Blind Faith

by Sagarika Ghose

  Whoever this god is, who gave me this ridiculous body and face, then snatched away my eyesight, deserves to be impaled on a cross or drowned by the flood. A woman hated for her beauty, yet unable to defend herself against the world. Blind like Helen Keller. Brilliant like Sappho. Voluptous as Juno. No revenge, no ill temper, no immorality is enough to make up for this injustice, this burden of unseeing womanly exceptionality.

  She read and wrote furiously, with half-a-dozen reading lights turned on the books, and became an intellectual and a patriot with no-nonsense views. The country as an abstract entity was the focus of her love, not the people who made it up. She wanted to work for India, to give her life for India, not because of the Indians she knew but because she sensed comfort in the idea of a presence greater than all the pettiness she felt surrounded by.

  She turned to her nation-state for ideals and protection. She disagreed with Gandhi’s romantic notion of India’s ideal villages. Villages must be transformed, not worshipped. She wanted progress, cities, industrialization, modern hospitals, modern roads, and modern education. She fought against the return-to-antiquity line and the return-to-tradition argument. Whose tradition? she raged. Tradition that burns widows and forces the poor to clean the shit of the rich? Onward, she roared, onward in a great forward movement. She had no time for god or flabby spirituality or silly prayers and ritual, threads and powders, what she called the weeds and grains of cowardice. She took her civil service exam and vowed to work towards the social good, towards forgetting the black bars that leapt at her every morning when she opened her eyes, towards creating a larger world for herself where the black bars were irrelevancies. She would toil, offer her services to the community. Once the school or the hospital was built, they would forget to mistrust her.

  Ashish Kumar’s loathing of Indi was encased in love and fatherly pride. She looked like a whore but thought like a statesman. She was going to be totally blind one day but already she had read far more than he had. She was a prostitute-scholar with the waist and bosom of a dancing girl, yet sailed through difficult exams with frightening ease. She painted her lips red and coloured her eyelids blue but her mind turned over with critiques of Gandhi and Nehru’s Five-Year Plans. She was a mythic figure. She was good. She was wicked. She was the personification of moral purpose without fuss or sentimentality. She was a daughter who would be far greater than her father, he predicted silently to himself, and unconsciously, in a far corner of his brain of which he was quite unaware, Ashish Kumar began to plot her destruction. He became subconsciously aware – rather like Neanderthal man may have become aware of lurking danger in the forest but found no words to articulate it – that Indi’s shadow threatened not only his survival as a human being but also his survival as a species.

  Yet he would be shocked and outraged if anyone confronted him with his plot. She was his treasure, his pride, he told his friends and relatives. Beautiful, brilliant Indi who would take the family name to great heights. He would do everything in his power to help her, he would get her the best medical advice, he would throw parties in her honour and celebrate her every milestone.

  And he would wait patiently for the time to strike the blow before she killed him with her magnificent presence.

  The burn mark on Indi’s palm never faded. A reddish stain on her line of fate.

  In Alqueria, Indi reached for her Braille novel and ran her fingers along the pages. Alqueria-on-the-bay. Here the forests are havens and the homes are plump matrons who forgive me for everything I’ve done…. I’m a gatecrasher in this old silence. A sinner who has slipped, unnoticed, into heaven.

  She turned her face towards the space where she sensed the ocean. Was he there again? No, he hadn’t been here for a few days now. Where had he gone? Perhaps he had lost interest in her and found some other person to haunt.

  She called him the Phantom Listener because he reminded her of Walter de la Mare’s poem. The Phantom Listener who watched her and heard her, but whom she couldn’t see. For almost two months now she had felt that there was someone standing silently outside her house near the lagoon. The presence sometimes vanished, then it was there again. Sometimes she felt a hot stare on her skin. Sometimes a quick breath next to her arm. She smelt something, something damp, something chemical, like a dye or glue. The presence of someone walking behind her when she went for her evening walk to Sharkey’s.

