Bullseye (sort of)

I noticed one of my students coming down the hill with a banana leaf in his hand. The leaves are commonly used in Kerala as plates, even at restaurants, so I figured he had picked up some breakfast on the way to school.

It was a little past nine in the morning—before the opening bell—and the day’s humidity was already palpable. I was making my way to JM’s “upper campus” where I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays. The student I saw is one I teach at the “lower campus” later in the week.

I slowed down as we neared each other and he opened the leaf, cupped as it was in his hand. What peered back at me from the leaf were two translucent balls vaguely familiar in their form and shape. The student was quietly laughing. And I realized that what was on the banana leaf literally was peering at me. The student was carrying two eyes, as big as golf balls, shiny and slick looking with a luminescent indigo hue.

“Eyes!?” I asked hoarsely.

The student nodded, then made a motion as if to eat one. He laughed more loudly as he walked away and I confusedly continuted on to school.

After my first two periods, I found myself with some free time in the teachers’ lounge. I tried my best to explain what I had seen to the other teachers, to see if I could piece together what the purpose of the eyes had been. If he really was going to eat them? After all, I reasoned, I just seen two dozen cattle ritually slaughtered the week before.

“A student…had…eyes,” I pointed to my own eyes as the teacher looked back at me, as if I had a giant booger stuck on my face. “On…banana leaf,” I mimicked how he had been carrying the eyes. “What are…eyes…for?” I said, knowing I must have sounded rather ridiculous. (What are eyes for? Uhhh….well, you see there are these five senses that all humans have…)

The other teachers looked as confused as I sounded. “Eyes?” one said. And he pointed at his own eyes. “Eyes?” another said, with a rising tone of apprehension.

I compounded the confusion by making the same motion the student had made as if to pop one of the eyes in his mouth like a fried jalapeno. The teachers squinted visibly with disgust.

“Human eyes!” one teacher gasped astonished. I think they now thought that I had come across some sick cannibal. And I was starting to feel their anxiety myself.

“Eating? Eyes?”

“You saw this? Here!”

I gave up and shrugged innocently, trying to allay their growing revulsion. Aww, come on. He was only eating eyes! No big deal, my facile expression hoped to say. The teachers did not look convinced, but they dropped the matter.

Later, at the “lower campus”, I brought up the matter again with my friend Santosh. This time, I thought it would be better if I made a drawing. I quickly sketched the banana leaf complete with eyes. Then drew a crude representation of a man and an arrow pointing at his gaping mouth.

Santosh’s reaction was the same as the other teachers'. “Eyes? We do not eat eyes here,” he said emphatically. I thought Santosh was probalby wondering what Americans ate. I had just told him the previous week about Thanksgiving. Maybe he was envisioning banquet tables filled with platters of eyes and shrunken monkey heads and fried caterpillars.

“What animal? The eyes come from?” I asked. I wrote, Cow? and Goat? on my paper. This seemed to spark something inside Santosh. He slowly smiled and put up his index finger, the universal sign for Eureka!

“Ahhhh…bull’s eyes!” he said excitedly. “Demonstration. In class,” he said pointing down the hall.

I began to understand the total futility of this entire investigation, from the moment I set eye on the...well, eyes.

“Science demonstration. Biology. Today,” Santosh said. He pointed at his own eyes. “Bulls’ eyes…veerrry human like. Bulls' eyes good for demonstrations. Bulls' eyes. You watch, maybe?” he said helpfully. Santosh could not possibly grasp the irony of his continued use of the term Bulls' eye.

“Where did the student get them?” I asked, feeling rather foolish.

“The butcher!” Santosh said with a "Duh" expression.

It all clicked into place. The student had been retrieving a set of bull’s eyes to be used as part of a biology demonstration later that day. Rather inncouous and harmless, still he had made the eating gesture as a joke and had fully exploited my cultural insensibilities.

All I could think of in the wake of this whole ordeal was the scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is set in India (though its depiction of India is about as accurate as Kenny G’s version of jazz). In one particular moment from the movie, a maharajah serves his guest bowls of steaming eye soup, which in the movie looks like a fairly delicious tomato bisque until the guests poke around and bloody eyeballs bob to the surface.

After more than three months in India, I realized I am still relying on Hollywood to give me some assumptive answers about the Subcontinent. Today’s guess was not a bullseye in the slightest. Unless, of course, you are being literal.