There is a presumed purity about when you enter this world. Not marked by the world and its inclemency, you are “born”– a fresh chapter on a brand-new page of life. The beginning, miles to go and so on. We do forget that we are marked by the genes of our parents, the executional biology of the reproduction mechanism – we compete to be dispatched out into the world, how healthy the mother is when she is carrying us.

I am not being knowingly obtuse to sound smart – we are marked before and after. We are “relatively” fresh after birth, like a rectangle-shaped sponge which had been manufactured rectangle – thou have free will in the quantity and quality of the gunk you collect, not the form in which you are born. Having disassembled this point completely, I move on.

Pure like refined ghee, you enter into this world – immediately the world starts doing a number on you. Parents, parental income, country you live in, relatives, friends, teachers, school – immediately begin to leave an impact on your impressionable heart and sponge-like brain. Your psyche, your personality, your relative success in this world is all determined by how you are brought up, your free will hobbling along the way, staking a larger claim to fame than the minor part that it actually played in your life. Then you grow old and like me, you become 32. As another year ends, and we rush to welcome 2024 with pinned hopes and fervent prayers that “this would be our year”, I self-reflect on the scars this world leaves on the “unblemished self” that was birthed 32 years ago.

I won’t be metaphorical, vanity beckoned me to write this lament. I won’t talk about the emotional markers that shaped me, the mental highs and lows of another Indian guy – but the physical ones. Because that is how you define a protagonist in any book – curly hair, very fair, eyes are blue, lovely too…he limped in his left leg……there was a lightening shaped scar on his forehead… It’s the distinctive features that gives the character his depth, which we recollect, which forms an image in our head, whom we may choose to empathize with or pile our hate on – depending on the author’s narration and reader’s collective experiences that has shaped him so far. But we remember.

I don’t want to paint a self-portrait like Van Gogh. I am not that skilled nor interested in such a laborious endeavor. Few recent incidents have made me bit sentimental, and as I cross 50% of the average life expectancy of a male in this country, I want to jot down my thoughts for my future consumption. I am not interested in the physical features that I was bestowed courtesy my genes, nor the accoutrements that I use to stylize me personality but the marks that life made on my unblemished self.

Like the acne that pockmarked my face and scarred my confidence during my teenage life, or the rough, uneven skin under my chin where I had received stiches twice – once when I was very young when I hit the corner of a wall, and once during college, when my chin hit the road when I fell off my Activa trying to outsmart barking strays – I never liked dogs much.

More recently, life had been pointedly unkind towards my face. Two years back, I suffered from Bell’s palsy – the left half of my face was paralyzed. Couldn’t blink my left eye, couldn’t scrunch my left nostril, couldn’t bring my left half of the lips to jut out in a smile. Half my face was dead, and there was no concrete reason why it happened. Some say it is due to the cold weather, but it felt to me like the incongruity of nature. One moment, I was a happy contended married young man, BAM! – the next moment I was Scarface with a very scary smile. I slapped myself silly the moment I realized that something was wrong with my face – but I couldn’t fathom for the life of me – why and how? The realization was more terrifying – my life was not in my complete control. My body could shut down my will any damn time it chooses and I could only pray to the gods of modern medicine to make a feeble attempt to let me continue my will. The inexplicable terror that I felt had a name and a remedy which gave hope to my family, yet tears dropped down my face while I looked myself into the mirror late into the night – nobody able to fully console me.

The regimen of electric shocks and facial exercises started the very next day. It wasn’t very strenuous but left a bad taste in mouth – but one thing that I still remember was the balloon exercise. You have to inflate your mouth with air till your cheeks protrude outwards in a balloon – a simple enough thing, that we did many times over when we were kids. In those initial days of physiotherapy, I couldn’t do that – air would simply leave the dead part of my mouth. It was extremely frustrating.