  The Phantom Listener lay on her roof, peering at her with an upside down face as she sat in her veranda.

  She knew the scraping sounds on her roof weren’t the monkeys that always swung between the trees and occasionally jumped down on roofs, because the monkeys made jumping sounds. This was a rhythmic scraping; human hands clawing for a grasp.

  One night, she had heard what sounded like a human yawn, a yawn so close that she had felt the exhalation ruffle her hair. She had lifted her cane and slashed it through the air and heard an ever-so-faint gasp.

  She had heard the Phantom Listener step back. She had smelt the stale chemical smell again. She knew all the smells in Alqueria. But there was this new smell suddenly. A stink of decay and neglect.

  She turned her face towards the lagoon…He was playing a cat and mouse game with her. He was mocking her sightlessness, testing her sense of hearing and smell, trying to confuse her with his arrivals and departures. She shook her head. No, he wasn’t there now. But she felt certain he would be back.

  When he came back she would be waiting for him because she had never been scared in her life and didn’t intend to start now.

  3

  LONDON

  ‘Never,’ said Karna. ‘I never watch CNN, BBC, Fox etcetera.’

  ‘ Of course not. So you won’t get to see this interview?’

  ‘ No.’

  ‘ Right. Okay, could you look into the camera for a second?’

  As the cameraman filmed, the sun scampered out of the clouds like a child running out from behind his mother suddenly wanting to play, twinkling briefly down through the trees, forming leaf patterns against Karna’s white shirt, before being engulfed again by a dark, mother cloud. He sat at a comic distance from her on the bench, refusing to risk even the slightest touch, looking like a visitor from another century trapped against his will in 21st century London.

  ‘ Good idea not to watch the big networks,’ she smiled, waving at the cameraman as he gestured that he had enough shots of the mad guru. ‘But you should tune in to us. We’re much smaller.’

  ‘ All you media people do is make fun of us. Make fun of things you can’t understand. In fact, you are programmed to make fun of us. There may be many among us who are frauds. But, there may be a few of us who have some value. And all you do is look at me and think about yogic sex, tantric orgasms and snake tricks.’ He seemed edgy, ill-at ease, someone buffeted about by the world, forced to grow up fast and develop all sorts of philosophies to make the world more bearable for himself.

  ‘ There is that temptation,’ she agreed.

  ‘ I also can make fun of you. I can make fun of you as someone chained to big companies, wearing foolish clothes, having all forms of base physical relationships, leading a second-rate life.’

  ‘ Absolutely right,’ she smiled again. ‘Mine is exactly a second-rate life. In fact, it’s a third-rate life. But I’m trying to make an improvement. That’s why I’m interviewing you. We interview people from all parts of the world. Politicians. Movie stars. An international range of guests.’

  ‘ I don’t want to be your international guest,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m a sadhu. A priest. I wasn’t earlier. But I became one because of the way the world treated me. You know,’ he pointed his finger at her, ‘it’s not a coincidence that people who question the world are consigned to the corners. If they didn’t consign us to corners, they would all go mad themselves.’

  They talked all afternoon and into the rainy darkness of six o’clock. The cold began to close in around them as crowds hurried home and tourists melted away towards the pubs. Across
the path, she noticed the Purification Journey Brothers were dispersing quietly through the freezing mist.

  She wished she could see his face more clearly under the Castro beard. If Anand had painted him in such perfect detail, could it be possible that she too might have seen him before? Perhaps Karna was famous, perhaps his face had appeared in magazines or newspapers and inspired Anand. Perhaps they had all seen him on their trips to Delhi to visit Anand’s mother. Seen him in a puja pandal in Kolkata, among the people gathered to watch as the women danced during sindoor khela. Or in Varanasi, on Assi Ghat, huddled in a blanket of hash smoke on the steps leading down to the river. He had existed all this time in some distant city. She might even have heard his voice on the phone in a cross connection. Seen the arch of his neck in a crowd.

