by Durjoy Datta
‘He’s just stupid!’ Aveek says. ‘If I were you I would ask him to shut up and let you be the way you are. Why the fuck fight it? He needs to accept you.’
‘Shut up. He loves me!’ Ahana defends her dad. They are still holding hands. This isn’t good.
‘No, he doesn’t! He just drags you around wherever he thinks he can get you to see and I don’t see that happening,’ he says.
‘I can’t ask him to lose all hope, Aveek!’
‘You’re just weak,’ Aveek says arrogantly, like he’s a mutant urging her to accept her situation. ‘Do you want to eat something? I’m starving!’
I do not exist any more. She says yes. They walk. I follow them to Bubba Gump, which looks distinctly like the TGIF I once went to when my father was promoted to Head Librarian; Mom had complained about the food and how much it cost and how she could have cooked much better food at home. I had concurred.
Aveek and Ahana sit on one side of the table, still holding hands, and I sit on the other, clenching my fists in discomfort. Aveek excuses himself because he says he needs to make space for beer.
I want to ask her, ‘Who the hell is this arrogant asshole?’ but instead I ask, ‘Who’s he?’ We aren’t close enough to act possessive.
‘I used to date him,’ she says. ‘Aveek visits Hong Kong frequently because of his seminars, and I have been living here for the last eighteen months, so our paths crossed. My father really liked him. Well, he likes every guy who kind of talks to me. But Dad thought we were a nice fit. He’s blind since birth but he’s kind of a genius. He makes these clicking sounds,’ she says and clicks with her mouth, her lips pucker and it’s irresistible, ‘and it echoes back to him and he knows where he’s going. It’s called echo navigation. He’s one of the few blind people who know how to use it. It’s pretty awesome!’
But I’m still stuck on her first sentence. ‘You used to date him?’
‘Yes. Dad used to get along with him. They used to work out together,’ she says. ‘But we broke up because of his negative thoughts. So Dad wanted me to stay away from him, said he was a bad influence, a dampener. I didn’t agree at first, but broke up with him later, not because he was a bad influence, but because he was always too good, and too busy for me. His eyes were cut out when he was just a few months old. Retinal cancer. And he’s used to his blindness, and he wants me to get used to my blindness too.’
‘I like your Dad.’
Aveek comes back and takes over the conversation. ‘I think we should order two platters. I really need to bulk up these days because I think my strength is going down.’
‘You seem pretty strong,’ I say, trying to participate in the conversation because I am treated worse than the waiter.
‘Oh, I’m so weak. Almost like her father!’ he jokes. Neither of us finds it funny. Aveek continues, ‘He wears medium size, imagine that. Do you ever work out, Deep?’
‘He writes,’ Ahana interrupts.
‘Lame,’ he says. The food arrives and he knows exactly where the waitress is standing; he thanks her and shoots a smile at her. He reminds me of Aman if Aman were to behave like a prick. He’s blind and everything, and a cancer survivor, but I still hate him. I feel guilty about it, but I still hate him.
The conversation shifts to blind people stuff. They talk about the blind conventions they used to go to, the new Facebook-friendly Braille tablet, of how the new lift systems are much more accessible, and how the street light sounds aren’t loud enough. Then he tells her about his trip to the US where he taught people his extraordinary ability to echo navigate. ‘The girls were falling all over me! My sound waves were echoing the word, slut, slut, slut, slut,’ he says.
I eat in silence.
The bill comes on the table and he almost snatches it from me. ‘Let me pay. You’re still a student.’
I insist reluctantly and we split the bill two ways; he still insists that he pays for Ahana. Ahana stays quiet.
We take the Peak Tram back to the main city and exit the Metro station. I’m still waiting for Aveek to tell us that he needs to go somewhere.
‘Hey, I know this really cool place with new gadgets for us!’ he says excitedly. ‘They are showcasing some concept cars and stuff like that. We should totally go.’
‘Okay,’ Ahana says. ‘I still have time I think. Do you want to come with us, Deep?’
