I woke up in a room full of floating eyes, estranged from the bodies they must have once belonged to. I am wearing a flimsy white dress and nothing beneath. It is a dark room, but the whiteness of the thousands of eyes together emits a soft light, turning my dress into a see-through, baring my curves, my uneven breasts, the length, breadth, and roundness of my body, and making me question the utility of the dress in the first place.

The pupils are scanning the room and stopping for a few extra seconds on me. I am aware that I am the only human in this room full of eyes.

Year after year, these eyes float in this abandoned room, waiting for a girl in a flimsy dress to enter. They never blink, sleep, or rest. They only glare. Their existence is summed up in the act of looking.

—————

Many years ago, when my grandmother first told me about the room full of eyes, I had asked: what harm could eyes without bodies ever do to me? My grandmother was horrified. How could being looked at not be bad enough?

The room full of eyes was lore among the womenfolk in our town. Because they were so afraid of it, they coped by exchanging stories, gossiping, and singing about it.

Women would share stories of girls they knew who had been taken into the room full of eyes. The songs urged women to be fearful, shameful, and disgusted by the room full of eyes, for that, they believed, would be their only armour against it.

These stories spread like a game of Chinese Whispers, from ear to ear, exaggerated, mutated, and decomposed as they passed from person to person. They drifted through every home until these unverified oral tales hardened into written historical truths.

—————

In school, the teacher with the rough face and marks on her cheeks taught us about the pardah system, which was meant to protect queens and princesses from being taken to the room full of eyes. Beautiful chikan kari pardahs through which the world looked rosy, breezy, and exactly as they wished it to be, but always out of their reach.

One day, a rebellious princess decided to step out and see the world as it truly was. She was struck like lightning by a gaze and seized. The king did everything in his power to bring her back, but a few weeks later she returned on her own, wandering through the same forest she had once dared to venture into. But she was no longer the same. She spent the rest of her life in a corner of the palace, in the zenana ghar, the women’s quarter, never leaving and never speaking a word of what had happened to her in those weeks. From then on, no girl in the palace ever ventured out again.

—————

I was always keen to learn more about the room full of eyes. I drew pictures of them, dreamt of them at night, but in the daytime I told no one and behaved like the appropriate woman I was supposed to be. I was one of two women in a house of eight men, and I grew up never understanding why the rules were different for us just because I had a few different sets of organs. How did that make us so different? I too wanted to lie bare-chested on the terrace on a hot summer day. I too wanted to go out with my friends at night. I too wanted to bathe in the nearby stream. But these were outside the realm of possibility. Still, this insect of desire to live freely slowly grew in me until it became the size of my instinct.

One night, I sneaked out to meet my boyfriend. I was eighteen, brimming with young adrenaline and new love, a disastrous combination for a society driven by virtue. My newly found boyfriend was waiting for me on the other side of the road, and all I had to do was cross a narrow lane alone. I wrapped an orni around my face and walked quietly through the dead of night, all my fears replaced by anticipation, and all my shame by desperation.

At the last bend of the road, my orni got stuck to a protruding piece of wood from a tree and bared my face and my cleavage. And then it happened. A few frozen seconds at first, followed by a rapid melting of time. I remember being dragged and pushed into what could only have been a wormhole in space. My whole body felt wrung like a cloth, and I couldn’t see anything for some time. The next thing I knew, I was in the room full of eyes.

Because I couldn’t see anything else, not even my own body, it felt as though I too was just an eye in that room, stripped of my body. The only confirmation that I still had a body was the fabric of my white dress and my aching limbs. The rest of my clothes were probably left behind in the other world. It did feel like another world, because this room, whatever it was, felt far away from the world in which I lived.

In the room full of eyes, I soon started losing count of days because I couldn’t tell one from the next. At first, they would only stare at me. Their gaze, I imagined, was not very different from what my father’s would have been upon finding out that I had sneaked out to meet my boyfriend at night: puffed with anger, hollow without love. But soon, their gaze began to crawl on my skin, demanding my attention.

