Farida did not want to look ugly either. How many girls at school wore glasses? A handful, and they were mocked by everyone else. When they took off their glasses, there were dark shadows under their eyes, wedges on their noses from the pressure of the frames. Their short-sighted eyes looked vacant and strange. As for Sister Carlotta, her eyes behind her glasses were almost frightening with their dark, animal hugeness, and how the left was slightly larger than the right, the right more heavy-lidded. The convex thickness of the lens looked like rings within rings. It reminded Farida of throwing a stone in a pond and watching the ripples spread out. On Sister Carlotta’s glasses, the ripples were fixed and almost eerie. It made talking to her awkward because while Farida knew that Sister Carlotta was seeing her, it was tricky to make contact with the fluid, overblown eyes in their deep pools of glass.

In their literature class, Sister Carlotta read to them from Flowers for Mrs Harris. Mrs Harris was a comic figure, a charlady flying to Paris to buy a Dior dress. There was a picture of her on the cover of the book, a sharp elderly lady with white hair tied in a bun. ‘My mother,’ said Sister Carlotta with a smile, ‘is exactly like Mrs Harris.’ The class roared with laughter. Sister Carlotta was the best teacher they had, the only one who never brought down her ruler on their palms and knuckles. When Farida asked if her mother also liked designer dresses, Sister Carlotta did not find her impertinent. Instead she explained that her mother now had macular degeneration and that unlike Mrs Harris, she could not see much through a shop window. In the library, Farida read up on ‘macular degeneration’. She imagined darkness in the middle and blurred sight on the periphery of her vision. Would you have to twist your head to read? It would be like forever watching an eclipse, the round black centre and rays of light slithering on the side.

Sister Carlotta began to allow Farida to sit at the front of the class despite the rule that tall girls must sit at the back. The other teachers were not as kind. Some of them did not believe that Farida was short-sighted; some of them did not care. So Farida’s grades started to slip. Lessons became boring because she could only understand bits of them. Science made no sense without clear diagrams and mistaking a plus sign for a multiplication sign in Maths lessons meant the answer was completely wrong.

‘Your semester report card is very bad,’ scolded her mother as she picked up the new baby. ‘You have failed every subject except History and Literature!’

‘Because Sister Carlotta teaches …’

Her father interrupted, ‘You will be held back a year if you don’t improve. Why have you become so lazy?’

Farida did not know how to reply.