‘What will he do there? Let him carry on!’ he says and thrusts his hand out, and before I can say anything, he adds, ‘Good to meet you, Deep.’
He grabs her hand and they walk away.
Part Two
The Blind Girl
16
I can’t see.
I know Dad’s tall, but when I was small, everyone was tall and towered above me. I also remember him as being strong-jawed and muscular, but it can also be because that’s all I hear about him. Mom’s like a painting, and that’s not even a simile, she’s literally like a painting seared in my memory. I identify colours from her image in my head. Blue is the colour of her eyes, brown her hair, light brown is the colour of her skin, and white is the colour of the knee-length dress she wears.
I now wish I had paid more attention during the first five years of my life to seeing everything around me rather than trying to learn to walk or be potty trained. But then I had no idea I was going to go blind and would have to search in the nooks of my memory whenever someone mentioned a colour or a shape or estimation of size. Or at least my blindness should have come with a notice period. It’s frustrating to learn that I could have known what the seven wonders of the world looked like, if only someone had cared to show me those in pictures! This wouldn’t have happened if I had some notice.
But I do know that Mom was beautiful and I miss her.
Life’s hard without her, but Dad is always around and that’s a mixed bag. He used to be like this free-spirited eagle and now he’s like a kitten, always scared, because he has to tend to a blind girl, yours truly, and make sure she’s not getting run over by buses etc. I really spoil his game.
You would think I remember everything I saw before the age of five, since I have never seen anything after that, but you can’t be farther from the truth. Slowly, every image sort of faded away and transformed into sounds and smells; I rarely even see dreams these days, they are mostly just sounds.
Aveek’s tugging at my hand. He always walks too fast for my comfort and never lets me use my cane whenever I’m with him. He’s a little too confident for his own good, but I stopped saying that when my dog, Bruno, got run over by a truck and Aveek just told me, ‘He was always a disaster. I never liked guide dogs.’ I had just hung up the phone and cried the night alone. Well, not alone. Dad kept ordering chicken soup for me, which did taste rather brilliant. Dad’s like Oprah—he handles crying girls with amazing tenacity. And that’s because he, unfortunately, had a lot of training, raising me.
I hate trucks. They are monstrous. But Dad tells me to imagine trucks to be just as big as cars, even though for me cars are pretty big too, because I was hardly a few centimetres tall when I last saw one.
‘Who’s your friend?’ Aveek asks, clicking and trying to locate the edge of the pavement. He succeeds and then even manages to stop a taxi: little feats that make him the Edward Cullen of my life, unbelievable and extraordinary. ‘Buff for a blind kid’, as Deep put it.
Aveek is a star in the kingdom of the blind. He’s the golden boy, the Lance Armstrong (from pre-doping scandal days) of our world, the cancer survivor who sees with his ears.
Every blind school he goes to, every convention he attends, he’s the star attraction. Not only is he fiercely independent for a blind person, I have heard he’s gorgeous, built like a tree, and talks like a talk-show host. His motivational speeches are a big hit, and not only with blind people. Blind girls find their panties in a bunch when they hear his name. His conventions are always sold off, the majority of the crowd being teenage, legally blind girls.
I met him in the US, where Dad took me, because he hea
rd from a friend of a friend that a research institute had a breakthrough regarding LCA, and that gene therapy could help blind people like me. Dad never misses the slightest chance to whisk me away to places with possibilities. (And with cargo and light planes to test.)
I really don’t mind, because I’m used to living in hotels ever since Mom died and I get accustomed to bumping into new things pretty often. Also, different accents excite me.
Aveek was giving a lecture, which was an hour-long rant about his struggle with cancer and blindness, and God, was he charming! I had heard about him before from the other blind girls in Malaysia, where Dad worked for a year, while I studied. They thought I would know him since he was a fellow Indian.
At the high tea after the conference, which was in a huge hall full of the barks of guide dogs and tapping sounds of canes, Dad had walked up to Aveek, with me in tow. I had felt my cheeks go warm.
