Blind Faith

by Sagarika Ghose

  ‘Blood on the sheet?’ Mia asked in confusion

  ‘Not for real, baby! We’ll just act it. Come on, it’ll be fun!’

  ‘Everything Vik does is fun,’ said the newspaper baron hopefully.

  ‘So where do we get blood?’ inquired the runner-up.

  The friends sat glassily upright as Vik screamed for Mrs Krishnaswamy to bring him a clean white sheet. He shepherded Mia back to their bedroom and pushed her down on the four-poster bed. As she lay on the bed, he unbuttoned his trousers. Running along the side of his thigh, half way to his knees, was a long strip of bandage.

  ‘Vik?’ she cried. ‘Vik, shit, what are you doing? What happened to your leg?’

  ‘Relax,’ he said excitedly. ‘Nothing to worry about. Just want to spill some of my blood, you know. Some of my own sweet, sugary blood. I got this a few days ago moving some equipment. My cuts take ages to heal.’ He ripped off the bandage to reveal a neat gash, still oozing with blood, purplish along the sides with bruises.

  ‘Vik! What the hell happened?’ Mia shouted, jumping out of bed. But he pushed her back against the pillows.

  ‘Relax. Relax, love-in-a-mist.’

  He pumped the sides of his thigh like a nurse searching for a vein. A little blood oozed out of the wound. He grabbed the sheet and wiped off the blood with it, dashing the sheet energetically this way and that so tiny smudges of blood dotted its whiteness. Then he tore off a strip of the sheet and tied it across the cut.

  The bloodstained sheet was a torn teenage hymen.

  Daubs of sticky red crumpled across virgin white tissue.

  Mia sat on the four-poster bed, watching Vik bind his leg again firmly.

  ‘How did you get this cut, Vik?’ she whispered.

  ‘I told you,’ he grunted, smoothening down the sheet. ‘Moving some crates in the office. Don’t worry, it’s almost healed.’

  An injury on the leg, a cut, running about three inches down the thigh. Vik’s skin was pale, almost white and the hairs on his legs were golden.

  ‘There,’ Vik smiled, pulling his trousers back on and gazing at the sheet in satisfaction. ‘See, the bloodstained sheet? Now I’ll pretend you’re my recently deflowered virgin bride. Cool, eh? Come on, baby, stop looking so spooked.’

  She stared at him. He looked excited and calm at the same time. Like a chef who had just completed the finishing touches on a complicated entrée. A party manager, signing off the decorations with a trademark bunch of flowers. The expression in his eyes was distant. His mouth smiled but his skin was very pale, like someone who had been drinking so hard that his face had drained of colour. She felt her palms turn cold. She shivered with fear at the sight of his pale face. She shivered as she had at the casual way he used the word ‘terrorist’ for the man in Goa. Again, she sensed the waiting in the air of Victoria Villa. Some secret feelings had squeezed themselves into every crack of these walls. Victoria Villa was a foul spirit tempting its inhabitants into unspeakable crimes. The semal had been a witness, that’s why it shrieked.

  He held the sheet above her for a few seconds then rushed back to his friends in the living room where they sat edgily on the leather sofas.

  ‘Look she’s a virgin, she’s a virgin!’

  She ran after him, exhaling in relief. She was too brave and too experienced a journalist to lapse into a ghost world. The Drama of Depression would say she was hallucinating again. Vik had just been making a joke. A harmless party prank. One of those tricks he had told her about. He had nicked his leg somewhere, that’s all, it didn’t matter. It was like someone holding his hand above a candle. These things happened at parties. People did these things at parties. Parties were a kind of circus where each guest performed a set of tricks to keep the others amused. Parties were a play where actors performed according to the needs of the audience. She clapped as Vik flapped the sheet over his head and bellowed in a mock-Rajput voice: ‘Hey, I’m a Rajput warrior and my wife’s a virgin. The woman’s a virgin!’ The friends clapped and giggled.

  In bed, afterwards, she kept her eyes tightly shut. He kissed her with familiar tiredness and touched her neck with his mouth in a word she could only describe as nipping. He’s nipping at me like someone picking raisins off a pudding. Like a rabbit. His hands were soft. He patted her about like a baker patting dough into shape. She felt bready. Doughy. She hated him.

