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The Gift of Sight - Sunny Singh Sunny Singh was born in Varanasi. She received her education in various parts of India and the world. She has worked as a journalist, teacher, and as a management executive for multinationals in Mexico, Chile and South Africa. For the last four years, she has been writing full-time. She is also a playwright. Her first play, Birthing Athena, focussed on evolving relationships and the price of ambition in post-liberalisation India. The Times of India described the play as "an intensely cathartic experience." Her first novel, Nani's Book of Suicides, had been published by Harper Collins Publishers India. Described by the Hindustan Times as a "first novel of rare scope and power," the novel explores the cultural identity of an Indian woman through a fund of myths, family lore and contemporary reality. Her second book, Single in the City: The independent woman's handbook was released on Dec 22, 2000 by Penguin India. Visit Sunny Singh's website at: http://www.sunnysinghwrites.com/ Click at www.sawf.org/sunny to read Sunny singh's Mezine on SAWF.

The term "blind" was first applied to me back in January 1998. A prominent academic with international publishing links ripped into the manuscript of my first novel. He went through my writing with a hatchet, gave me his scathing opinion on the state of literature in general, and listed a whole series of changes that I needed in order to make my novel "publishable." When I refused his suggestions, he told me that my "creative blindness" would ensure that I would never be published.

That seemed to set the tone for the next few years. Within months of that conversation, my personal life also fell apart. My family and friends called me "emotionally blind" for loving a man who, according to them, didn't deserve my love or loyalty.

By May 1998, the term "blind" seemed to fill my entire life. A seemingly minor eye problem led to a surgery. When it was over, my right eye saw everything through a blur. And the medication left the other, good, eye also bleary. I complained of the blurred vision, only to be informed by the doctors that "it wasn't possible." Instead, I was told to go on normally, and allow the eye to heal.

Since I couldn't to take time off from work and writing, and instead chose to function with an eyepatch (in feminine powder blue), my eyes refused to heal. Trying to focus with them gave me severe headaches and left me dizzy. Strong light, wind, pollution, practically everything in my surrounding became a torment as my eyes reacted - with pain and tears - to them. Initially, I told myself that at wearing my pirate's eye-patch was a fashion statement (although my mother stubbornly refused to get a sequinned version). A childhood fantasy come true, although in a terribly bleak adult way!

Yet, as my sight diminished, I panicked. Tantrums, tears, bursts of anger all became a regular feature. Even as a child, I had suffered no major ailment, except the usual childhood maladies. My worst health experiences were of regularly fracturing bones. Now I realised that the pain of broken bones paled before the fear of losing my sight completely. As I fought the blurred vision, even my dreams seemed to fade into the bleariness. Nothing I dreamt was bright anymore. Instead, dark clouds, ominous shadows, blurred visions of a life submerged in murky waters took shape in my mind, reminding me of my fears even as I slept.

My family worried too, since all troubles - emotional, professional and physical - seemed to have joined together against me at the same instant. We went on consulting doctors and eye-specialists. A friend even set up an appointment at Delhi's Apollo hospital and practically hijacked me to the examination. Yet, the verdict was unclear: no one found any "real" problems. Diagnoses varied from allergies to "irregular growth" and no two specialists seemed to agree on the cause.

Meanwhile, I continued to search for a publisher for my novel. And I continued writing. Ironically, at the time, I was working on a play about the difficulty and pain of creation - both biological and intellectual. As I began to finalise the draft of my play, "Birthing Athena," and needed to spend more time on the computer, my eyes were incessantly irritated, teary and blurred. In the end, I wrote in a dark room, with my nose held two inches from the computer screen.

At the same time, I began to understand that something else was also happening inside me. As my sense of sight failed me, other senses, especially my nose took over. Steadily and increasingly, memory, experience, fantasy and imagination began to rely on the power of smell - a special perfume, a mix of spices, a waft of cologne. Every fragrance I had never noticed suddenly seemed recognisable, obvious, guiding my mind and imagination.

My skin also became extra sensitive to my surroundings, picking up not only sensations of cold and warmth, rough and smooth. It even seemed to sense feelings - anger, confusion, sorrow - of those around me. I would pick up breathing, voices, sentiments against my skin, finding nuances that my eyes had never "seen."

Most importantly, my inner radar seemed to go into overdrive - I could suddenly pick up emotions, not only from spoken words, or body gestures. Even in letters and emails, I could suddenly "see" beyond the words. It seemed that in absence of sight, I had become more receptive to the world around me. It was as if sight had actually been a blindfold, and in its absence I had turned into one unified receptor of all that surrounded me.