‘This is my daughter,’ Dad had said and made us shake hands. ‘She uses a guide dog.’
‘After sufficient training in echo navigation, she will not have to use a dog,’ he had said in a voice that sounded even better than it did on the microphone. He sounded like undaunted hopes and dreams and courage and I was hopelessly in love with him. It was like a fan meeting her hero. What do you expect?
I don’t know what he heard in me, but we ended up spending the evening together. He tried to teach me his clicks, but he was the Zen master and I was a stupid student lost in his voice, in his audacity, and I soaked in his reflected glory.
When he kissed me that night, it felt wet and unhygienic, but maybe that’s how blind-people kisses feel (or maybe even non-blind ones, but I have no way of finding out), and that’s how the two other kisses with legally blind boys felt, but at least his lips were soft and chewing-gummy. There was none of the passion or the heat or the heavy sighs that I had heard of in audio books, but there was a sense of achievement. He liked me and that was enough.
We reach the convention centre and he makes me sit on a couch that is a little too soft for my comfort and I sink in.
‘I will be back in bit. I have to meet some people,’ he says. Then, he kisses me on my cheek. He still does that and I think he shouldn’t, but he’s usually done by the time I realize it’s happening, so I never see the point of protesting.
Half an hour passes by and he’s not back yet. For an eighteen-year-old blind boy, he sure has a lot of people to meet. But then again I forget, he’s the golden boy, and I’m just a regular girl with a handicap.
I’m fiddling with my phone, listening to all the tweets from celebrities around the world. It’s become my number one way to kill time ever since someone made an application which brings Twitter to blind people. And also, you get to know so much about nipple slips and explicit pictures leaked on the Internet. It’s entertaining because I literally can’t understand the noise about it. If my naked pictures go online, I would probably go like, ‘Do I at least look good?’
‘Are you okay?’ he nudges me. Before I can respond he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m really stuck. I have to meet someone.’ He leaves me again.
When he comes back, he finds me sleeping on the couch, and wakes me up. I’m listening to the audio book of Huckleberry Finn, which is playing in a loop for the third time.
‘You were listening to a book? Did your writer friend put to up to this?’ he asks as I sense him putting one of the ends of the earphone to his ear. ‘It’s sped up! What’s it like? Like 900 words per minute?’
‘It’s 1000 words per minute,’ I correct him.
‘Lame.’
It’s the only thing I do better than Aveek; words come at slow motion to me. (Like most blind people, we have higher than usual comprehension of the spoken word.)
What you hear on the radio as, ‘Investment in mutual funds involves risk and the offer documents of the funds should be read for further details,’ we hear as, ‘Investment . . . in . . . mutual ... funds ... involves ... risk ... and ... the ... offer ... documents ... of ... the ... funds ... should ... be ... read ... for ... further ... details.’
I think I have a career in deciphering rap lyrics.
We are in the taxi again. I get to see none of the exhibits that he promised we would. He probably tried a lot of them and I will probably listen to his quotes on some new blind product after a couple of months.
I really loved him. I think I still do. How could I not? It would be like a high school graduate complaining that Justin Bieber doesn’t spend enough time with her! Ours was a long-distance relationship and though he kept coming over to Hong Kong in the past year, it was never enough for me. But it was always enough for him.
My girlfriends from my old school told me I was crazy for breaking up with someone who flew down from wherever he used to tour just to be with me, but I knew I couldn’t handle his absence or the insecurity of being with someone who was ‘out of sight’ and always amongst people who loved him dearly. I thought I wasn’t good enough for him and he never made me feel otherwise. Then one day I told him Dad wanted me to stay away from him.
I had lost a dog and it had pained me terribly; I wasn’t prepared for the pain of losing a boyfriend.
He dropped me home, and he held my hand the entire way, which made me cry a little and wish we were still together. It made me hope he would tell me that he still needed me despite all that he had, that he really missed me and wanted me back, but he didn’t.
17
I’m trying not to cry in the lift.
