Something Unseen

All stories that my grandma tells me are not hilarious. I realised this the day she told me about her eyes. Nevertheless, it is definitely a story of courage of a 12-year old girl and ends on a happy note. But there is ‘something or someone’ in this piece, about which if I say now, it might sound, exaggerated. So let me get on with the story.

My old lady narrates this story or bits and pieces of it whenever she sees me drawing my eyes. She loves eyes that are well drawn. She drew my eyes for the first time in my life, when I was an infant and was the one who taught me how to put kohl in my eyes. However, I sat, without blinking my kohl-drawn eyes, when she narrated the story of her eyes.

When she was twelve, there was a dreaded disease called small-pox which had engulfed the nation. When it affected the eyes, they got horribly distorted. Returning from school one day, granny experienced stinging pain in her eyes. By the time, her mother came back from temple the little girl’s eyes had swollen up like plums, with severe pain. After a whole night of unsuccessful home-made treatments, her mother took her to the local government hospital. Towards evening, the doctors confirmed that it was not small-pox. According to them, the pain and swelling was due to abnormal growth of optical muscle inside her socket which might even mar her sight, if not operated soon. No name for such a disease existed. They operated and removed some mass of flesh from her eyes. After a gap of 10 days, she could see, though not as clearly as before. And after a gap of three months, the disease was back, with all its fury.

As the doctors kept on operating and removing the mass of growth from her eyes, the disease kept coming back every 3-4 months. Neither could the doctors name the disease nor could find the cause of the growth. Hence, within two years, she had had more than 12 eye surgeries and innumerable breaks from school. The school finally cut her name off from its list and my grandma’s tryst with education ended there.

After two years my granny’s maternal uncle came to stay in the village due to a transfer in his government service. When he saw the condition and the endless surgeries she had had, he had a word with her doctors and took her to the city hospital. At the city hospital, the doctor found out that the growth is the result of pus being formed from some gland near her eyes. A crucial surgery was prescribed for the following week.

My granny was sad on the day of the surgery. Four days later was the great ‘Kartika’ puja at the temple which is held at a great esteem. People from all over, come to see this puja during which, the deity is taken around the temple in its entire lit-up splendor. The mere sight of it is considered auspicious and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The little girl knew that she would never be able to come back to the village to see her favorite deity, all decked up, just within three days of surgery. She cried when she went to pray before going to the hospital and breathed a silent prayer, a whispered request.

When she was taken inside the operation theatre, she was greeted well. Then she saw that the doctors had a bowl of live leeches. Real blood-sucking ones! While she looked around, two doctors held her upper eye-lid and two held her lower eye-lid. The main surgeon, then, released three leeches in each eye. All this while, she was fully conscious, being only given the needed anti-poison injection.

The doctors had told her uncle beforehand about the procedure. There was no way to suck out the pus without disturbing the optical nerves and hence this kind of a technique. She should be kept in full consciousness during the surgery to avoid a coma-like situation and so no anesthesia was administered. After they removed the swooned leeches, they stitched up sutures by using the flesh from her thigh. The surgery had lasted four hours.

The next day the much-bandaged girl complained of severe pain in the eyes and the doctors removed the bandage to see blood oozing out. After they cleaned up the blood, they decided it was better to leave the area without bandage. By the third day, the pain and swelling had come down. On the eve of the third day, a depressed girl told her uncle about her desire to visit the puja, scheduled for the next day. The main surgeon heard this and kindly got the discharge papers done. It was quite later that he told my grandma that he himself was neither sure of the recovery nor why he had discharged her. By morning of the day of puja, my grandma was back in her house, eagerly waiting to see her beloved deity, in all its grandeur, though with bleary eyes.

The disease never came back after that and since then, my grandma goes to her beloved deity, every year, to see and thank Her. Just to be with Her.