Blind Faith

by Sagarika Ghose

  He let her ramble on as he tied her legs together. Then he started to work on her. It was difficult because she kept struggling. He drew out a lipstick from his pocket, bent her head back and painted her lips bright red. He painted two red circles on her pale cheeks. ‘Hold still!’ he hissed. ‘You’re looking wonderful. Let’s see your eyes. They’re the most amazing eyes anyone has ever seen. The sea in a storm. A downpour in a deserted ocean. I’ve never seen such eyes in an Indian woman before. Hold still!’

  He painted her eyes black. He braided her hair and stuck hibiscus flowers in them and placed some in her nightdress.

  ‘Beautiful, Madam,’ he whispered. ‘You look beautiful. Even more beautiful than you already are.’

  She shouted so loudly in her hoarse voice that he had to shut his ears.

  ‘Help!’ she screamed, ‘Help me! Get out, you scoundrel!’ She shook her head violently so the hibiscus flowers fell out.

  ‘Oh lord,’ he mouthed. ‘Now look what she’s gone and done.’

  He stuck the hibiscus on again; she shook her head and sent them flying. He hit her hard across the face, so her head whipped around and blood spurted from her gums. She started to cry in low guttural sounds.

  ‘I have nothing against you personally,’ his gaze on her face was calm. ‘It’s not me. It’s the Brothers, basically. The Brothers of the Purification Journey say they’ve been watching you at your work and your home. They say you are one of those women who are a threat to our world, understand? You are ruining, no, murdering, human civilization. Your ego is too big. You neglect your children. You compete with your children because you can’t control your own ego. We are working to create the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. We’ll have to decide your fate soon. We haven’t decided yet. When we decide, we’ll tell you, okay? Don’t worry. We’ll make sure we tell you.’

  On the wall opposite her bed, along with some photos and prints, was a gilt-framed citation of her Magsaysay Award. He brought them all crashing down. Then he took out his brush and his can of paint and painted a giant bow and arrow. A black curving bow with a string. In the centre a long arrow aimed at the ceiling.

  The sea growled outside and the rain came thumping down on the roof. He turned to look at her. She was tossing and yelping, straining at the ropes around her wrists and ankles. But she looked nice, he thought. Her cheeks with their bright red blotches, her blackened eyes and her violently red lips. Another touch was needed, a cleavage to make sure she looked as if she was attending a dinner party. He tore open the front of her nightdress. There, now she looked as if she was having a wonderful time, as if she had had a party with the wine bottles arranged in a row at the foot of her bed and the flowers in her hair.

  He took out his Canon and clicked some photos. Several of her from the front and sides. Close-ups. Long shots. The flash went off against her face as tears ran down her eyes, the black liner streaking the red circles on her cheeks.

  ‘Who are you?’ she sobbed. ‘What’s your purpose? Don’t you realize how foolish all this is, what a short term measure it is?’

  He said nothing. He spotted her cigarettes next to her bed. He lit one and put it in her mouth. She coughed and spat it out. He pushed it in again, but it fell out. He held it in her mouth so she blanched and inhaled as much as she could. Then he snatched it away and threw it out of the window.

  He stared at her for a few moments. Then he dusted himself off, switched off the light and went out the way he had come, with Francis Xavier’s body outside leaking blood into the wet sand.

  Indi sat upright in bed, bound, coloured and dressed with flowers. The wine bottles were knocked over by the wind blowing in through the open door. Outside the rain stormed into the sea.

  When Justin found her the next morning she couldn’t stop shaking. They locked up the house and she moved into his hospital room. They decided to close Sharkey’s, send a written apology to the guests and refund advances.

  A case of murder was registered and two police jeeps came tooting down the zigzag. A small police picket took up station at Sharkey’s, waiting for him to come back.

  The villagers gathered together. There was a special mass for Francis Xavier at Santa Ana and for poor Indi who had lived through such an unimaginable assault.

  Lord, negotiated Father Rudy, let this be the end.

  Justin crept under the semal leaving gifts in its hollows. Justin watched him wobble past on his tricycle.