  The Purification Journey didn’t matter. It was only a joke he was playing on the world. A marketable formula to lead the gullible to his ashram. She could process it into a headline and dump it in the daily trash can of journalism to be taken away by paper recyclers and made into grainy sheets scribbled on by children and crumpled into waste. That would be the public arrangement. But in private, alone, he would be the idealist riding in to rescue her from the luxuries of cynicism.

  ‘ You talk about the Mother Woman,’ she waved the pamphlet. ‘Where’s your own mother? Your father?’

  ‘ Oh,’ he laughed. ‘I have no mother or father.’

  He was an orphan, he said, one of the thousands abandoned on a footpath in India. The only mother he had known was a billboard with the picture of a cow above his head, saying ‘Drink More Milk’. He had lived under that billboard for the first three or four years of his life, sheltered by it, fed by charitable folk on festival days, sleeping in temple verandas, at the mercy of the beggar syndicates. Then, on one Independence Day, when the prime minister in a speech from Red Fort exhorted citizens to help the poor, the Purification Journey Brothers had adopted him and a few others as part of their new Hope-on-the-Road street children project, taken him to their Pavitra Ashram, and put him in school. When he was old enough, the Brothers even sent him to college where he got a degree.

  His childhood had been happy enough. During festivals, the Brothers would dress him up like Krishna, paint him navy blue and stick a peacock feather in his hair so that wonderstruck passers-by would give him money. Sometimes they would take him to the slums through puddles of water into tin-roofed huts with shit curling in at the front door, so he could entertain factory workers and street vendors with his natural gift for story-telling. He said he had grown up close to the ground and in times of trouble, the ground would protect him. He was a renunciant who had vowed never to marry.

  ‘ A renunciant?’

  ‘ Sure,’ he smiled. ‘All pray and no work.’

  ‘ You say you want to purify love,’ she searched her mind for a suitable query. ‘But isn’t all love pure?’

  ‘ No, not all love. When god created love it was pure. But love is being ruined. Ruined by lust. Ruined by jealousy. The love of man and woman is being ruined by competitiveness. We have taken our message all over the world. To New York. To Paris. Asking people to purify their love.’

  His voice was defiant. He was inviting her to tease him because his outfit and conversation were tailor-made for ridicule; he was setting himself up to be laughed at, to have water dumped on his head, or for his hair to be pulled. He was ridiculous yet in need of protection; as if he was upholding the last of a dying world.

  ‘ And what religious denomination are you?’ she asked.

  ‘ We have no religion as you understand it,’ he said smoothly. ‘We worship the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. To us she is the ideal.’

  ‘ And finally,’ she asked before she switched her tape off, ‘you said the bow and arrow was the dress of a novitiate. But why the bow and arrow, exactly?’

  ‘ Bow and arrow,’ he shrugged, ‘is for Cupid. To create love where there is none. For aiming at those who have a heart of stone and making them love. Just an ornament. Just part of my dress. Look,’ he drew out an arrow and pushed it at her. ‘Completely blunt. Once I finish my apprenticeship I’ll take it off. I don’t think it’s stupid. No more stupid than a shiny tie. You don’t’ – he shrugged again – ‘have to believe me. You can forget me. You can do your interview and walk away with me as your crank of the day. Everybody who is different is a crank. Only those who keep on buying…what is it?…Dior and Nike…are not cranks. They are normal.’

  ‘ They too,’ Mia agreed heartily, ‘are cranks.’

  Anand used to paint at dawn. Dawn, he said, was the time of insight. Dawn was the time of vision. One’s own vision, not someone else’s, bottled and tinned to acquire at a price in the shopping mall of vision. After Anand had died, she had woken early to try and hear if he was calling to her through the first watery rays of the morning but all she heard was the jangle of Mithu’s new jewellery.

  Irrationally, she brought him a slew of expectations. He would fill the emptiness. He would help her down from her high wall of grief. The intimacy of childhood would return, he would always watch out for her and care about what happened to her.

