The Universe in the Eyes of an Infant

I just can't help it. I was going to avoid sharing any pictures of the babies we work with, but then, consent was obtained to take this photograph, this could be any baby, and I am not telling you her name nor in which squatter settlement she lives. I cannot express how much I love this little girl. Look at her eyes. When I look at them, I don't know, something happens to me.

Listen, this is what it is, I think. In this 6-month year-old's eyes what do you see? Fear. Pain. I mean, yes, she's a bit sick here, but there's an existential pain. There's a spiritual wisdom there, shimmering beneath. A kind of understanding of such extreme needless suffering. That sorrow or sadness or grief (these may all look like synonyms, but they're all slightly different from one another and all of them are in her eyes). It's like her spirit understands the struggles of the world around her. And the fear is like a fear of the hopelessness that consumes the people who live there too long (and eat too much paan, which I have described in more detail in previous posts, and other animal-blood drugs -both of these, by the way, are the leading cause of oral cancer in South Asia), and likely feed other kinds of addictions to numb away their shattered kind of existence.

It breaks my heart. Just completely. In that way where you can't even cry because even your tears are aware of their futility. And yes, this is indeed both a human and spiritual tragedy, but it gets worse. Want to know how? When you look in the eyes of children, starting about 5 or 6 years old, their eyes change. Maybe it's because their parents started renting them out early to those thugs who coordinate organized-begging (what you saw in "Slumdog Millionaire" is not just a movie) for a meagre daily fee, which is then used, not to feed the family or purchase urgently required medicines, but to buy paan with tobacco, heroine, animal-blood and betelnut. The schools in these squatter settlements are essentially empty. And there's no really getting out of there. Children and infants are quickly made slaves to their parents' addictions. And the parents need those addictions to survive, even though they go through their lives in a lulled, semi-conscious state, starving, getting high, procreating, reproducing in hovels of filth and hopes turned inside-out.

But anyway, I digress. So, their eyes change once they are no longer toddlers. Those families of 9, 10, 11... those kids who probably are only 5, 6, 7 years-old, their eyes have an unsettling glaze, and they've turned glassy. Sometimes it's because they're sick -there's an excrutiatingly painful amount of mental illness here (and it doesn't take a genius to guess why -these things often come about when biology and environment interact under particular conditions that facilitate the emergence of the illness right, whether it's a personality disorder, depression, or whatever...). There are also a lot of people who suffer from epilepsy that goes totally untreated and unrecognized as a condition that requires treatment (I was told of a case in 1 town where a young girl had a seizure and her mother said she was having a spiritual experience, and when she seized, a big bag of that animal-blood stuff fell out from under her clothing -the doctor was absolutely livid. Especially when after explaining that the medical condition was treatable, the town's response was "we have no money". And it's true they have very little money. But enough money to buy the drugs, you see).

Anyway, so you know what I think about the glassy, hypnotic glaze that comes over what are supposed to be innocent, playful eyes? They go spiritually unconscious. Because how can you continue to live, if you're fully conscious, in that kind of intense misery of a reality, which is really more of a lived nightmare. So babies' souls go into hiding.

Those eyes though, really. Makes you just want to hug and kiss and coddle the poor thing, whisper that it's all just a bad dream, and rock her gently to sleep.