakfast. I spent long hours at the university trying to juggle two courses and my own research work. I seldom returned home in time for dinner, I wonder now if it was to avoid an encounter, and would stay behind to finish up writing notes for next day’s class. There was an implicit understanding between us not to intrude on the other’s professional time. We did engage in some civil conversations over the weekends whereupon I would learn that she had to be away at Pune to attend the annual Convention for Freelance Journalists and she would learn that a paper of mine appeared in the Indian Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Clearly, she was as much at unease with this as I was and was defiantly refusing to initiate things herself.
Our first few months though were completely spent trying to readjust to this colossal hodgepodge called Bombay. The Local summarised all of it in its long train of eleven coaches clanking and careening with vast numbers of humanity transfixed in eking their daily livelihoods — frail women carrying straw baskets of mangoes from the distribution centre at Kalyan to their mobile marketplaces around the streets of uptown, jewel-merchants careful not to betray their identities by dressing in khadi kurtas and dhotis, scraggly urchins tearing off fragments of stenched cloth from their body to clean the floor of stale biscuits, spit and urine and slavering at the prospect of rupee-note missiles and big shiny coins tossed at them and babus from dung-plastered tenements going to their government offices and depressing bureaucracy. On my first day on the Local, I threw up as the train lumbered past women cooking broth in the open, unaffected by putrid sewers swarming with flies and boys with sooted skin squatting and defecating in a line with ingenuous smiles on their scabbed faces. I had to come to terms with the staggering divide between these railway orphans and the mandarins and technocrats at Marine Lines who enjoyed idyllic views of the Arabian Sea at a verandah hundred feet high costing thirty thousand per square foot. The world outside our apartment was a cruel cacophony of decadence and penury that was muted as soon as I entered it. Perhaps, it was the same with her too as our monosyllabic parleys in the evenings seemed to suggest. Little wonder then that we preferred the silence of the other rather than the voice. Our circles of friends were limited too. I dared not bring in any of my lecturer peers home for that would only set off an avalanche of calls and return calls. She chose to meet her colleagues for luncheons and dinners outside. Our bedding was separated by an ornate mantelpiece, we used two different brands of soap and toothpaste, the bookshelf was neatly demarcated with books on journalism and literature on the left and the ones on rigidbody motion and Advaita on the right – we were in effect living like two apartmentmates with disparate takes on life. It was not that the marriage had gone astray, merely that it had not even taken off.
III
The first symptoms I noticed of her failing eyesight were when I woke up one morning a little more than two years ago to find her frantically rubbing her eyes, distending and screwing them shut as she tried to read the newspaper. She did tell me a few days ago that she was having frequent bouts of headache for the past month and was finding it difficult to read. While she had prescription reading glasses, she seldom used them and preferred reading by good lighting holding the material close to her eyes. I had suggested to her often that she ought to read with her glasses on passing along advice my father beat into me, but there was only so much I could impress upon her given the present sangfroid. But that morning was a worry and I convinced her to let me take her to an eye specialist that evening. It was fortuitously a Saturday and I had nothing to prepare for the next day so she would not feel guilty about my offer, I reasoned. I think it said something about me that the first time I had volunteered to take my wife out somewhere other than to fastfood joints at the dead of night was to an eye specialist. Mild concern gave way to distraught panic when the eye specialist referred us to Dr. Murthy – the leading ophthalmologist in the area, hinting ever so slightly at macular degeneration and briefing us of its seriousness.
That evening after the checkup, the ride on the Local back home was a watershed moment for us. It was nine in the evening and the Local to Andheri had uncharacteristically copious standing space. We swayed by the wide door holding on to a steel bar between us with one hand and the rolling leather stanchions on the ceiling with another. As we passed Dadar Junction, the tracks replicated threefold, fourfold, fivefold and parted ways with us with a twinkle in their beams stolen from the fluorescent light of the distant streetlamps. The vast open tract of land that they straddled across absorbed some of the anxiety in me and I even began to count the electric poles cursorily. How long before she was going to miss seeing this? Her face was looking down at my sandals. I was trembling; had she noti... I checked myself and with boldness I had not known before, lifted her chin to find her eyes wet and caught in a transparent slab of tears. I clasped her tightly and she broke down on the squares and buttons of my checked coffee-brown shirt. I was relieved that words were still not called for as I had none to offer. I did not know what to make of my actions – was it just that perceptible sign of weakness in her that I was waiting for this long to shake off my inexplicable albatross of apathy? But in reasoning so, I realised I was pandering to my adolescent instincts for combative self-assertion and contempt. It struck me as shallow to debate my actions and gestures but I had neither the emotion nor the maturity to check myself and chose instead to wait patiently for her to recover. I stroked her hair and held her tightly to myself but that only catalysed her to cry even more. I heard myself mumbling words steeped in mawkish sentiment into her ears but it is possible I might have relapsed into a state of hallucination between sleep and wakefulness when thought translated automatically to prompt action. Nothing is going to change. We have each other. This doesn’t mean a thing. Second opinion... quack... everything is going to be alright... I promise. I half-believed some of those words myself. It suddenly occurred to me that we were not alone on that coach and a hundred and fortyfour eyes looked at us at that moment – some quizzical, some sparkling and some castigatory. Luckily, Andheri approached. We alighted and were on our way home.
On the sixth visit, Dr. Murthy confirmed the pronouncement with the most clichéd phrase – advanced stages – but suggested regular medication and visits. Several months of unraveling and strange relief had passed in between. I began to understand the woman I had married. After that outburst in the train, there was never so much of a sulk or grimace at the turn of events. All along I had mistaken her silence to mean unquestioning acceptance to the state of things as they were; but it had more to do with similar notions of affront and fear of incompatibility that I constantly grappled with though with every subsequent day, we grew to like and respect each other’s company. I guess we had skipped a phase in between but neither of us was sadder for it.
Her freelancing was out but she picked up an assortment of other activities to keep herself busy – Braille, teaching children in the slums and social activism though I tended to think of it as phone politicking. She accepts that next to me, she views the phone as her closest confidante – merely seeing her tapping away at those buttons left me with disbelief. She was indeed reaching outwards, as if to counterbalance her loss of sight with more joie de vivre and gaiety. My lifestyle changed too; I was home earlier than usual ready to partake of what little meal she prepared for the two of us. I would sit by the lampshade and read out to her at bedtime for an hour as her eyelids would droop heavily and eventually plop down and then resume to my class preparations. It is probably wicked and downright selfish of me to say this but looking at her over those months, I was in a way glad about her ailment. At least, we had learnt to live together, as husband and wife.
IV
Yet another of Dr. Murthy’s sessions has ended and Kamakshi emerges with a radiant smile. I wince as I sign the cheque and hand it over to the secretary but make sure I am not audible. Time to take the 7.15 Local to Victoria Terminus and catch the pigeons at the Gateway.