Yet the realisation of these other ways of "seeing" came to me not in a waking moment. Instead, I dreamt of my grandmother's house, where I had spent most of my childhood. I couldn't really see the house in my dream. But I knew it from its smell, something I didn't even know I had ever noticed or remembered. I walked through my dream smelling the comforting, combined fragrances of hot, fresh milk, bitter neem-leaves crushed in the passage way, the sickly-sweet scent of cowdung near the shed. Always with an undernote of a wet dog, of my Lhasa Apso, Tashi! And blended within, were notes of camphor, roses, water sprinkled on dry earth to smell like new rains. Of aging Burma teak timber piled up for the day my parents would build their house. And the golden scent of wheat harvested in our fields and stocked in the back of the house. All combined, it was the scent of love, and courage, and young, unchallenged hope. I walked through my dream, seeing nothing but smelling my home in a way I never had in reality.

When I awoke, I knew that I could use my other senses to make sense of the world around me. If I truly wished to be a writer chronicling human lives, trying to understand human beings, if I chose to write honestly about people, I didn't really need my eyes to see them. There are ways of "seeing" the world, of knowing people, that are far more accurate and reliable than sight. It was a realisation that brought peace to me. And reserves of courage where I thought I had none. And more importantly, the fortitude to accept what was happening to me.

And with that realisation came improvement. First of a peace of mind, and the knowledge that I didn't have to see with my eyes to write. And then, with time, not just an improvement of my state of mind, but also of my eyes. Not in a miraculous overnight way. It was slow, and painful, and frustrating, and took a long time, with ten steps backwards for each step forward. But steadily, my vision improved almost by itself. I could see the world again, and didn't need to turn away from bright lights. The innumerable colours of the world, the faces of those I love, the beauty of the world about me flooded back to me, like a gift specially chosen and granted by the universe.

Oddly enough, with the return of physical clarity of vision, my creative sight also grew keener. I wrote, finding somewhere within myself the hope and compassion that had been missing from my first novel. Armed with this new knowledge, I considered my manuscript again. And yet, finally decided not to alter a single thought. My first novel was written in confusion, desperation, in blind groping of a young person trying to find her space in the world. And it is most honest as just that - the despairing chronicles of lost hope. I decided that the hope I had found would find its own expression - perhaps in a future novel.

With the dispersal of my "creative blindness," I realised that "publishable" was just another euphemism for "saleable." And although I wish for fame and success as much as anyone else, I couldn't compromise on what I wrote and how I wrote in order to achieve them. So with my new found courage, I sent my manuscript back out into the world, sure that it would survive the cruelty it would encounter. And nearly a year and a half later, I found a publisher. Not the kind with the large advance and international publicity that makes for good hype, but one who would get my book out for people to read.

Something similar happened with my personal life - although it does not have a happy ending that readers demand. But then, life is quite different from fiction, isn't it? My months of blurred vision forced me to look inwards. Since the world outside was unclear, I looked within for understanding. And I discovered that being "emotionally blind" is not such a bad state for an artist and a human being. Far too often, we choose "relationships" over love, because we are afraid that our love is not understood or reciprocated.

Perhaps that is the smarter, logical, way for human beings to find happiness in our lives. And yet, when I write, I do so not because logic dictates me to write. I write for the love of the words, for the love of writing itself. Why then should my love for a human being be any different? Shouldn't I bring the same dedication to that act, even when rationality and logic state otherwise? Thus, I chose to stay "emotionally blind," loving where it is not logical, not happy, not practical. In doing so, I have begun finding within myself a surprisingly large, apparently unending, capacity for compassion and kindness and patience. And that enriches my writing more than any event or emotion I have ever experienced before.

My sight has returned fully today and to this day, no specialist has satisfactorily explained why I lived in a blur for five months. Perhaps it was my mind manifesting my emotional pain in physical terms. Or may be, it was a test that I had to undergo to find my own sources of strength, as a person and as a writer. Or perhaps, it was - as the religious tell me - a divine gift, intended to reveal more of the universe than I could see with just my eyes.

Despite the years, the gifts I received in those months have not been withdrawn. I still sense - almost preternaturally - when someone I love is in trouble. I now know that spoken words - even on a phone - are just a veil to hide the secrets of the heart, and I can often hear the hidden patterns, even when the words are innocuous. Writing, in books, letters or emails, speaks more deeply to me than I can ever explain - revealing in startling flashes, the love, pain, longing, sorrow and joy that are hidden in the forms of the alphabet.

And then there is smell. Now consciously creating memories, uniting imagination and experience to grant me precious insights into the universe. As I write this, the wind from the forest brings the new fragrances I have grown to love in the past couple of years: of paddy newly planted in the fields, the rich soil redolent of the basmati that grows here, the moist, tangy fern scent of the forest undergrowth. Of fresh paint, and jasmine, newly sawed wood and the slender grace of a young Amelia plant. It is a different fragrance from my childhood, but it speaks to my adult years. And it smells of patience, fortitude, endurance, and hope when there isn't any. And most importantly, of a clarity of mind, and a gift of sight that cannot be seen solely by the eyes.

Till we connect again...

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