  ‘ Sometimes,’ he smiled self-deprecatingly, ‘I think I’m a genius, far ahead of my times. Other times, I think I’m nothing but an idiot. And you,’ he pointed at her, ‘think I’m a crazy guy from India who eats snakes and drinks human blood.’

  ‘ Karna,’ Mia’s voice was quiet. ‘I don’t know how to say this. Sounds silly. I’ve been a bit off lately. A bit loopy. My life’s been a bit…here and there. My dad suddenly committed suicide, I moved back in with my mother, but it’s not really working out. I need to make a new beginning. With my life. For some reason – and there’s a good reason – for this good reason I feel as if I know you very well. As if I’ve known you all my life. No, no,’ she said hurriedly as she saw him stiffen and sit up straighter, ‘please relax. Nothing to be scared of. I know you are a – as you said – a renunciant, and I’m not making a move on you. What I mean is, I can’t stop here. I can’t just stop my interview and walk away and never see you again. I’d like to be friends and I’d like to get to know you better.’

  ‘ Of course,’ he said excitedly. ‘There is a connection between us. There is definitely a very deep connection. I have sensed it too, from the start, even though I did not want to mention it for fear of scaring you. We are going to be here all week for our publicity campaign. Please come again. And please come and visit us in India.’

  ‘ And can I meet you here?’

  ‘ I will be here,’ he said after a pause. ‘But then I leave on my mission.’

  ‘ Your “mission”?’

  He smiled. ‘Yes, my mission. There is a mission that I need to finish before I’m accepted as one of the Brothers. I can take off the bow and arrow once I have taught someone a lesson in love. But we will meet again. Let’s meet every afternoon from now on. I’ll be right here.’

  ‘ Great,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘ There are so many things I’d like to tell you. To convince you that there is no meaning in colour photos and magazines. Only a lot of stupid money chasing more stupid money.’

  It’s precisely because I’m so jaded, he sounds to me like a quack shrink. But there’s an invitation here to let go of the weighty shit, to drop the posturing and rejoice in miraculous coincidences. Papa had no time for overeducated fault-finders and I could never bring myself to be corny. Papa wasn’t afraid to sound foolish but I’m petrified of even a tiny concession to foolishness, to irrationality, to any kind of attention to that shopworn entity, the soul. The Drama of Depression is my bible. Rational thought is my shrine. Reason is my guide; I’m not driven by fleshy unreliable instinct or Zen intuitiveness or transcendental cravings. For my father, words were an obstacle; for me, they are everything.

  Perhaps Papa married Ma precisely because she didn’t have so many words at her disposal, while I’ve always searched for men who knew more words than me. Perh
aps Papa jumped into the river so I would wake up to the seriousness of his way, to jolt me awake from my word-filled hauteur. Perhaps that’s why he secretly turned his back on Marxist reasoning and opted for the other way. He said that I didn’t think about salvation, never bothered about my soul or its journey, that I relied on my mind and not the wisdom of the heart, that I was too dependent on authors like Rosenthal and Silver.

  But how is one to grow old and face death without the unknown audience?

  ‘ This is a completely loony cult!’ she raged loudly at the SkyVision office. ‘Some weird, all-male sect. Purification Journey, how to purify your love, purify your desire, reject the market, Pure Love of the Mother Woman. Extremely right wing on women and family values and all that. Fundamentalists. The guy’s a nut.’

  ‘ Well, apparently you got on rather well with him. Careful, darling, next it’ll be Pure Sex with a Python.’

  The night streaked past on her way home. The music from the pubs made her wonder why she had let her social life become extinct.

  ALQUERIA, GOA

  Regrets, Indi thought, never come in a neat package marked ‘regrets’. They hang about in bits and pieces like shreds of ash.

  She turned a page of her Braille novel. Her house had been burgled recently. And the thief had taken away most of her Braille novels, as if he had known how dear they were to her. Thankfully Pride and Prejudice still remained. Along with the novels, all Sharkey’s account books, some of them painstakingly transferred into Braille, had been stolen. The Phantom Listener had identified her belongings well.