But all they did was stay on me. They whispered in my ears in a language I didn’t quite understand. They seemed angry at first, and then sad. Soon, I could see into their grief, see them for their loveless existence, for roaming endlessly without bodies. All they could do was glare, stare, and dare to seize women who transgressed. Without this, they had nothing to live for. So they waited for girls to make a mistake, to venture out where and when they weren’t supposed to, and then they pulled them in.

This way, humans would fear them, respect them, and even without bodies, they would carry some weight in this grand universe.

After some time, they left me, dropped me back through the wormhole. They say it’s arbitrary how long someone is kept, but I think they were done with me. Without my fear and shame, they had nothing to do with me. I was as useless to them as a young man walking alone on the street in the dead of night.

Unlike the abducted princess, when I came back, I did not want to stay quiet and retreat from the world. I still wanted to go out, have chaat, go to school. Instead of me, it was my family who carried the shame on my behalf. Nobody spoke to me except my grandmother, who only spoke the bare minimum. I was considered unlucky by the rest of the neighbourhood, so they stopped inviting me to family functions. My father started counting the money he would have to spend on me now that no decent man would ever want to marry me. Now that I was touched by the eyes, I had become untouchable.

The boyfriend I had left home for that night never called again, and my friends started avoiding me. In my isolation, I began drawing out my days in the room full of eyes, outlining each moment on paper until a narrative emerged.

Once done, I wanted to share my story with other girls and women, tell them that fear was not the antidote to the eyes; it was actually what attracted them. It is what they want us to be, fearful of them. 

The first one I had to convince was my grandmother, so I slowly started telling her stories of the room full of eyes in bed, reversing the time in my childhood when she told me stories of the eyes. It took me 18 days to get her to believe my story and 28 days to convince her to photocopy my drawings and share them at women-centric community events, since I was no longer invited to them.

I had started the fire; now I had to wait for it to spread. It took 1,000 days, but the next time I was allowed to step out of my house, things had changed. Although it was getting closer to dusk, I saw women all around me on the road. The autumn sky smelled of freedom.

In our town, during this time of the year, a goddess with big, slender eyes descends from the mountains and comes to our land to kill a demon-god with the power to kill whatever he sets his eyes on. According to our mythology, many powerful gods before her had tried to kill him, but nobody could succeed. Some gods had even tried killing him by being invisible, but such was the power of the demon-god’s eyes that he could still see through them. Then the creator of our universe looked at his wife, the goddess with big, slender eyes, and pleaded with her to save his world. And then she came, with her children in one hand and big, slender eyes.

The demon-god laughed. They had sent a woman to kill him, the most powerful person in the world. He glared at her; she remained unmoved. He screamed at her with red, wide eyes; she continued moving towards him. At last, when she was too near him, and so was his end, he broke down at her feet. She placed her hand on his head and shoved her trishul, her three-edged weapon, into his eyes. The world was restored, but she keeps coming once every year to remind us to defeat the eyes that dare look at what matters to us. People wear new clothes, offer the goddess jewelry worth the land’s total income, and feast on delicious food, but they forget to listen to what she is trying to tell us.

This autumn day is a little different. The women are wearing bright costumes that elevate their figures. They bare their hands and legs as they dance and walk at night singing songs of the downfall of the demon king.

In history books, nobody reads about how this change came along; in the news, people share theories; in our religion, it becomes the story of a demi-god who walked into the room full of eyes and killed them all. I was never allowed to claim my story. The change spread through a game of Chinese Whispers, in queues to buy milk, in breastfeeding rooms, in beauty salons. 

In this world full of eyes, women’s stories have either become cautionary tales or tales of divine intervention, and until women write, draw, and take the mic, the eyes will talk and tell our tales.

A fiction piece selected for the blog among Issue 10 submissions (expedited response/review entry)

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