Some godless ophthalmologist has handed me a new set of eyes. Merciless things. Lenses of clarity, sharp as double edged swords and just as forgiving. The myopia had become unbearable; the outlines of people had started to bleed into one another like melting crayons in a microwave. I thought that was suffering. Clearly I was wrong. Clarity is worse. Now every edge of this city wants to murder me. Each line, each silhouette is an armed assailant. The world isn’t soft anymore; it’s animated, vibrating, buzzing. The sky burns like a screen stuck on max contrast, and the light bounces off every surface like it’s going to claw its way inside my skull. A garbage truck rolls by. A metal beast belching out olfactory war crimes. Its scent slashes the air: fermented rice, rotting flesh, and something vaguely reminiscent of melted rubber. A biochemical symphony of decomposition. The death rattle of civilization in one foul exhale. Uncles squat on the ground playing ludo, all while chewing and spitting out the landscape of this country. A soda bottle pops somewhere, and I nearly scream. The fizz echoes in my head like a gunshot. I imagine its icy citrus flood down my throat, sweet and stinging, but I’m not allowed to drink it. “It’ll kill you,” my mother says. I bloody well hope so. Streetlights cast everything in the yellow glow of an underfunded public restroom. The gravel road looks like the liver of a jaundiced man. And there is barbed wire all around the park fences, looped and spiraled like the intestines of some post-apocalyptic predator. We have to clamber over a waist-high fence to get in. Even here, the stench persists. Now it’s not garbage but sweat. Salt, despair, the sour punch of unpaid labor. A woman screeches into her phone in rough Punjabi, voice like gravel in a blender. I swear her voice goes an octave higher every second. My senses are rioting. These new glasses have turned me into an antenna for every goddamn frequency of human misery. Two boys are standing in the middle of the narrow pavement. Slum kids, denim sagging, pockets bloated with God knows what. Weapons, candy, dreams. “Janwar,” my father mutters under his breath. Animals. They have no manners, so to speak. How dare they sully a place that doesn’t belong to them. Who does it belong to? His face is tight. He’s a good-natured man more often than not. The wind is cruel tonight. Like a bored lover, teasing and withdrawing, a breeze here, a chokehold there. When it does blow through me, I sigh. My sweat tries to evaporate but fails, trapped just beneath the skin, festering in the pores. The sweltering heat, in absence of a direct culprit, is a brain-addling experience. A lamp sputters to life, flooding a patch of dried grass with an eerie halo. Holy light for dead things. I miss a step. Again. My depth perception is shot; I can’t trust these new eyes. They lie, show me distance where there’s none. Everything is off by a cm. This night walk was supposed to be magic; it was supposed to rip the misery out of my heart and replace it with peace. It wasn’t like this before, the air was always cool and pleasant, smelling of freshly cut grass, and our usual company would be some elderly couples, amicable and tender in their silent companionship, or a tired father and his little tribe of kids with an inexhaustible expenditure of energy. I go home. Rip the chaddar off in the garage like it’s covered in leeches. Scrub my face, my nose. Chase the nausea out with scalding water and lavender resolve. Then I make tea: spearmint and three oolong leaves my father got as a gift from a Chinese student. Pour it into the only floral teacup I have, the one you have to hold with your pinky out. I put on rises the moon and stuff my ears with wire. Depth perception be damned. My crumpled shirt releases one final puff of stink that wafts up and fills the room. I hum and drink the tea with my pinky out. I pretend I’m gentler than I am. I pretend I am dignified. Next time we will go before 11 p.m., and I’ll make sure to take my myopic eyes with me.