Eventually, it improved. I was able to close my left eye fully, make a face balloon and smile without seeming like a psycho. If you aren’t closely observant, and people aren’t observant in general – you won’t notice anything wrong with my face. But the condition left its mark – my smile is lopsided, stretching slightly more towards right – I can consciously stretch my lips equally in both directions, but if you catch me unaware – my smile would limp. My condition would become more apparent when I do the breathing exercises as my left nostril still doesn’t scrunch properly.

I couldn’t pity myself for long as life took over and I moved on. Life threw a seemingly common root-canal at me next.

It was my first visit to a dentist in my 31 years of existence, a pain in my back teeth. Mouth x-ray (shoving a probe in my mouth with its plastic end pricking my tongue) gave the verdict: need for root canal. Life threw a minor curve-ball, let’s take it in my stead. The fear of unknown didn’t haunt me much because I didn’t research online before going there. The first visit was a novel experience – anesthetic injection to deaden the left side of my mouth (quirk of fate!). A tube of water shoved down to the base of my mouth and the drill which threw the white powder in my face. A bit later I saw a spray of red flowing out of my mouth (I couldn’t fathom what it was initially) – diluted blood flowing in fountains – that made me a bit afraid – but I survived the first procedure, with a novel experience to chalk in the book of my life.

It was the second procedure that scarred me for life. During the second procedure, my tooth was supposed to be capped. The hole was covered in the interim to ensure food doesn’t come in contact, and the doctor mentioned – you can eat without concerning yourself overmuch. And I ate without concerning myself overmuch – the hard bits of food cracked the covering and shoved the jagged piece into my tooth – splintering it in the process.

Capping session turned into a full-fledged extraction, and during those 3.5 hours when the dentist tried to extract my tooth, I realized why mafia leveraged tooth extraction as a method of torture. Again, this was supposed to be an easy process, but my “strong teeth” were fused to the very bone and it had to be drilled to the very end – to remove each bit of my under-siege tooth. The pressure I felt as the dentist pulled out jagged bits and pieces of bloody teeth in a metal tray, the fountain of blood that oozed out under that relentless drill and the numerous anesthetic injections that needed to be pricked deeper and deeper to ensure that I didn’t feel pain. It was a tough day, I felt drowsy later. Back home, my face had slackened, on the left side – courtesy the heavy doses of anesthetic used. I knew the pain would return once the effects wore off. But I had an irrational fear that there would be a resurgence of Bell’s Palsy and this time the effects would last forever. So, I welcomed the pain later that night as my face swelled, and I went to sleep – tired.

Life didn’t let me obsess over my teeth. I moved on. The end of the year had me travelling to hometown for a wedding. I got into a minor road accident (on my Activa, again!) and I broke the rabbity front tooth. I had only a few scratches in the rest of my body, so I stoically attended the function. On my way to the stage (it was a reception), I switched on the front camera on my phone and practiced saying “Congratulations” with closed lips so my friend wouldn’t see that I looked like a pirate. Having accomplished an awkward greeting, I rushed straight home – in and out of there in ten minutes flat.

Later that night, I inspected myself in the mirror. It looked like life had punched me in the face, and my battered ugly self, had to take it in stride, once again. A visit to dentist (a short one, thank God!) to get the filling done – to make me look normal again.

These three incidents made me reflect a lot. I realized that everyone of us would have had series of such minor misfortunes throughout our time on earth. You can’t eke out a life without life noticing your existence. What I had gone through wasn’t unique, it was part of the human experience. We are no longer our unblemished self – just like the rings in the trunk of a tree tells its age, the marks on our body are the time capsules of the various phases of our life. A blemished self is a “lived” life. You are here, you have participated, you have partaken and you have given. You have lived. These blemishes make you unique – curly, jet-black, frizzy haired, brown eyed man, a wispy beard, a dense moustache over a pockmarked, fair face with a hesitant, lopsided smile. There, that’s how you would describe me. You won’t notice my teeth unless you are a dentist and the other scars stay well-hidden under our clothes.

But that description takes me from being generic to specific. That makes me unique, that makes me Vismay.