  ‘Hello,’ said Justin, under the semal.

  ‘Hello,’ said the boy running up towards the semal. Little boy in his father’s hair. Little boy in his father’s eyes.

  ‘Hey big guy! Hey cowboy!’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Are you being fine? Are you being good?’

  ‘Can, can I ask one question?’

  ‘Course you can, little person!’

  ‘Am I a normal human being?’

  ‘Now what made you think otherwise?’

  ‘Then why doesn’t my dad want to see me? Doesn’t he even want to see me?’

  Avenging angel Justin shouted fiercely: ‘Of course he does. Your dad sees you. Believe me, he does. Do you believe me?’

  ‘And who’s that woman who sits in the house? She keeps walking around. She’s blind. Who is she?’

  ‘She?’ Justin’s brows were puzzled. ‘Don’t you know who she is?’

  ‘No. Who is she, Justin? I know you. But who is she?’

  Sometimes Justin’s anger at Indi grew into a dark mountain. At other times he told himself that he understood her better than she understood herself.

  The boy had always been a good student so when the warden rang that evening from his college saying she should come as quickly as she could, she was impatient at being disturbed at work. Perhaps he had won another prize.

  The warden took her to his room and when she peered through her glasses she fell back in shock. He was sitting up in bed, white-faced. Down his shirt front a thick ochre-coloured liquid looked like the worst bout of vomiting she had ever seen. She blinked in the half-light, the beige stripes criss-crossing his chin. His body was rigid and his jaw set fiercely. Next to him, a steel bucket stood full to the brim with vomit.

  ‘My god,’ she shuddered. ‘How ugly he is.’

  The boys outside the dorm sniggered. ‘Hospital and then drug addiction treatment, Madam,’ the warden said. ‘God knows from where they get it. He needs to go to hospital immediately.’

  ‘Then take him, for god’s sake!’ Indi shouted. ‘Somebody clean him up. I’ll make a mess of it if I try.’

  The ambulance drove through the night, past the ridge, past the Inter-State Bus Terminus towards the 24-hour Emergency at the Medical Institute. They had wheeled him in, pumped his stomach and let her see him after twenty-four hours.

  ‘What have you to say for yourself, you?’ she drew herself up into a figure of authority. ‘After that disgusting episode?’

  ‘What do I have to say?’

  ‘Yes?’

  His answer made her head spin. ‘Tell me, who are you?’

  ‘Who am I?’

  ‘Yes, who are you? Why do you dominate the house? Why is everything centred around you?’

  ‘I’m trying to get on with my life in the best way I can!’ her voice broke. ‘I feed you. I pay your fees. Have you no gratitude for what I’ve done? Don’t you see how much work I’m doing? What do you mean, you don’t know me? What’s your problem? Twittering around like a ballerina…I’m going blind, Vikram. I’m struggling to keep my eyes and my sanity and my independence. It’s a struggle, believe me, because most of the time, yes, I admit, I am deranged about the fate that awaits me. I cannot deal with it. I cannot read books and calm myself. I want to be independent because I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me. I work hard so there’ll be enough money for you. I’ll leave you everything. The house, all yours. What do you know what it is to suffer. You’re spoilt. Pampered!’

  ‘You don’t care for anyone but yourself,’ he sa
id calmly.

