It was three years before he met Chitra that Muthuraja completely lost vision in both his eyes. The date and time is stamped on his mind – it was 7 p.m. on January 13, 2013, the night before Pongal festival. He remembers the rising panic when he realised he could no longer see anything.
The next few years were devastating for him. He mostly stayed indoors – feeling angry, mad and weepy – and he had suicidal thoughts. But he survived. At the time of meeting Chitra, he was 23 and blind, and he “felt like a corpse”. It was she, he says softly, who gave him a new lease of life.
A series of unfortunate accidents had impaired Muthuraja's vision before he became blind. When he was seven, he and his sister was transplanting rose plants on their farm in Madurai, where they grew the flowers for sale. It took one mistake – his sister did not grab an uprooted plant correctly from his hands – and the stem hit his face and the thorns pierced his eyes.
After six surgeries, there was some vision in his left eye. His family sold their three cents (0.03 acres) of land and went into debt. Some time later, his good eye took another hit when he met with a bike accident. Then school and studies were hard for Muthuraja – he couldn’t see the blackboard very well or the white letters on them. But he somehow managed until Class 10 with his teachers' help.
Muthuraja's world went completely dark that January day in 2013 when he bumped his head against an iron rod on the street in front of his house. It was only after he met Chitra that light – and love – returned.
