A goddess smiles at me

Before Nelliakkattu Bhagwati

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu rose in my mind before anyone else as I stood in front of the Goddess of Nelliakkattu. I seldom pray for myself. I get on somehow with my own idiosyncrasies which I think even gods can’t do much about. A lot of missionaries of many gods tried to ‘reform’ me and failed miserably. They made me a failure too most of the time in the process. That’s how I decided to keep gods far away from my personal life. But I sort of like them - gods, I mean, not their missionaries, apostles, priests, yogis, and ministers. Gods are fun if you have ever cared to engage them in conversations.

Kerala has a lot of gods and goddesses. In fact, every Hindu family of some historical repute has its own god or goddess. One such goddess is Nelliakkattu Bhagwati. She belongs to the Nelliakkattu family of Ayurvedic physicians. I’m treating the nascent cataract in one of my eyes with their medicines – a few eyedrops only. “You don’t have enough cataract in your left eye for a surgery,” my allopathic surgeon who operated on my right eye three years ago said.

My leftist vision was always strong. I kept the thought to myself since physicians don’t have any sense of humour.

During my quarterly visits to the Ayurvedic hospital for the routine check-up and purchase of a new stock of eye drops, I say Hi to the goddess of Nelliakkattu family to whom the entire hospital belongs. This time I asked her, in my prayer, to give some good sense to Trump, Putin and Netanyahu. I don’t add too many people in the list so that Bhagwati will take me seriously. Otherwise she will think of me as another regular beggar with joined palms asking for the whole world if not the cosmos itself.

“I can’t help you,” Bhagwati said.

I was not chuffed.

“Not in my jurisdiction,” she explained.

I guess the deities up there have allocated regions and authorities in order to avoid squabbles or perhaps wars too. Do they have passports and visas too?

I stood looking at Bhagwati for a few minutes. I love to do that. Just watch gods. Do they feel bad about my staring? I don’t know. Jean-Paul Sartre might scold me because he believed that the gaze of others objectifies us and endows us with a sense of shame. Just imagine you sitting in your closed room and someone standing outside watching you through the keyhole secretly.

“I don’t mind being looked at,” Nelliakkattu Bhagwati said to my surprise. She could do mind-reading! Well, she is a god; how did I forget that? She smiled. I was happy. Have you seen a smiling god or goddess?

I grew up with an extremely sad god, Jesus. “Jesus never laughed,” one priest told me once. I had the silly habit of laughing loudly when someone cracked a joke even if the joke wasn’t quite funny. I meant well. Anyone who tries to being more cheer into this sad world should be encouraged, that was my view. But since Jesus never laughed, I too stopped laughing. That was one of the blessings of religion on me: it stole my laughter. Eventually, it would steal even my faint smiles.

Nelliakkattu Bhagwati is different.

“How do you feel about your eye?” Dr Namboothiri asked me after he looked into my eyes with different kinds of torches.

I expressed a little disappointment because three years have passed with their treatment and the world didn’t look any better to my left eye.

“Now I’ll have to tell you like we do to little children,” he said with a disarming smile. “You have only two options: one – use specs constantly for vision in the left eye; two – undergo surgery as you did with your right eye.”

I understood that the Ayurvedic eye drops were only preventing the cataract in my left eye from deteriorating. It wouldn’t remove the cataract totally in all probability. Age matters for light too.

“Do you know what the doc said to me?” I stood before Nelliakkattu Bhagwati once again as I walked from the hospital to the parking lot carrying the eyedrops for the next quarter of the year.

“I know,” she said. She would know, I thought. The hospital was within her jurisdiction.

“What do you suggest? Manage with the limited vision I now have or go for a surgery?” I asked.

“Why do you want to see more?” She asked. “Have you forgotten a short story of yours, Blackout, serialised in a Shillong newspaper when you had clearer vision?”

How could I forget? Those were some of the most terrible days of my life. I was a teacher in Shillong and the hill station was going through a violent sociopolitical turbulence. The local tribal people didn’t want nontribals like me there anymore. Societies are like that: once your requirement is over, they discard you. Isn’t that what Trump is doing in his country now? His country? His? Well, he is an immigrant himself!

My story, Blackout, was about those dreadful days in Shillong. There was lot of darkness in Shillong’s society in those days, both really and metaphorically. The people were forced to switch off all lights at home in the nights to show solidarity with the agitators. We had no choice but live in darkness. And the darkness had many hues.

There was a little boy in my story who was congenitally blind. He is given sight through a surgery by a benevolent doctor. The boy goes out happily to see the world around him. A day later he returns to the doctor and demands, “Remove my vision. I don’t want to see the ugliness of the world.”

I looked at Nelliakkattu Bhagwati again when she reminded me of that story. “I don’t want a surgery,” I told her. She smiled. The smile had many hues.

The founder of the hospital