Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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      She hung her head, but he could see that beneath the lowered eyelashes she was barely listening to him. Naturally, he had been extremely disappointed when she was born. She had been such a big healthy baby that she could easily have been a male child. But she was not. As she grew older, he had begun to get even angrier because she seemed to succeed at everything in spite of being a disappointment…She grew unacceptably beautiful and embarrassingly curvaceous. She understood more mathematics than he ever could and on top of everything else, she was blind, blind to the horrors she was wreaking on those around her. She was freed by blindness, strengthened by blindness, made wanton by blindness. Blindness made her wild, a creature of the wilderness.

      He was powerless to rein her in, helpless against her success, impotent against her unseeing dominance and powerless in the face of her scorn. Since she couldn’t see properly, he was easy for her to ignore. Easy for her to regard as negligible while he chafed and fretted about his own smallness, six feet two and still maddeningly small in his daughter’s disrespectfully absent eyes.

      ‘You told a lie? Why?’

      ‘Lie?’ she asked. ‘What lie?’

      ‘You told Sister Cyril that you have a brother. That he was killed in an accident. Why?’

      ‘I felt like saying it. I wish I had a brother. Instead of’– she jerked her head at the cowering Pom – ‘that idiot.’

      ‘Don’t you think it’s wrong to lie?’ His face was red with fury and triumph. ‘You’re not young. You’re going to become an officer in the civil service. And you act like a child.’

      ‘I felt sorry for you,’ said Indi calmly. ‘You don’t have a live son so you may as well have a dead one. A man without sons is not a man.’

      ‘Get out!’ shrieked Ashish Kumar. ‘Get out of my sight!’

      ‘Indira,’ Shiela Devi wept. ‘Was it you who sat in my poor womb for nine whole months?’

      She sneaked out into the lawn that night, treading barefoot so she could recognize the path, to smoke her cigarettes which she stored in a test-tube buried under the semal. As she lit up and inhaled, Ashish Kumar came up behind her and whispered softly, ‘So, my dear. You are smoking?’

      She started and exhaled hurriedly into his face. ‘Once,’ she held up her head, ‘in a while.’

      She ran her feet over the triangular edges of the bricks that lined the flowerbeds. Tiny upturned bricks formed a neat mountain range enclosing the nodding pansies.

      He stepped in front of her and snatched her wrist in a hard grip. His mouth was twisted in a sneer but his eyes were frightened. ‘Your lie about my son was a shameful matter. A very serious, disgraceful matter.’

      She struggled to free her hand, the cigarette still burning between her fingers. ‘I was teasing you,’ she said, trying to laugh.

      ‘You must not do all this.’ He looked at the cigarette, ‘Telling lies to your college principal. Lying to a nun. Asking them to hold a full scale mass for someone who doesn’t exist…Now you are smoking. What will you do next? Sell your body to anyone who wants it?’ All of a sudden her father shifted his grip to her fingers and twisted the burning cigarette into her palm. The heat burned into her skin. Tears sprang to her aching eyes but she didn’t make a sound.

      They stood under the semal, the father crushing the lit cigarette into the daughter’s palm, smelling the singed skin and watching her hand thrash involuntarily like a wounded bird. Then the cigarette fell to the ground and Ashish Kumar turned away red-faced.

      Indi hopped around in pain. ‘You gave me a third degree burn!’ she shouted. ‘You burnt me!’

      ‘Go into the house,’ Ashish Kumar hissed over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘Your mother will make you better.

      ‘You fraud!’ she screamed after him. ‘Pretending you don’t lust for a boy!’

      Loud prayers from the shanties surrounding Victoria Villa ran up the trees.

      Indi sank to her knees and cooled her palm on the wet grass.

      J The world became her adversary. Her blind and blinding beauty brought out the worst in everyone around her and made it impossible for her to find love. All she met – even from her parents – was jealousy, suspicion and fear. She began to 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.

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