Blind Faith - Sagarika Ghose

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detest her over-the-top womanliness. She thought of herself as a grotesque creature who drove everybody away, a ravishing half-blind Amazon to whom nobody could bear to get close. She became convinced that no one, not even an infant, was capable of goodness towards her, that nobody would ever sympathize.

      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.’

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