I have twenty-eight steps to wipe my face off anything that may suggest I have been crying. Also, I hope that Dad isn’t in the room. I don’t smell Deep around. The word ‘old’ came out very inappropriately the first time I sensed him; I wanted to say ‘home’ but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. He smelled faintly like Mom, earthy and worn out and pleasant, quite unlike Aveek, who smells of new cars and expensive perfumes and hair gel and hotel lobbies.
My steps are slow and I’m sniffing like a narcotics dog trying to sense if Deep is around. I’m not crying, but I’m sad that Aveek is always there when I want him, and yet isn’t there. And Deep . . . well I don’t even know who is he. I unlock the door and I just know Dad is there, just like Bruno used to know when I was around even when I was minutes away.
‘How has the birthday been?’ he asks and walks up to me. I lose myself in his arms, which wrap around me twice.
‘It was great!’
‘Was it? Who were you with?’ he asks, helping me sit down on my bed. ‘Deep has been in his room since the last couple of hours. Where were you? Don’t tell me you were with Aveek again.’
‘Chill, Dad! We were just hanging out,’ I say, a bit coldly.
‘I’m just saying the boy isn’t to be trusted. He’s often up to no good. You have been hurt once!’ he cautions.
‘I will be fine, trust me.’
‘He’s not a nice boy.’
‘You mean to say he can find someone better, right? Thank you for the confidence you show in me.’
‘I never said that,’ he says quietly. He knows it’s true.
‘But that’s exactly what you meant.’
I plug in my earphones and pretend that I’m listening to music. I would rather be invisible than be a problem child.
‘Why did you leave Deep behind?’ he asks. ‘I know you’re not listening to anything. I like him.’
I have had a long day, walking around, being confused why one boy is with me and why the other is not, and so I snap, ‘But HE CAN SEE, DAD! Get over him and leave me alone.’
‘I just thought you needed a friend,’ he says apologetically.
‘I DON’T NEED ANYONE! Stop feeling sorry for me,’ I say and bury my face in a pillow and mumble into it. I’m cursing, and then I’m crying. Sometimes I just hate everyone around me, people who can see, people who can’t, people who pity, people who try to be normal . . . everyone. They say they know me because they have met other blind people, as if being blind is the only way one c
an describe me, like it’s my identity and it’s all that needs to be taken care of. They don’t understand that though walking around, bumping into people and trash cans might be a part of my life, it isn’t all there is to it. I have other concerns as well.
Some days, I just want it to end. I don’t want to die or anything, but I want it to stop. Dad’s hopes, people treating me differently, the conventions for the visually impaired, other people like me talking about pain and courage—I just want it to stop and be a five-year-old all over again.
And then Dad’s patting my head like only he can and I feel a lot calmer, my heart rate goes down but I don’t want to stop yet. It feels so nice that I drift away to sleep. When I wake up, he’s still sitting there, his hand on my head. I hate it because he makes things alright so easily; I hate it because he doesn’t let me be as angry as I should be, I hate it that he’s the perfect father and I’m the imperfect daughter.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumble and turn to him. He kisses my forehead.
‘You don’t have to be sorry for anything. I went too far. You’re a big girl,’ he kisses me again, ‘and you have the right to meet anyone you want.’
‘I’m sorry you have to put up with me. You should have given me up to an orphanage. I would be much better off making candles.’
He hugs me tightly. ‘NO! Don’t say that. Never say that. I can’t imagine my life without you. I can’t even begin to think how . . . just . . . don’t say that ever again,’ he breathes. Dad never cries, but I always know when his machismo is in a civil war with his tear glands.
I nod my head silently, not trusting myself to speak. Thank God at least he can see.
‘Let’s go out for dinner?’ he asks.
I smile, and all my fears dissipate in a moment. ‘I wouldn’t say no to the handsomest man I have ever seen now, would I?’
It’s been over a year since Dad shifted to Hong Kong to test pilot some small and some cargo planes for companies, and I am yet to join a college or decide on a subject I want to study. Thinking, I step on the longest escalator ever made, like, ever.