  Should I run through the garden yelling that I think I’ve made a mistake in my marriage? Should I run back to London? What reasons will I give to Mithu? That my husband has lots of parties, buys me presents all the time and has a naughty sense of humour? That he cuts his leg, then drizzles his blood on a sheet to amuse his friends? Mithu wouldn’t believe me. She would think I telling nasty stories about Indian men.

  The weight of the party hung over her like heavy pollution. He was an extravaganza of afflictions, with his insulin pump and his bandaged leg. Her hands and feet were ice cold. The clatter of the hot air blower rang out a coded message. Far away from London, in a dark room with a man with a bleeding leg, she felt as threatened as she had once been on assignment in Sri Lanka, when on the train back from Vavuniya to Colombo, she had been interrogated by a soldier whose voice had been hysterical but whose eyes had been bored.

  She had been over-confident about India. She had married Vik armed with the preconception that a dashing young man from her parents’ land was bound to suit her just fine; that he was a cheery businessman who fell in love easily. That he was Jehangir, the handsome emperor. That his good looks and hearty handshake were as predictable as airport check-in counters, no surprises there. She had even felt a little superior to Vik, had sat on judgement on his parallels between cities and movies-stars and mentally given them grades. In the hierarchy of experience, she had placed him many notches below Karna, as the flighty opposite number of a sage.

  Now she felt annoyed at his metamorphosis into a figure of fear. Why was Vik, of all people, trying to scare her?

  ‘I have to go to London again, love-in-a-mist,’ he said in a sleepy voice. ‘The very last trip before we head for our holiday in Goa. I’m sorry.’

  ‘London? Again?’ she focused her eyes on his face.

  ‘Moksha. Again. Back to London.’

  ‘London.’ Her rain-grey city with Anand’s absence jumping at her from every corner. ‘Do check on the flat.’ The oil-paint-and-turpentine smelling flat with the wet grimaces in the wallpaper. ‘And could you please get me some…’

  ‘Sure, anything. What would you like?’

  ‘Liquorice.’

  He laughed. ‘Absolutely.’

  Thoughts of London drove out her fear. She was being silly. There was nothing to be scared of. He just hadn’t grown up. He lived for momentary excitements, the empty pleasure of a party trick, quick sex, quick sleep, up again, another party trick. A roller-coaster existence, with no part imbued with anything as dark and dreadful as she imagined.

  ‘Lovely,’ she reached across and hugged him. ‘Thanks!’

  ‘Sure,’ he kissed her forehead. ‘Will look in on the flat too. Bet Mithu left it in a mess. Not to worry. Hey,’ he reached for her, ‘I would never leave my love-in-a-mist for even a second. But the guards are here round the clock. If this new deal comes through for Moksha, we’ll be rocking. Really rocking. They can close Sharkey’s. My mother will have enough money. She’ll never have to worry about the…that man.’

  ‘Did he show up again?’

  ‘No,’ Vik sighed. ‘But he might. After I come back we’ll go to Goa. You’ll have the best holiday and I’ll sort out the mess. I’ll take care of him once and for all.’

  Mia turned her face towards the window and the silhouette of the semal. She felt as if the air inside the bedroom had become thick and that Victoria Villa’s memories were bubbling out of the wall, in the manner in which water spirals out of the hull of a sinking ship.

  The Kumbh Mela, the Kumbh Mela. The answers were all there. After she came back, she would have to get back to the draw
ing-board of her life and chart the blueprint of a new future. The inglorious reasons for her marriage to Vik had begun to assert themselves like weeds sprouting from a camouflage of artificial flowers. She would have to either find another garden or replant this one.

  But first she had to make the journey inside her father’s painting, the painting that had been the parent of her adventure.

  Tunnel vision negates the dimensions. Light appears sometimes as a glare, a ‘white out’. Sometimes light is concentrated in a doughnut-shaped ring in the centre of the eye. At this time Indi wore eyeglasses with dark filters to block the sudden white-out glares when she went into the sunlight. She sometimes saw two separate worlds. The world in front, and another just above it, leaving her to claw her way to the correct image. Justin read out passages from books on how to deal with the madness of retina loss. ‘ The Madness of Usher’s Syndrome: Dealing with the Threat of Loss’. But the books were of no help.