  ‘Listen!’ she shrieked back, red flashes darting in front of her vision. ‘You listen to me. Why can’t you just endure? Endure like me. Do you know that my own father squashed a cigarette into my palm because he couldn’t stand me? And you know why he couldn’t stand me? He couldn’t stand me simply because I was a girl and because I was going blind and because I refused to become a pitiable creature on whom he could pour his sympathy and his condescension…I’m disabled but I don’t act like I am, you know what I mean? I don’t act as if I am handicapped and this makes a lot of people very very angry. People want to be sympathetic to me but they can’t. I refuse to be a figure of pity. Partly because of the way I look. If I was ugly, I would be better off. But I’m not. I’m not ugly and I choose to live my life. That’s what gets people angry. That I choose. That I can choose, when in fact I should be taken care of, or hospitalized or institutionalized. I don’t play the right games. I proved my father wrong. I endured. I rose above it. I had no eyes, I lived alone, away from family weddings. And I endured and I brought myself up. You’re a boy. You’re supposedly the apple of everybody’s eye, are you not? You’re the right sex, the right gender, so why do you need all this attention from me? Why do you come crawling to me, looking for me to make your life better? You’re not going to get it from me, because yes, let me tell you, let me honestly admit that I resent you for your advantages. I resent you for your natural advantages of gender and eyesight, both of which I have to fight for almost every day. Did anybody make my life better? Listen, I didn’t want to be your mother. This mother thing is a terrible trap. Mother is a category without change, without dynamism, without democracy. Everything else can change. The world can change. But mother cannot change. Just Mother. Mother Mary. Mother Earth. Mary is every man’s secret fantasy, is she not? The woman who gave birth without sex? Without any dirty sex. But immaculate conception is not enough for some people, understand? It’s not enough for me.’

  ‘How vulgar you are,’ he remarked. ‘You’re vulgar. I don’t know who you are and I can’t spend any more time talking to a vulgar woman whom I’ve never seen before in my life.’

  As she turned on her heel, he was suddenly at her side, his face long and strange. He pushed her down on the hospital floor and brought his hands to her throat. Her tongue ran dry as his grip began to close around her neck. His sweat dripped down on her glasses. She felt a savagery in his arms, in the spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth, in the rough strange slaps he gave her on both cheeks. ‘My god, what is this, what are you doing? Stop it, Vikram! At once do you hear me?’

  ‘Why does it always have to be you?’ he kept inquiring. ‘Why are you always the centre of everything? Why are you the one so famous, oh-so-beautiful, oh-so-brilliant, so whatever? You, you, you. You the blind amazing goddess. You, the centre of attention. You the only human being, while everyone else is just nothing, less than animals. You, the goddess. You, the superstar. You want to live; you want to live but your life is my death, do you understand? Your life is my death!’

  ‘Stop this!’ she coughed back. ‘Stop it, you low life, you mongrel.’

  ‘It’s always you.’ Tears collected in his eyes and dripped down on to her face. ‘Everyone wants you. Everyone talks about you. My father wants you and not me, you’re the only star. Why? What’s so great about you, anyway?’

  Poor sad Victoria Villa. With its mournful shadows and its sobbing tree. Victoria Villa where love died in strange ways. He looked like his own father. But to Indi, he sounded identical to Ashish Kumar. So identical that she had fought him as hard as she fought her father.

  Prince Jehangir was an aesthete and a poet, but numbed all his life by the immense presence of his father, Akbar. Akbar, who built an empire with such force, such masculine energy, that poor artistically-inclined Jehangir had to fall back on opium and liquor to give him the personal style that could match Akbar’s valour and wisdom. The sheer strength of Akbar’s character led Jehangir in later life to acts of vicious cruelty towards others, in an attempt to bring some proof, some succour, to his own achievements. Jehangir found his father intolerable. And over 400 years later Vik found Indi similarly unendurable.

  Her courage, the smashing beauty and the mind that leapt forward into contructive acts of public welfare, the grandeur of Indi, made him desperate. He felt as if she was a giant sun that was hurtling towards him, uncaring that she would burn him to death, as long as her own flames remained fiery. He brought his face closer to hers; his open mouth like a dead star. Her hands were pinned to the floor but she began to howl like a kicked dog.

  It was a hot afternoon. A hot afternoon in a hospital with the sun beating against the white curtains. She howled like a cur in an alleyway, in broken barks. Her eyes became bloodshot with the pressure of her screams. The sound of the nurses’ running feet sent him jack-knifing back to the bed, cheekbones protruding out of his skin.

  ‘You bastard!’ she screamed, groping for her cane and raising it as the nurses helped her up. ‘You tried to strangle me! I could bring the police against you for attempted assault! I could have you put away for ever! Physical assault is a crime, don’t you know that?’

