Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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      Her father’s painting was even more attractive in the flesh. The hare-brained speech and crazy costume made her want to hug him hard and never let go. Anand had deserted her, but she would hold on tight to Karna. She imagined him injured, beaten by the police or stoned by Neo-Nazis, a battered Jesus, a suffering diviner. She felt awakened to fantasy. He would create a new body for her with his hands – a moonlit, newly voluptuous body. His skin would be darkly luminous, and when he threw his hair behind him, she would catch a glimpse of his long throat. In the rain, he would be a bedraggled rock star on stage, wet with sweat and dripping hair.

      His formal manner infuriated her, so did his talk of this stupid Purification Journey. She wondered if she should tell him about the painting. Had her father seen him somewhere and captured his exact likeness? Maybe Anand had caught a glimpse of him on one of his many trips to India. She wanted to tell him that she knew him very well. That he was more muscular and tall than she had hoped for. That to see him now was a message from the dead, that her father hadn’t even seen his subject’s best angles. Perhaps most people in the world are waiting to be carried away by strangers on the street, or searching out fervent religious preachers to fall in love with because the software sector was turning out to be far too unromantic and their camouflage of office jokes was wearing thin.

      She bent into her notepad, but instead of taking notes, drew a face that was an ideal version of her own, with every feature stretched to perfection. ‘Interesting,’ she said after a pause. ‘Tell me, d’you ever watch TV?’

      ALQUERIA, GOA

      The road to Alqueria ran along the sea. It was a zigzag of a road. A road with a split personality. A slam of sunlit sea on one side, quiet palm and mango forests on the other. The forests sloped upwards to a red dust hill where the old Portuguese fort stared out across the water. Next to the fort was the church of Santa Ana (presided over by Father Rudy) with its whitewashed walls and blue curlicues.

      Tiny seaside Alqueria: one of the world’s forgotten ancestors. Where the spirits were ancient and powerful.

      Wayside shrines dotted the zigzag road. There was a white crucifix planted under a cashew bush with a marigold at its base. Next to Sharkey’s Hotel, under the big banyan tree, villagers lit clay lamps every evening. Under the rocky steps that led off the zigzag to the beach were scattered hibiscus petals and stalks of rice. In Alqueria, Father Rudy told his congregation, all kinds of gods pranced in the shadow of humans. When a smiling arc of palm leaf drifted to the ground, you knew it wasn’t just another leaf.

      In the evenings, music from the church choir accompanied the fishermen to the taverna. Family homes with pillared patios, red-tiled roofs and icons on their walls came alive with lights and buntings. Bougainvillea, jackfruit trees and abolim flowers grew in the back gardens of the houses that lined the zigzag.

      Sloping down from the zigzag was Capuchine Beach and its crescent of sand. On one of the bends of the zigzag was the popular Sharkey’s Hotel. Its whitewashed walls were painted with palm trees and beer bottles. Red paper lamps hung from the ceiling. The rooms on the first floor were comfortable enough though the sheets were faded and the floors were sandy. The best thing about Sharkey’s was its stunning location, with the bay in front and Alqueria stretching behind. Ad executives, chief financial officers and models with bandannas streaming from their hair and cellphones tucked into their sarongs, came to stay during the New Year holiday and arranged all-night parties. There were techno, rock ‘n’ roll and Bollywood remixes on offer and an a la carte of Goan sausages, fish curry and beer, as well as first-aid when the parties became violent or when the Goa police exploded in on their motorbikes on the suspicion that someone was selling drugs.

      Indi, who owned Sharkey’s Hotel, lived in a white-painted house on the far side of Capuchine Beach. The house overlooked the rocky part of the beach and a clear lagoon set back from the sea by an undulating bank of sand.

      In the evenings, when Indi sat in her veranda, her face towards the lagoon, all movement on the beach stopped. The financial consultants and models who tripped past in their Speedo suits came to a standstill. And the fishermen who pushed their motorized crafts into the water whispered that when Indi was nearby, the poor prawns and pomfrets in the sea seemed to stop swimming and give themselves up distractedly to the fishing nets.

      Indi was brutally beautiful. Her beauty had always been as formidable as a conquering army. At five feet ten, she was the tallest Indian woman Alqueria had ever seen. Her skin was the colour of freshly churned butter and she had eyes that stretched from the bridge of her nose to her temples. Her eyes were unlike any other. They were the colour of the ocean in the monsoon, azure streaked with grey, eyes that thundered and stormed under black brows. The straight nose and cheekbones that angled out of her skin were chiselled to knife-edge sharpness but there was nothing pure about Indi. Everything about the voluptuous figure and defiant expression, was brazenly sensual. Her clothes seemed to want to constantly fall off her body, as if in apology for covering up what should be displayed to the world. Her grey-streaked black hair flew around her face and when she smiled she looked wickedly unpredictable. She was a master-craftsman’s gift to himself. A prima ballerina’s swan song.

      She was blind. Her stormy ocean eyes were dead. She hadn’t been born blind. She had been born with retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable progressive degeneration of the retina. She had been night-blind as a teenager, lost her peripheral vision in her thirties, developed tubular vision in her fifties, until one afternoon, one hot afternoon, something snapped and her vision went completely.

      All her seeing life she had felt two thick black arms crowding into her eyes from the sides in a deathly embrace. Indi called these two arms her prison bars. Prison bars that were marching in towards the centre of her eyes from the sides bringing the blackess of solitary confinement. For many years she had seen the world as a distant planet, a circle of existence framed by a galaxy of pure darkness. Perhaps this was the way god saw us, she thought – as a far-away aberrant circle in a surface of uniform black.

      The diagnosis was delivered to her parents when, as a fourteen-year-old, she began bumping into too many doorways at night. There was no known cure for retinitis pigmentosa. The retina could not be rescued. She must start learning Braille, the ophthalmologist suggested, to equip herself mentally and try and enjoy her life as much as she could, because inevitable darkness awaited her in old age.

      She had tried not to notice the prison bars when she was younger because they started as faint threads. But as she grew older they began to thicken, getting broader and fatter until finally, one hot afternoon, when a dry wind came beating against the windows, they swelled and blocked out the sun forever.

      Indi had learnt to feel her way along walls. She could tell if a wall had been recently touched by sunlight and if it led into a doorfront, or if a wall was damp and smelt of a bedroom. Bedrooms smelt of underwear, living rooms of shoes, cigarettes and farts. Footsteps were eloquent on character: angrily stomping or shuffling or suspicious. She felt the sun on different parts of the body like the touch of a friend or the push of an uncaring bystander. She could smell the starch on a napkin and judge whether it had been recently washed or not. She had never been able to properly distinguish colours, and sometimes dressed in wildly clashing clothes. She had never properly been able to see the power of her own beauty, but sensed it in the startled intake of breath she heard when someone saw her for the first time.

      Sometimes she would smell and count her way to the lagoon and turn her face to the sky and bend her head this way and that to ease some sliver of sunlight into any remaining crack in the undulating dark.

      But all she came away with was the mossy smell of the lagoon and remembered souvenirs of the sun on her skin.

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