The Spectacled Game

I knew there was something wrong with my vision. My eyes hurt the moment I took a book for reading. Surprisingly, even the plain looking Urmila, our next door girl, looked stunning. I, therefore, decided to see an eye specialist and asked my elder brother where I could find an ophthalmologist.

It was perhaps due to working twenty-four hours a day writing and rewriting a screenplay I was commissioned to write for a movie, thereby pushing my blood pressure up on most days, and minimum rest for my eyes at night. In the hectic schedule of my work, I had not experienced any vision difficulty. In the morning, however, my eyelids would appear heavier, and from somewhere headache would appear and remain with me throughout the day like a street whore who would not go away without getting more money than she had earlier agreed upon. 

It is the eye, I told myself; you cannot baulk at it. So one wintry evening, I went on a search to find the name of an ophthalmic clinic my brother had suggested somewhere in Rash Behari Avenue. When at last I located it, I had momentary hesitation about its efficacy. The ophthalmology clinic was housed in a nondescript dilapidated building, and I wondered whether it was a homoeopathy clinic because there was no one waiting in the reception room. But my brother had said it was a gifted place. I trusted in whatever my brother recommended.

“Can I help you?” 

A young, stocky woman without glasses appeared from nowhere and flashed her perfect set of teeth at me. She would have been in the right place if this was a Dentist clinic. In an ophthalmology clinic, it was incompatible. The fact that she was not wearing any spectacles baffled me. It was like restaurant waiters having their meals outside.

“Yes,” I stammered, then quickly added, “is the doctor in? I would like to see him.” She nodded to the vacant bench, and I dropped my lean body on to it.

Without excusing herself, she went inside, leaving me in the company of an empty table, chairs, and benches. On the wall, there were photos of men, women, and children of varying ages wearing different sizes, models and shades of glasses and I wondered, whether the persons in those photographs were their previous patients. From the faded appearance of these photographs, I was not sure whether these people were still alive.

She was away only for a few seconds, but it seemed ages, and I was kicking myself for being a fool to come here and was planning to run away from that hole when she showed her face again. “Your name? Age? Occupation?” she demanded. I wondered whether I had entered a fortune-telling Shoppe by mistake. Was this stocky character their welcome spirit?

She put down a brief c.v. on a piece of paper and again, without even thanking me for the information, she disappeared into the inner room. I took that opportunity to go outside to read the name board to ensure that it was indeed an ophthalmology clinic. Satisfied, I came back to my seat and glanced through the old movie magazines to while away the time. What surprised me was, I had never seen the current issue of any of these magazines on the center table of a reception room. Perhaps they believe that the visitor would take away the magazine on his or her way out. As I began to flip through one such periodical, it hit me suddenly that I could read everything, including the small font showing where it was printed with my naked eyes. My eyesight seemed perfect. Yet I decided to take the advice of the doctor to know why I was having intermittent pain. Presently the welcome spirit came out and nodded to me, which I interpreted as her invitation to go in.

The woman behind the table looked up as I stepped into an ill-lit consultation room. She was short, obese and on the wrong side of her fifties and looked more like a midwife, but she did wear a pair of thick-framed glasses, which restored my confidence in her. I did not find any crystal ball in front of her.

“What is your trouble?” she inquired after she asked me to take a seat.

For a fractional second, I wondered whether I was supposed to tell her my failed love affairs, other personal, family, and official problems, but restrained myself in time to give her only a pertinent answer. She probed me like a police sergeant, and I admitted that I had a harmless habit of writing short stories at one stretch; sometimes from early morning until midnight, which though upset my stomach seriously, it had never affected my eyesight.

“Why it should now tell upon my poor eyes is something beyond my comprehension,” I added.

“Do you write pulp novels?” she enquired suddenly.

What does it have to do with my eye problem? I asked myself. “No, I haven’t tried it,” I said. “Is writing pulp novels bad for one’s eyesight?”

The doctor smiled wanly and said, “No. If you do, I would have loved to read it. Well, your problem seems to be a peculiar one. I’ve to do some more tests to find out the exact reason,” she informed me.

Her grave face (which I later discovered was her permanent dour expression) sent a chill down my spine. I feared I was slowly going blind. She then beckoned me to another ill-lit room, where there were several instruments placed on a table. It looked like a watch-repairers den. She commanded me to sit down on a solitary chair, and then she drew her chair very close and sat just opposite to me. Then she put off the light. I thought she did it purposefully to kiss me. I waited apprehensively. I feared my bones would crack if she embraced me. Instead, I saw her in the dim light picking up a sharp tool like thing, and I thought she was going to stab me for harboring such unsavory thoughts. She directed the tool towards my eye. For a moment, panic gripped me. Was she going to carve out my eyes from their sockets to study them minutely at her leisure? Instead, a light reflected through it into my eyes, and she seemed to examine them for quite some time. Then the light came on.