  She turned on her boy. The flat-chested boy, with six by six vision blazing from his eyes as he pranced around her, flexing his muscles and turning cartwheels under the trees.

  She had always secretly wished to be a thin, hairy, ordinary man. A rangy man with laser power in her eyes. Someone who could simply throw off his shirt and bask bare chested on a park bench, not skulk around in bathrooms, covering herself up for fear of the rage of strangers. In comparison to her son, she felt perpetually ill, handicapped, dragging her stupendous body along dim corridors, while he hopped and skipped in a pool of sunlight, his coiled energy promising to take him far ahead of her, to places she could never venture. Rangy men with vision in their eyes were born to win the war against Indi.

  She vaguely registered his school teachers as dumpy women who smelt of hair oil. ‘He’s trying too hard,’ his teacher once said, glancing at the composed boy who stood with his back to his mother. ‘He puts himself under enormous pressure to succeed.’

  ‘He should,’ she replied. ‘I had far better marks than him even though I had failing eyesight.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have to, he’s good enough at his work already.’

  ‘He should be as good as he can possibly be. Sometimes he opens and closes his mouth like a dumb goldfish.’

  ‘He’s not a dumb goldfish!’ His shocked teacher put out a hand to grasp the boy’s shoulder.

  ‘He’s not as cerebral as he should be.’

  ‘He’s a fine boy,’ the teacher said hotly as the boy turned his face away. ‘You misunderstand him.’

  ‘He appears to associate with all manner of scum.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t,’ his teacher was confused. ‘He has very nice friends and is working far too hard.’

  ‘Hey, dumb-as-a-goldfish!’ the children shouted in the school playground, delighting in his mother’s description of him. ‘Hey, goldfish!’

  His mother’s friend Justin always had lots of nice things and showered him with gifts. He gave him a mountain bike. He bought him clothes from America. He had books and toys and games and a transistor radio. He had books on Viet Nam and he had army boots.

  She sensed no love from him. All she got from him were demands, demands of who his father was, demands to attend his school, to interact with his foolish teachers, to attend to his needs. He wasn’t as impressed by her as he should have been, her formidable reputation didn’t seem to arouse the sort of admiration in him that it should have. The government had given her a special assistant, on the prime minister’s orders, a special secretariat had been created so that all her important documents were converted to Braille for Madam Indi and she could labour over files without pause. She had won the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership. Standing on stage in Manila, rays of gold light from the portrait of the Philippine president flashing through the black prison bars in her eyes, she had enthralled the audience with her movie-star looks and social commitment – India’s partially-sighted woman civil servant who had toiled so remarkably at building roads in north Bengal. Dressed in her severe uniform of white sari and blouse, with her hair piled into a thick crown on her head and aided by tinted lenses on her eyes, Indi had looked so tall and aristocratic that the crowd had gasped in disbelief. She had shown Vik the photographs but he had tossed them away disinterestedly. Why did the boy not admire her, she whispered agitatedly to herself? Why did he not admire how hard she worked?

  Sometimes she saw red flames flickering in the dark, which the doctors said were possibly the beginnings of a cataract. Sometimes she saw grey concrete slabs even in the round circle of vision directly ahead. Sometimes she couldn’t hear and voices became jumbled in her head. Justin had told her that the disease could affect her hearing so she should expect it and report it immediately. There was nothing to be done, she bellowed to herself, standing in front of a mirror she couldn’t see, there was nothing to be done.

  There was nothing to be done but wreak revenge.

  Revenge on those who could see the sky change colour or concentrate on a crow about to take flight, those who saw everything and achieved everything while she curved out from every imaginable place and blundered across streets, a breasty cow. She cringed at herself.

  She hated her body. Perversely, she tried to make her son equally voluptuous by feeding him sweets and cakes, so he wouldn’t taunt her with his thinness. She forced sweets, lozenges, toffees and lollies at him. She gave him cakes when she wanted to keep him quiet for the night. She gave him pastries so he wouldn’t cry when she was working. She watched while he ate, screaming out, unconvincingly, how much she cared for him. Juvenile diabetes was diagnosed when Vik was ten and gave her cause for some devilish triumph; just as her blindness must have been some consolation for Ashish Kumar.