  ‘You go to hell!’ he stared at her calmly.

  Mother and son readied themselves for mutual annihilation.

  After that hot afternoon, Indi left Victoria Villa forever. She had her assistants pack her suitcases and stumbled out through the gates, her eyesight now completely gone. She dictated her resignation letter from the Civil Service in a barely audible voice and fled to Justin who was working at St Theresa’s Hospital in Fontainhas, near Alqueria. The government was co-operative. They begged her not to resign but when they realized she was adamant she was given every help with her papers; her pension was expedited and the chief secretary of Goa himself helped her buy a patch of land in Alqueria next to the cottage Justin already owned. Indi and Justin started Sharkey’s Hotel together.

  She never went back to Victoria Villa. He never came to Alqueria. He stayed on alone with the servants and the two haunted trees, with Justin for regular company. After he passed his exams, Justin arranged for him to go to The Wharton School where he not only got his MBA but also read a great deal of Hegel and Nietzsche. He read translations of the works of Ernst Junger who wrote of the flabby, comfort-seeking ways of the middle class, as contrasted with the higher principle of pleasure which came from adventures that are close to death. Death was an ideal, while comfort was mediocre and centred around money.

  When he came back, he was raring to go. His diabetes was fully controlled with his new insulin pump and monitor. Moksha Herbals already existed as a promising business owned by a Kerala landowner and contracts with a number of film studios in the south had already been signed. He bought the business with the money Justin’s parents loaned him. Since the supply chains and workshops were already established, he was able to upgrade the scale of operations by securing a clutch of international clients whom the Reylanders set him up with through their friends in California and New York.

  By the time he met and married Mia, Moksha Herbals had become a rollicking concern, poised for even greater success.

  He kept up his reading of Junger.

  Under the semal, when evening slanted across the lawn, the eight-year-old boy asked his father,

  ‘Justin?’

  ‘Yes, big guy?’

  ‘Do you have a son of your own?’

  ‘Do I have a son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes I believe I do.’

  ‘Who is he? Why don’t you care for him?’

  ‘My son is Cupid. He shot me with an arrow and I fell in love with his mother. My son has fluffy pink cheeks and has a bow and arrow strapped to his back.’

  ‘What’s a bow and arrow?’

  ‘You want one, big guy?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Okay, kid. I’ll get you a bow and arrow. A toy one. But be careful with it, all right? Very careful.’


  ‘Is a bow and arrow dangerous?’

  ‘It can be, kid. It can be.’

  Since Indi couldn’t describe him except that he had a whispering voice, smelt of chemicals and talked of some Brothers belonging to the Purification Journey who had some plans for her and were on a mission to create the Pure Love of the Mother Woman, the police had no idea where to look for him. They searched up and down all the way from Loutolim to Colva, but what could they do without a description, with nothing to go on other than Justin’s sight of someone tall, long-haired and dressed in white? The police detachment posted at Sharkey’s dragged some chairs out to the waterfront and dozed off by the purple sunset.

  Justin called Vik, speaking to him for the first time after Vik had telephoned him from London to tell him about his marriage, and listened to his shocked silence. Yes, yes, he said after a while, he would try and come straightaway. He would come as soon as he could.

  How dutiful he was, Indi told Justin.

  Her mind returned once again to that hot afternoon. That hot afternoon; the final act in her blindness. That hot afternoon when the sun, or was it her son, had burst into her eyes for the last time.

  Justin was not taking any chances with the police. At Panjim market, he designed and bought Indi a special cane. The cane was as long as the previous one but when you pressed a clasp, the outer covering came rolling down to reveal a sharp inner spear.

  ‘You may never need to use it,’ Justin said, loyal only to her; unrepentant of the choice he had made in his life. ‘But just keep it.’

  9

  NEW DELHI

  Mia sat on the four-poster bed, replying to sms messages from the runner-up. Yes, Vik had called from London. Yes, she was fine, nothing to worry about, she was well looked after by Mr and Mrs Krishnaswamy. Yes, she was missing him.