Presently, she asked me to read some printed letters I could see reflected in a mirror.

“O, F, S, C, E, P, D, h, b, e… and printed at Reshmi Press, Calcutta,” I read from top to bottom.

“Shocking,” she admitted. “Now try to read them once again,” she said, placing some weird glasses in front of my eyes. The small letters, like little kids, played havoc with me. The alphabetical letters looked blurred and jumbled together, and I had difficulty in reading them. I told her so. We played this game for some time until I was not sure whether B was E or C was O, and I had to admit that it was confusing.

Then she gave me a sheet of paper where some sentences were printed in different sizes and asked me to read them. 

“I’m sorry, I cannot read them,” I declared.

 “Ah,” she uttered in relief. “You’re in grave danger,” she pronounced.

I knew then that she had me where she wanted me to be.

“Doctor, I said I cannot read because …,” I began.

“Yes, yes, I know,” she cut me short. “The blurred vision may be the reason for your failure to read a single line. You may have to undergo cataract surgery,” she declared triumphantly.

“Doctor, I said I could not read it because it is in Bengali, and Bengali is Greek to me.”

“What the hell. You should have informed me that before,” she said exasperatedly. She then flipped the card and, on the backside of it, some sentences were printed in English, in different font sizes. I told her that I could read them from top to bottom including the last line which, from a distance, might look like ants doing a passing out parade.

“Good,” she admitted. Then she summoned me to follow her to her consulting room, where she once again produced an instrument like a torch and, flashing its beam against my eyes for quite some time, she grunted something inaudible. Then she began to scribble something on a piece of paper.

“I am going to prescribe some medicines to be taken orally twice and another thrice a day, and you will have to wear this glass continuously.”

I was aghast. Was she telling me that my eyes were not faultless, after all? I looked around. I could see everything very clearly. Perhaps I might be color blind. What I saw as blue could be green, and the pink could be brown.

I took the papers and came out, dejected.

Outside I found the welcome spirit blocking my way.

Perhaps she imagined I would escape without making a payment. She collected the prescription from me and piloted me through a dark corridor to a well-lit large room. “Which type of frame would you like to have?” she asked without any preamble.

I was not sure whether I liked to wear glasses at all. I told her I did not have much money with me. “Shall I come tomorrow?” I asked, hopefully.

“No, you will have to order now,” she was quite insistent.

I coughed up all the money I had. It came to around 245 rupees and few coins. “All right,” she said, “100 rupees for the doctor’s fees and 145 as an advance for making the frame.” At that time, the rupee had a fair value.

That was a pure and simple robbery. I had no choice. I did not like to part with all the money I had. “What about medicines?” I looked at her skeptically for a solution.

“You want to buy them today itself?” She seemed genuinely sorry to have a portion of her loot cut for medicines. “All right,” she agreed after a few seconds of mental calculation, “100 for consultancy, 100 as an advance, and 45 for the medicines. How is that?”

I said she was beginning to be magnanimous.

She took some measurements of my face and bridge of my nose and scribed something on a printed paper. So much unnecessary paperwork was being done here, I reflected wryly.

“Come after two days with the balance of 245 rupees,” she suggested, and I strode outside, looking like an idiot.

I looked at the passing buses, the sleeping trees, the clouds in the sky and the cracked pavements below with my now proclaimed defective eyes; but I found I could see them clearly. The doctor was a learned person, with a long tail of degrees after her name and, being a specialist, she must know. Who the hell am I to say that she was wrong, I reprimanded myself.

When I got the glasses, I wore it proudly as if I had won a major trophy. My sister said I looked very serious with specs. I was elated. As I was going out, I met my friend Poltu on the street.

“Hey Vijay, you look different. Let me see your spectacles,” he said.

 I gave it to Poltu, gleefully. He inspected it from all angles, brought it closer to his eyes, looked through it from a distance and finally pronounced that they were plain glasses. “You have been taken for a ride,” he remarked.

He was right; I found that I could read anything with or without them. Fortunately, I had not taken the medicine the doctor had prescribed. I was following what my friend once advised, ‘if you have any health problem, you must consult a doctor because the doctor has to live; buy the medicines he prescribes from a medical shop because the shop owner has to live, and toss the medicines you have bought to the nearest waste bin because you also have to live.’