‘ You’re American?’
‘ Afraid so.’
She laughed her throaty laugh. ‘You’re the enemy. We’re with the Soviets here.’
‘ And you?’
‘ Me?’
‘ Who are you with?’
‘ I’m not with anybody.’
‘ Good,’ he said because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘ What’s your name?’
‘ Justin. Justin Reylander. And you are?’
‘ Indira. Indira Ray. Come. Come to my house. Come and meet my parents.’
She felt inexplicably in charge of this blond American, this man whose hair colour shone with a kindness she didn’t believe in any more. As if he, of all the people who set eyes on her, was the only one who was brave enough to risk the blinding light of her dying eyes. And as if for his bravery he deserved her protection.
‘ Hey, no, that’s crazy,’ he protested like an old lover. ‘I can’t just show up at your home!’
‘ Of course, you can!’ she cried. ‘My parents are very happy today. They won’t mind. They’re having a party because I’ve just passed an important exam.’
Justin and Indi sat in silence in her room in Victoria Villa, while the party giggled in the lawn. They listened to the silence between them grow older. They wondered what life would be like if the other suddenly died. She felt as if her days would be broken in half, she would be an amputated limb if he were to now suddenly disappear. He comforted her by dispensing with the rituals of introduction, by acting as if he had always known he would find her.
‘ What are you doing here?’ she asked, walking into his gaze. ‘Are you CIA? Do you have a recorder hidden in your teeth?’
What am I doing here? I’m looking at the patterned landscape in a tumour that blossoms from a man’s stomach. The stab wounds on a child that look like the edges of a hibiscus flower. The whorls of scabies on an old man left for dead.
He laughed. ‘I’m a doctor. I’ve come to work here at the Medical Institute for a few months. I’m doing nights in Emergency.’
‘ I’m a civil servant. I’m in the IAS. That’s the exam I passed. The Indian civil service exam.’
He leaned back in his chair and studied her. ‘You don’t look’ – her pale blue sari was tied low on her waist and her blouse was a tiny slip of cloth, tight across her breasts, her hair swung down to her hips and there were rough daubs of blue shadow above her eyes – ‘anything like a civil servant.’
‘ I’m trying not to. Why always dress the part? Why be what is expected? I have a license not to, anyway. You see, I’m half blind. Soon I’ll be sightless.’
She told him about the retinitis pigmentosa. Her retina was dying at such speed that no force on earth could stop its death. She almost couldn’t see anything at night and during the day two black prison bars stood to attention in the corners of each eye. She had lost her peripheral vision. She still had her central vision though, which tunnelled forward and beat against the prison bars. Sometime, in the next twenty or thirty years, she would be ‘legally’ blind.
‘ Yes,’ he whispered. ‘RP affects rod cells and cone cells. You might sometimes get white-out glares.’
‘ I do,’ she nodded.
I’m going blind, I’m going blind was the refrain she woke up to, the song she went to sleep with and the chorus in her ears. It was her liberator and her dictator, the looming threat, almost a sexual charge, a beast forcing her to writhe against the light and dark to accommodate its appetite for her eyes. Over the last few months, while preparing for her examinations, she had fought against herself. She had locked herself in her room while her forehead became vermilion with pain and blood pounded behind her eyes. She had walked to the window to let draughts of air touch her eyelids. The jamun had rustled comfortingly during her shivering headaches. Unmindful of the doctor’s warnings, she had stayed up all night studying and been ranked in the first ten among thousands.
‘ Unbelievable,’ said Justin. ‘An unbelievable feat for someone with RP.’
‘ Yes,’ Indi turned her face towards her palm and held it at an angle where she could see the reddish stain of the cigarette burn across her line of fate. ‘It is unbelievable. Thank god for my country and for what I can do for it.’
When the results were announced, she had thrown herself into celebration. She had lain naked on the floor of her room and kicked up her heels in glee. She had bought herself a bottle of rum and drunk a toast to herself. She had stood in front of the mirror and let her hair cascade down to her buttocks and stared at her disembodied appearance, far away in a tube of light. She knew this was a vengeance on her father. And she knew she had succeeded in fighting off her helplessness at least for the duration of her professional life.
Justin felt his senses run into each other. He felt as if he too was blind. Like an LSD crossover, he smelt her beauty and heard her perfume. He was bewildered at himself. His life in America was a universe away where she wouldn’t matter at all. He was bewildered at how willingly he became her slave. He felt as if he was dying. As if his life had been taken out of his hands and set on the slippery course to some sort of abyss from which there was no escape.
There was a complaining knock on her door. ‘They’re calling you,’ Pom had whined. ‘They’re calling you outside.’
‘ Oh maaa!’ Indi groaned. ‘I have to go. I have to go and smile and say yes and no like a programmed parrot and cross my legs and not show my teeth. There’s a pig out there waiting to “see” me. Waiting for his mother to get him married to me. Waiting for me to lead him like a fat sow into the temple. If I marry him, I’ll be the owner of a pig. The owner, actually,’ she winked at him, ‘of a rich pig.’
‘ And will you?’ he asked. ‘Will you get married?’
‘ Come,’ she whirled around. ‘Come with me. I’ll introduce you as my American boyfriend. Then I won’t have to get married. They will all guess that I’m not a virgin and that will be the end of the proposal.’
‘ No!’ he cried aghast at this disrespect to local customs. ‘No way!’
‘ Coward,’ she spun in front of the mirror. ‘You’re scared.’
He nodded, sitting on her bed with his head in his hands, surprised at how easy it was to throw one’s life away.
When she appeared in the garden before her family, the gathering couldn’t take their eyes off her.
‘ Congratulations, my dear!’
‘ Indi is an IAS officer! Such good fortune!’
‘ Indi, the pride of the family.’
‘ Come, Indi-ma,’ Shiela Devi called. ‘Come and have some of this tomato juice. A Virgin Mary for my new government officer!’ Shiela Devi giggled and looked proprietorially towards the plump suitor who stood waiting in a starched white shirt.
As they crowded around, Indi dropped one of her bombshells, fortified by Justin’s blue-eyed adoration.
‘ Why should I have a Virgin Mary, Ma?’ shouted Indi so everyone could hear. ‘You know I haven’t been a virgin since the age of sixteen. One. Six. I told you about that affair of mine. I told you.’
After