Once in Istanbul, walking home from dinner, I began to feel ill. It was Ramadan. In the parks, families were breaking the fast by picnicking outside in the hot dark. All the next day, I lay in bed, shivering with fever. The hotel stood between two mosques and every few hours the call to prayer rang out. The mosque grounds were full of cats, strolling and lounging in the sun. I clutched the evil eye bracelet I had bought to keep me safe.
It was one of those experiences so strong it becomes charged with significance. The fever, the hours, the wail of the ezan calling the faithful to prayer.
More than two million Syrians had crossed into Turkey to escape the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. Istanbul was hot and crowded and blazing with energy. The police were conducting raids, hunting for Isis terror cells. When I asked the hotel manager about the 200 riot police in the square, he saw no evil. “What riot police?” he smoothly asked.
The eyes are the windows to the soul. Assad showed his soullessness as he gassed and bombed his people. The dictator was softly spoken, highly educated; he spoke in a whispery voice with a hint of a lisp. What is it about people like Assad? When confronted, they bristle, there’s a sense of ruffle and flutter. Something vampiric settles itself into flintiness, a look of stone.
In the movie Crimes and Misdemeanours, a man has his troublesome mistress murdered. How, the movie asks, will the universe react to the crime? One character, a rabbi, believes in God and morality. He’s sure that goodness will be rewarded. But the murderer realises he will get away with it. The universe is indifferent, morally neutral. The rabbi has an eye disease. By the end of the movie, he will be blind. The murderer, who clearly sees the brutality of life, is an eye doctor.
Ever since Istanbul, I’ve worn my evil eye bracelet. The universe indulges me in this harmless superstition, while adding to its tale about eyes. The infamous Dr Crippen, hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife, was an eye specialist. In 2023, a Christchurch eye doctor was jailed for the attempted murder of his landlord. In 2024, an Auckland eye surgeon was acquitted of the murder of his wife.
The eyes are windows to the personality, and how does personality form? As a mother, I know this: after a birth, you gaze and gaze at the baby’s face. You focus so intensely, it creates a weird effect: all other children begin to look alien and bizarrely oversized.
That early intense interaction is the beginning of communication, of the forming of a new self. The baby finds security and connection, the basis for individuality. But what if the process goes wrong? The baby might fail to develop crucial attributes: the ability to connect and care, to empathise.
The fall of Assad’s regime revealed the horror of his rule. His prisons were barbaric, the body count was enormous. A whole population was left traumatised by his crimes. The dictator has fled to Moscow, to rough it with his entourage in a high-rise gilded cage.
It’s too late for him now to rejoin humanity. But did he once have some instinct to fix what was wrong? To restore the thing he lacked, to repair, to open those windows to the soul?
What was Assad looking for at London’s Western Eye Hospital, when he began his postgraduate medical training? He’d chosen to be an ophthalmologist, a specialist in the care of eyes.