  She began to take LSD. She had taken some as a student and remembered how it had helped her not only make sense of her world but also to hallucinate about an imaginary eyesight that lasted forever. She went searching for it again, in secret, telling her secretaries she was going to meet an old retainer, tap-tapping with her cane down the dingy alleys of Paharganj where the dealers lived.

  Every evening after work she began to pop a tablet so that at home she was almost perpetually high, barely registering the boy’s presence and absently shoving chocolates in his direction every time she noticed him. She came alive at night when, in drug-induced energy, she would either laugh through the nights with her hallucinations or speed through her files as if the words were pouring themselves into her brain without need of sight. She wandered, cigarette dangling from her lips, groping her way along the walls and the windows, or peering at dates on calendars or the brushstrokes on a painting. The drug made the prison bars blurry, so she could fool herself that they were just eyelashes caught in the white of her eyes which would go away if she blinked hard enough.

  She scared Vik.

  One night, when he was just about thirteen and was asleep in his room he heard a strange sound, a sound like someone laughing. He turned over in his sleep reaching involuntarily for his lollypop. He listened again for the sound. Yes, it was a woman’s laugh broken by bouts of coughing. He got out of bed and padded across the veranda towards the living room. He saw an orange light coming from under the door. His heart almost stopped at what he saw. He stood there, in his nightshirt and pyjamas, staring at his mother as she sat on a sofa, in flames.

  She sat laughing in her nightie while the sofa burned all around her. She laughed then coughed and he could see all the way down into her throat, white with dehydration.

  ‘Wake up!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, wake up!’

  Indi opened her eyes at the sound of his voice. She blinked at him unseeingly and went on laughing.

  He ran into the veranda and out into the garden. He pulled out the hosepipe that lay coiled up near the garage door. He dragged it in with all his strength, grunting and sweating as he came hurtling into the study.

  The fire flamed all around her. She went on laughing, her hair spread over her shoulders. Any minute she too would begin to burn but sh
e didn’t seem to be able to see the fire. He ran back to the garden and turned on the water. Then he sprayed and sprayed with all his might. Sprayed until the water crushed the sofa. Sprayed until she slid, unconscious, onto the floor, sprayed the curtains which were untouched by fire. Sprayed the walls, sprayed the paintings, sprayed the lamps. Sprayed everything, cleaned everything.

  She blinked awake, lying spreadeagled on the carpet, waving an airy palm at him to go away. He tried to drag her out but couldn’t as his heart had begun to thud far too fast. In the end, he ran breathlessly to her bedroom, got her sheet and covered her up. He sat by her side all night, watching her toss and turn and cry out for water. In the drenched living room, the burnt sofa looked like a beheaded animal. He sat crouched by her, sucking his lollypop, while the servants whispered horrified in the kitchen and her secretaries telephoned her doctor…

  Justin had burst in the next day, off the morning train from Goa and gathered Vik up in his arms as he sat stockstill in his room. ‘Stop this drug-taking,’ Justin pleaded to Indi. ‘Please stop.’

  ‘It helps me,’ she cried. ‘Don’t you understand, it helps me? Does nobody understand?’

  But she did stop, flushing the tablets down the pot…Blind, blind, I’m going blind and nobody in the whole world can stop it. Fatally beautiful; fatally cursed.

  Justin sat with Indi in their silent universe, as he had always done, his arm around her shaking shoulders while she shuddered and knelt before him, her mouth slavering for her tablets, and kissed her until she fell asleep, sprawled against his chest.

  ‘When will he ever get lost?’ she murmured, listening to the boy tearing open more chocolate wrappers in his room. ‘When will he go away and leave me alone?’

  The unwanted boy, once the unwanted baby grieving under the semal tree, had begun to acquire a glow in his eyes.

  His eyes darted. They flamed. When Justin was around he kept his eyes downcast so Justin wouldn’t see the smouldering coals. But when Indi walked by, he turned his eyes on her and it was just as well that she wasn’t able to see them.