Prisoner of my image

I was waiting at a traffic intersection the other day, when I saw a young man, obviously blind, trying to cross the road. It was a busy time of day and crossing the road, even for an able person, would have been a struggle. One part of me wanted to help, another part kept holding me back. Even as I debated and dawdled, a boy of about 12 appeared from nowhere, took the young man by his hand and swiftly shepherded him across.

A sense of shame and inadequacy enveloped me. This was not the first time that I had allowed my public behaviour to be dictated by what others might think of me. I had been that way since c h i l d h o o d . Ashamed to be seen in public with my brother, who was blind, and with my mother who was afflicted with leucoderma.

It’s not that I didn’t get along with my brother, elder to me by four years. I did. I loved him deeply and admired him too. Against all odds he had educated himself, passing out of a blind school with honours and then going on to university to acquire — unusually for a Brahmin — a Master’s in Islamic studies with distinction. We used to eat together, laugh, and play — all within the confines of the home. But I used to shy away when it came to escorting him to school or even be seen in his company outdoors. I knew I was causing him a lot of hurt but young as he was he never once complained.

Similarly with my mother. There was no cure for leucoderma then. Some 40 years ago, we weren’t even sure that the disease had a name! People thought it a dreadful contagious disease and shunned my mother. Socially and otherwise. A woman of rare courage and fortitude, my mother — though deeply hurt — bore it all quietly, even staying away from the marriage function of her own daughter, her first-born and my eldest sister lest her presence invite censure from relations.

It was only when my second sister, who was being brought up by an uncle in a distant town, returned to the family fold that my mother, who had virtually confined herself to the house for close to two decades, started venturing out into the world. Cajoled, even prodded, by my sister and my eldest brother, she would allow herself to join them for an occasional movie, a dinner in a restaurant, or a trip to the main city market. But I consciously stayed away from these excursions, afraid my friends might spot me in their company and snigger at me later for having a mother with a hideous skin disease. I wasn’t happy doing this but could never muster the courage to declare, as it were, my mother —and my blind brother — to the world at large. This weakness of mine damaged me; ridden by guilt and shy by nature, I became even more of a recluse burying myself in books almost as an escape from the real world.

My blind brother is long dead. My mother, too, is gone. A portrait of the family hangs in my drawing room, taken when I was very young. I have put it there myself. But I’m gripped by fear every time a casual visitor takes a close look at the photograph, afraid that he or she might ask who that short, frail-looking woman with patches on her skin was and that thin young man by her side looking straight at the camera with deepest, unseeing pale blue eyes.




Source: Times of India