Between glasses and dentures

Raaja Bhasin

ONE could call them unofficial franchisees or ancillary units that pop up on their own. Like a patch of grass in the middle of a concrete slab. Occasionally, they provide better services than the parent factory or shop, especially in matters of repair and replacement. You may find them outside elegant salons doing nails, or ‘nail art’, as is the politically and artistically correct phrase, one is told. Or creating intricate patterns with henna on hands and feet. Then, there will be someone with a pile of metal bits and a melange of pots, pans and electric items by the doorstep, or in the back alley of a showroom that sells gadgets or tableware. Service providers like these are the last-ditch effort to procure an elusive part for a blender, toaster or other items worthy of repair. This, before the appliance is relegated to an increasingly dusty corner and becomes what my grandmother, speaking in Punjabi, would term something that ‘couldn’t be kept and couldn’t be thrown’. We Indians, supposedly, have a word for this, ‘jugaad’. I dislike the word and all it connotes. It debases ingenuity, innovation and imagination.

One such establishment had a tiny space adjoining an optician. A box of cheap dark glasses would open and hurriedly shut when the vendor was shooed off. From this dealer, I picked up a pair of plain glasses. These were expected to add gravitas (how I love that word!) to my teenaged face and bestow it with suitable world-weariness and angst. It didn’t work. The glasses found their way to the bin.

Now, decades later, one has spent a fair bit of working life and pretending-to-work hours in front of a screen, a sheaf of paper or a dusty book. Expectedly, one victim to this otherwise wonderful work has been a questionable posture that often resembles the hunchback of a question mark. That mark of interrogation, over the years, among other oddities of pointless punctuation, has been transported to the human body — an apostrophe here and unrequired parentheses elsewhere. The other casualty has been eyesight. Having fended off spectacles for decades, there came a time when I could escape no more. I was now trapped between the lens and the pernicious arms or temples that held them. Then, depending on the mood of the moment, I could also say that I had been saved by them in order to continue working as one did.

My mother was about the same age as I was, late 40s, when she started to wear glasses to read. This bothered me to no end and I would not let her wear them. Permit me to add that I was not a bothersome semi-adult, but was relatively young as my parents had married late. My aversion to her glasses reached a point that she had to sneak off to read or prepare her teaching lessons for the following day. If she was caught in the act, she would fumble and mumble and make all sorts of excuses while I, in my wisdom, fumed and fretted. Now when I look back, one realises that one did not consider that moment when she started wearing glasses as a normal life process but as an event that marked time. She was getting old. And I did not like it.

Some of this may have had to do with the fact that my father had been partially blind in one eye since childhood. Despite this handicap, in his younger years, he had been a university champion short-distance sprinter in Lahore and after Partition, in Shimla, a fairly good ice-skater and skier.

On the other hand, there was something amusing about the dentures that both used. Taking them off and allowing them a good night’s sleep in a bowl of water, only to be retrieved in the morning and snapped back into position with a smart click-clack. Then, there was the oft-repeated episode of the gentleman who travelled down from the hills for an important engagement and was prone to travel sickness. Just before the road smoothened out, the stomach decided to give one last heave. And with the retching, the dentures went down the khud. While brushing my teeth, I remembered this and was mentally grinning when a prominent filling on a front tooth dislodged and rushed down the wash basin. To modify the motto of a British chivalric order, this was retribution, ‘Bad to whom bad thinks.’ With a chasm on display every time I opened my mouth, one delivered an online lecture to an audience of peers.

Going to my optician is now a given. The dentist wants me to come by at least thrice a year. Every time I ask, “Do you think I will need dentures at some point?”, he just smiles and doesn’t answer. That seems ominous enough.

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