The Eyes

It was David’s strange fate to be haunted by eyes. Eyes of men and women, animals and birds, reptiles and insects, and even of pixies and demons of his dreams pursued him in his wakeful hours. He saw through these eyes sights only their owners could see. He became their third eye, for what he saw through them he could see through his own eyes too.

In his sleep he became one with the eyes and dreamt dreams seen by them. He realized that the eye possessed a hidden eye on its inner side, a supplementary eye, with which every eye saw its dreams. His sleep was thus a journey along the endless shores of dreams of all variety of creatures, let alone humans.

Eyes stuck on him like petals on a bough. The eyes that he looked at crawled out of their sockets and flew to David. These eyes he carried on his body, and upon stretching his limbs like a bird about to take off, he became a human peacock with umpteen eyes on its fanned tail.

The first inkling of his oddity occurred to David as a boy while kneeling at the altar of St. Antony’s church. He was five years old. Martha, his mother, knelt beside him with the end of her sari passing over head to cover it and the sides of her face. She tilted her head towards left and was a Madonna in her looks. She had an oval face that always wore a sad expression. David remembered that his mother’s favourite colour had been white. She mostly wore white saris and blouses. His mother was whiteness to David. And that was an ordinary day when the church was empty, and the wind passed through its arched spaces as though through deserted ruins. And then a blue pigeon flew in from among the coconut trees.

It flew in parabolas along the length and breadth of the nave of the church, and then made a curvaceous leap towards the crucifix. It alighted on the left hand of the holy cross upon which crucified was the sacred body of Christ. The pigeon cooed in suspicious comfort pruning its plumes a couple of times to attain a cocky poise. It then passed into a statue like stillness, having set its eyes on David and his mother. Only he saw the pigeon. As his mother was in the deep waters of meditation, her mortal eyes were shut on the world. But David was not sure whether the bird’s eyes were fixed on him or his mother. He knew it was either of them that the pigeon had eye locked. From his little height of a kneeling five year old, he felt that the bird was perched on top of the universe, supported by the bleeding hand of the Lord.

David had been regarding the pigeon oblivious of himself when the crucial thing happened. He began to look at his mother from above the Lord’s head decked with the crown of thorns. The nave and aisles in her background, the arches, and the high white washed walls of the church on which were hung the pictures of the different phases of Jesus’ way to the cross, all looked as if they were in a liquid flow downwards from a high point. Everything was drained of its colour. The white of his mother’s garment overflowed her contours and suffused every object and corner of the church’s interior. He flew down to her, alighted on her right shoulder and perched there on their way back home.

“I was on your shoulder today,” he said. But his mother gave him a smile and went on with her washing.

“I was a pigeon today,” he continued.

“You were the white dove that landed on your maker’s shoulder,” his mother said and gave him a smile that had a hundred roses blooming in it.

On the niche of the ventilator of his classroom at the school attached to the church, submerged in the cooing orchestra of surrounding pigeons, David lost his virginity to a female dove that had white spots on her blue body. He remembered with a wave of thrill washing across his body how the dove had shuddered submittingly under his feathery weight high on the wall of his class room on that Sunday during his catechism class while the father was speaking to them about the serpent that tempted Eve.

“Mother, I knew Eve today.”

His mother gave him a cute look raising her black eyebrows into a bow and laughed throwing her head back to his father who was in the heavens. David realized then that he should no more reveal his avian life to anyone; that it was his secret land of promise. He was yet to realize that he was to live a hundred ophthalmic lives in his life.

 

The serpent’s dream

           

            Leaves, roots and dross; roasted sand, melting pitch, sun and the cool of dark shades; upon me and under me; these were my life. A world where fear is unknown that was where I dreamt. David saw the lowest level of the world where dust sang in the wind. He was afraid of the slightest motion of a leaf or a shadow. In it might be the cudgel of death.

It was not my desire to crawl between her thighs and set the juices of sin flowing. I had nothing in my dream to lead me across the yellow desert of a burning sea. It was my wont to search for cooler shades from cool places. My eyes could not reach beyond the immediate sense of my tongue’s kiss. My tongue touched the sweetest softness, and the more I pressed forward a coolness drew me into a moist sleep. I coiled between her flesh and dreamt of the bottomless deep of a harmless sea. I saw a red flower of velvet folds that wept the joyful honey of unsung longings. I was sucked into the vortex of a storming desire that would soon seek and find its fatal union.

David saw her feet trailing along the dusty road to the scaffold. There they got entangled with darker and muscular limbs. A shudder passed through the serpent in David’s dream, for it meant the beginning of all shudders his life would have to bear. For he realized that the serpent was with his mother.

I knew nothing of sin. I knew nothing of joy. What I knew was fear of getting trampled, and to kiss others with death to save my brood.

What the demon saw

The eyes of the demon that made him became David, and he lived the paths and alleys that led to the fatal moment of his creation. It was a world soaked in red. The red of blood, the red of deprivation. What made me was the want that writ the pages of my life. I was ordained not to be given. I was born in the burning waters of lust to unknown parents, and being born thrown into the whirling darkness of chaos. The world grew on that which was denied to me. It would throw away the leftovers to dogs and cats, yet would consider it sin to give to me. I was born shackled to the log of motiveless sinning, fated never to know the meaning of the judgement that was the log. I rooted my existence in snatching what was refused. Whenever my hunger grew, I drooled and leapt to the nearest possessor of the forbidden fruit, which I snatched injuring its owner with the eagerness of my poisoned claws. Whatever I set my eyes on and grabbed by force of want was left with the bruise of greed. Yes, I became demon.

Her whiteness was of a singularly devilish kind. It was unblemished to the extent of ensnaring me, in fact, terrifying me. The pureness of her white was a replica of my own nature, for nothing that did not suffer from want could be as chaste as her. Her monochrome was an outrageous but silent call for defilement. I only satisfied a need that yet did not have a name.

No, I did not hide my lewd ugliness from her, nor disguise myself in tempting shapes. Instead, I showed off the wolfish hunger of my upright loins that raised its hood in utter hatred for the undefiled. On the scaffold I crushed her into a hundred bleeding petals. In her swoon she murmured my honeyed name.

Rain in Martha’s eyes

           

            During the summer nights of his childhood, Martha’s eyes rained and flowed to him like paper boats in rivulets. They clung on him oozing ululations of the agony of singleness in a world of faked doubles.

The pigeon on the high window of St. Antony’s church was the lover of my windy spaces, where the earthly stench of steaming desires did not seek to coil in. What the bird loved in me was my whiteness, its colourless essence. In the red circles of the pigeon’s eyes, I was reflected in my naked mind. He poured a nameless peace on me, in each of our encounters in which air met earth in a feathery embrace. The dove was of a spirit that did not seek shelter in the folds of flesh.

The worm was of a foetal charm that set my dreams of joy milking. The worm circled the warm inlands of my flesh, and grew into the hooded bewitchment which I ran to flee from. The pigeon had fled away; spirit was intimidated by flesh. Upon the scaffold of tearing, my virtue lost its name and habitat. The worm, the serpent and the sprung up demon of irresistible darkness held sway of the wheels that raided my white valley of innocence, O David.

“The eye is the lamp of the body.”   (Matthew 6:22)

 

Having lived the lives of a thousand eyes, of creatures of all kind, my eyes have lost their singular light. My eyes are legion, and my memory a Babel of mournful cries of the three worlds. I David, son of Martha and the unknown, could not tell one tale from another that I stumbled upon in the dark recesses of the castle of lamp shine. But among the infinite visions I had been cursed to live, a tale of dark fatherhood hovered around my head in all its human ages. The tale of maculate conception.