The Face at the Window: A Short Story

Last week we watched a Diwali magazine on DVD, the first of its kind...One of the features was a documentary on Anandvan, and Baba Amte, its founder. There are no words to describe his dedication and drive to bring meaning and worth to leprosy patients and handicapped and blind people. People who had not just lost their limbs, their faces and eyes, but their will to live.

For years, my childhood friend has bought all her greeting cards from Anandvan. I have posted this link here, for everyone to view the cards, and especially to view the work done by Baba Amte. I admit I haven't yet purchased the cards, but I am doing it.
I have memories of recoil and horror at seeing bodies and faces robbed of the familiar angles and ends. Baba Amte lifted the curtain of fear of this disease, by educating the public about it being bacterial and treatable.
This is a story I wrote years ago : it may seem familiar to some.

The Face at the Window

The bus is crawling laboriously along the road, heaving to speed, slowing down, jerking at turns, with its bursting load of people. It is Sunday, late afternoon, and there are people everywhere. On the roads, everyone seems to be going somewhere, anywhere. Inside, people squash into the aisles, between seats, women “ adjust” three seats for two, with children in laps, between knees, plastered to windows, wound around the vertical bars running from floor to ceiling. Men, their bodies flattened against one another, keep their gazes steadfastly out of the bus.

Outside, the sun is harsh and blinding, its light glaring angrily on tar roads, tin roofs, gaudy clothes. After the mild months, the heat has come to stay. It permeates everywhere, along the aisle, between bodies, through clothes, entering our very pores.

I, who am making the trip to finish an important errand, wonder why people leave the coolness of their homes at all.

A little boy is crying for a window. His harassed mother pushes him between the aisle bar and a seat. He gets stuck between a pair of knees, and then is obligingly pushed further across another pair of knees to the window; on reaching which he immediately is lost in the world of the outside.

Luckily, I am seated near a window, through which trickles in a thin current of air, and I don’t envy the passengers in the aisle seats, whose shoulders support the weight of those standing leaning against them.

A mass of humanity waits ahead at the bus stop, and the bus, leaning heavily on one side, lumbers to the edge of the road and stops. With it stops the breeze.

People attack it at both doors. Some, who go to one, not finding room enough, run to the other. Men, women, children, fall over one another to get an inch, a foothold. There is a cackling and frenzy not quite human. Concerned relative’s push them safely inside, and then come to the windows, embarking upon a long series of farewells and goodwill messages for those back home.

Someone taps urgently on the tinwork below my window. Instinctively, I look outside to see a good-looking, well-dressed young man smiling at me. His hair is well combed, his nose sharp, his moustache trimmed. His shirt is clean. But I cannot recall ever meeting him.

Albeit with a frown of mistrust, I try to place him. Quickly he raises his hands for me to see. I recoil. The remains of his fingers stare horridly at me, gaping with gray-green stubs, like inward-pointing arrows, the beginning of a journey of decay. Bodies with flattened noses and stumpy limbs dance before my eyes.

Indian Express, Madras, Wednesday, August 14, 1985