Bhumlutar! A hamlet in the backwater of Kavre district can be
reached after about an hour of motor drive from Dolalghat, a weekend hotspot
for picnickers. The road, jolty and bumpy, due, in fact, to recent road
widening is even dustier that one who courses through the way winds up finding
himself into layers of mud-clothes. Granted that the weather is clear,
you can even enjoy the vista of idyllic hills and meandering river far down and
back before you reach there.
It was the 9th of April and our team was there to conduct an eye
camp locally organized by a Credit and Cooperative Society. There was this
sprightly woman of 89; every Tom and Harry would listen to her old stories
gaping open his mouth. She was a one-man family since his son demised more than
a decade back and her daughter-in-law moved out to Kathmandu with a baby boy.
She even tended goats on her own and the irony was that she was a blind.
Bluntly put, she couldn't see anything more than a meter away. Good heavens!
How was she contriving to tend those 3 goats when her own eyes were
nigh-defunct?
Clearly, her vision incapacitated her and she would reel knocking
at the doors of villagers importuning to fetch the fodders. When we advised her
to go with us in order to operate the eyes so that she could see better, she
guaranteed that her eyes did not need surgery and it sure as shooting would be
cured by medicines. Sadly, we didn't have such medicines as to cure a cataract.
Later there was a crowd of people to disabuse her that the cloudiness of her
eye could never be treated with medicines. After what seemed quite a while, she
was convinced in some way or other, but who would look after her livestock? A
big
question. Few people dispersed to scout someone who could care her
goats for a few days; well, they found the bonded friend of her dead husband
who assented to do the foregoing job. Blimey! A neighborhood bloke too readied
to come keep vigil on her.
The octogenarian had never rode a bus, never travelled beyond
Dolalghat, never ever seen a city, let alone the hospital and surgery. She felt
way too queasy soon after the vehicle was on the move. Well, her decrepitude
did brook no motion sickness, she started retching and vomiting.
Two days afterwards, she no longer had to sway slowly with the
help of a cane or a human guide. She underwent small incision cataract surgery
of both the eyes in consecutive days and the surgery engendered the brightness
in her life anew. Blissful and grateful, she waved us a hand, when asked that
was no time to wave a goodbye hand as she again would have to show up for
follows up. “This is my first and the last time that I ride a smoking vehicle;
difference is I came blind-I go keen-eyed”, resoluteness evinced in her
disposition.
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