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The hilarious sight of li'l Ishani leading me by hand to her kindergarten school was heart-warming to me but acted as a wake-up call.
It meant that I was becoming a dependent due to this cataract while otherwise fit enough so so physically and mentally. And there was this fear of slipping and falling and breaking a leg...it would be unkind on my son and D-i-L who are a working couple.
And then one evening my nephew came down for a couple of hours to look us up in Hyderabad. He is an eye-surgeon working in the UK for NHS and performs dozens of cataract surgeries every week. And he asked me how my cataract was. And I replied that I was waiting for it to mature. And he laughed at me as if I were a mesozoic beast. And said that nowadays they prefer to remove the cataracts well before they mature. And he inspected my right eye and recoiled saying:
"It has gone white!"
And asked me to get my eye-lens removed pronto before it burst and made a mess leading to painful emergency surgery and irrecoverable loss of sight.
The die was cast.
Then on my son was surfing the net for the latest procedures and facilities in Hyderabad. And I was discreetly finding out from friends who had recently gone through it what it all entailed.
And found that the surgery is nowadays a simple procedure and no hospitalization is required. You will be let off to go home half an hour after the thing.
But the post-operative care at home is amazingly finicky. This is always the case with modern surgeries. One surgeon told us that the so-called micro-surgery is ten times more involved than its macro-cousin. They call it keyhole surgery but the smaller the incision the greater the needed care and skill. And the modern eye surgeries are nano...no key can enter their holes if any.
And every bit of aftercare that my friends warned me of was scary for a chap of my weird habits.
Except that I shouldn't watch TV for all of 3 DAYS! (Impossible for old folks on Hyderabad). But I never watch TV for more than 3 minutes so that part of it was ok.
Again that I shouldn't munch hard nuts that need cracking by the teeth.
That too was ok...I lost my cracking teeth long ago and eat only soft foods...the hardest is an occasional pizza in Papa Johns.
Pizza calls for a cultivated taste. Ishani devours it. But my wife was indifferent to it. And for me it is an alternative to starving.
What I don't like most of Hyderabadi pizza outlets is that they don't give plates to eat from...we are supposed to eat from the inner covers of cardboard boxes. I don't know why. We are used to eating from banana leaves and well-knit banyan leaves. But cardboards!
Another thing about our pizzas is the technique for cutting pieces off it that I never mastered. I tried and failed miserably. My son told me that one has to take the damn thing to the mouth and bite the size of the piece that you are ok with. But that looked too odd for a senior citizen without teeth.
Last night I tried teasing apart a small enough portion off it but found that it was coming up with gooey streamlines of cheese that refused to snap. And we were given no fork or spoon. And I thought that snipping all those elastic fibers with my fingers on the other hand was against the etiquette.
Finally I wore my dark cataract goggles and all went well enough...for me...what the eye doesn't see the stomach doesn't throw up.
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