LOVE LOOKS NOT WITH THE EYES

  PROMPT: A STORY BASED ON EXPLAINING COLOURS TO A BLIND PERSON.

I

"Are you gawking at a guy?" Dhruva asked.

Sudha frowned. "I wish."

He folded his walking stick with a sharp click and said, "What else do you wish for?"

"For you to be silent."

"Seriously, what are you looking at?"

Sudha pondered briefly before she answered, "People."

"People?" He scowled and added, "Yes, they're the worst."

She believed him, even though she knew he'd forgiven people who had insulted him and laughed at him. She'd seen him apologize to a man who made a big deal to pick up the earphones that fell out of his hands on the metro. A lot of people didn't deserve this world, not as much as Dhruva.

She rested her elbows on the railing and glanced around. The grey three-story-long poster of a brand-new Benz car hung lazily in the mall's centre. The brown, overflowing chocolate fountain on the second floor, and the bright, orange jacket of a man posing for a picture on the other side of her floor. It was a slow day at the shopping mall. Minimal crowd. She liked it that way.

Dhruva stood in silence beside her. He wasn't looking down; he could have, but it wouldn't have done any good. He adjusted his glasses and leaned back at the railing. Leaning! Sudha wondered how easy it came for her. The word. The verb. For him, it was a process. He took a step back and touched the metal railing with one hand to confirm that it was still there, that he could lean on it, and that it would not disappear, melt, or dissolve. Then he rested his back against it. Why didn't he ask her if he could lean on the railing? She knew better. He was as proud as he was blind.

"How can you lie with such a straight face?"

Dhruva shrugged. "It's easy to hide the lie when you don't have your eyes to reveal everything."

"Oh," Sudha giggled. "Now, now, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the prophet. Blindest, the third."

The mall went quiet. The guy in the orange jacket was gone. Was it the jacket or the shirt? She struggled to remember. The ground floor looked at her blankly, the mall staff dragging themselves around. They must be closing the place soon.

"Hey, do you want to take a walk?" Sudha asked.

"To Bangalore?"

Sudha shook her head and straightened. She felt her jeans tight around her legs. Javed never got her size right. What a generous and attentive boyfriend he always had been.

"I'm not going to Bangalore. Would you drop the topic already?"

"I won't." He opened his stick and tapped it on the floor. "I deserve the answers. You don't bring a blind guy out in public and not give him gossip. That's absolute treachery."

"Call my life gossip again and I'll paint your specs white."

"Why would I care?"

The tremor in his voice said otherwise. He adjusted his glasses, his hand lingering on them a little longer than usual. Sudha bit the inside of her cheek and tried not to smile, knowing he cared. He had ordered those glasses specifically to deceive people into thinking he wasn't blind. They gave him a cool gen-z expression.

"Imagine a brown guy with white specs walking around in traffic."

"Shut up."

She held his hand and walked down the corridor together. She'd always assumed that she led the way, taking him to where they wanted to go. But slowly she came to understand he walked just as clumsily when she was holding his hand as when he was walking alone. It was little, but she noticed it after years of knowing him. Maybe it was his muscle memory that kept him from walking like everyone else. A lifetime of walking with the assumption that there was always something in the way would have had its consequences.