The Vision Thing

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"...With perfect vision, one is inextricably trapped in the workaday world, a prisoner of reality, as lost in the commonplace America of 1937 as Alexander Selkirk was lost on his lonely island. For the hawk-eyed person life has none of those soft edges which for me blur into fantasy; for such a person an electric welder is merely an electric welder, not a radiant fool setting off a sky-rocket by day. The kingdom of the partly blind is a little like Oz, a little like Wonderland, a little like Poictesme. Anything you can think of, and a lot you would never think of, can happen there...

...To go back to my daylight experiences with the naked eye, it was me, in case you have heard the story, who once killed fifteen white chicken with small stones. The poor beggars never had a chance. This happened many years ago when I was living at Jay, New York. I had a vegetable garden some seventy feet behind the house, and the lady of the house had asked me to keep an eye on it in my spare moments and to chase away any chickens from neighboring farms that came pecking around. One morning, getting up from my typewriter, I wandered out behind the house and saw that a flock of white chickens had invaded the garden. I had, to be sure, misplaced my glasses for the moment but still I could see well enough to let the chickens have it with ammunition from a pile of stones that I kept handy for the purpose. Before I could be stopped, I had riddled all the tomato plants in the garden, over the tops of which the lady of the house had, the twilight before, placed newspapers and paper bags to ward off the effects of the frost. It was one of the darker experiences of my dinner hours..."

...James Thurber in The Admiral on the Wheel

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Thurber says he had only two-fifths vision when he killed all those naughty chickens with stones.

Right now I have four-fifths vision in the left eye and one-tenth in the right. The cataract in the right eye has bloomed to what the eye-chaps call the 'opaque lens', just short of a 'white eye'. And they ask me to get it removed before it bursts and get it replaced by an expensive artificial lens. And they pooh-pooh me when I murmur that I am afraid of surgery. They claim that nowadays cataract is no longer 'surgery' but just a 'procedure'.

I don't know the difference. They still meddle with the eye alright invasively. And they say the whole 'procedure' is over in ten minutes and I can walk away with a mere flap on the eye that can be removed in a day (the flap). And I just have to pour a few eye-drops five times a day for a few days. And then on I can see like a hawk.

What they don't say till I ask them is that I have to stop taking baths for a month. If even a drop of water gets into the meddled eye, infection invades and I risk losing both eyes and going completely blind. 

When I mentioned this to a gent who had his eye 'procedured' recently, he laughed it away...no baths for a good month...hallelujah!

My case is different. 

Till about the age of twelve I resisted baths...a perfectly normal instinct. But from my teens on, when hormonal imbalance started affecting me seriously, my head used to get overheated like the engine of my old Maruti car that whines for the coolant and the fan every five minutes...I drive them in the second gear.

So I got used to taking at least ten head-baths daily on an SOS basis. 

And the matter rests there.

The asymmetry in the eyes spoils my 3-D vision. Time was when my wife, when she was resisting glasses in her forties, used to come to me with a needle asking me to thread it for her. It was a breeze for me. But nowadays, I can't even button up her school uniform shirt for little Ishani...she decries my ineptitude and runs to her dad.

And I am blind in the dark since there is no night vision anymore. And I am blind in the glare of lights since my opaque lens reflects all the light dazzling on it. So I always carry my pocket torch with me much like Diogenes who used to carry his lamp with him and when asked why replied that he was looking for an honest man.

One dark and cloudy night a few months back I parked my car in its slot in the lower basement and got out. And saw a young software couple park their bike a few slots ahead of me, dismount, and start walking jauntily towards our lift. And then there was this sudden power outage. Those were the early months of our upcoming gated community when the standby generator wasn't switching on automatically. The security chap had to blow his wailing whistle, step down into the basement with his pen torch and switch the generator on hunting and poking...an operation that took a good three minutes.

So the software couple were taken aback and stopped abruptly, not wanting to bump their heads on the interlaced maze of columns and pillars.

I took out my pocket torch and switched it on and started walking ever so slooooowly towards the stair case. And asked them to follow me. They were relieved and thanked me and walked behind me blindly following my footsteps. And we had this small talk of which floor they had to go to and which me and what a nuisance this was and how dark pitch darkness could be and such inane things.

On our way up, on the first basement, the lights came on suddenly and the couple thanked me and strode past me ten hurried steps on to the right-angled landing and turned back and saw my withered old face and the white hair on my wizened head with eyes blinking like a rabbit's in the sudden glare.

And rushed down the steps to reach me offering one sorry hand each saying:

"Come, Uncle, Come on Please!"

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