Four I's

So you left your glasses at home. “What do I need them for?” you must have muttered to yourself when your mother asked you if you were carrying them. Your youth and foolishness, and to some extent your newfound confidence in your ability to make do without glasses after switching to lenses, probably led you to say something to the effect of, “Am I not carrying enough already?” Your economic training was grossly inadequate to make you realise that hand sanitizer and spectacles are not perfect substitutes.

You went to college, slightly annoyed with your right eye for being so uncooperative on such a fine morning, but you blinked away your worries. You took off the lens, cleaned it and put it back on, commanding your eye to behave itself now that you had given it due attention. But when it started watering in class you realised that, unlike you, your eye doesn’t usually get unnecessarily belligerent, so you should probably go see what the matter is.

You patiently removed the lens once more, and with your other eye you noticed that the edge was chipped. Oops. How did you even manage to wear that in the first place? Your poor eye had to put up with all your crap in addition to this. “Oh well, left eye, looks like it’s just you and me then,” you said. But when you failed to notice a step on your way out and your brain grew positively confused with extremely clear and extremely blurred vision, you decided to remove the other lens too. “I don’t need lenses either,” you told yourself proudly. Or so you thought. Until someone waved at you and you waved back without knowing who the person was and whether they had waved at you or someone else.

It so happened that on this day you wanted to return some notes. You walked, in fact strutted, to the photocopy shop, secure in the knowledge that you won’t have to spend any money there today. You saw three men, approximately the same height and build, all wearing vests and grey trousers. “Will Prem bhaiya raise his hand if I call out his name?” you wondered. But the problem solved itself when someone called him and he turned around. Mission accomplished!

All you had to do was get home. You could do that part with your eyes closed. Taking the wrong exit or the wrong metro is too routine to be considered a detour anymore. Oddly enough, you didn’t even do that, despite not being able to read any sign boards and voluntarily impairing your hearing with earphones. In fact, things were surprisingly easy. You didn’t have to worry about protecting your glasses or lenses from the rain. You were able to figure out which escalator went up and which one went down even though you couldn’t see them properly. You held your book five inches from your face and looked positively captivated by whatever was on the page. You didn’t have to look sheepish when you dropped your phone and iPod because you couldn’t make out if anybody was looking at you. The metro ride itself made you see Delhi as an awesomely green city because you couldn’t see the garbage. You counted stations and managed to get off at the right one even though you were listening to music and reading a book at the same time, thereby feeling smug about your ability to multi-task. And most of all, it was so much fun pretending to stare at everyone very attentively, even though you couldn’t make out much other than the colour of their clothes.

“What a day it has been,” you told yourself as you wore your spectacles to write about how you don’t need them at all.