My mother had ligament surgery two weeks ago. She still can’t walk properly.
I have retinitis pigmentosa. I have been navigating vision loss since I was a child.
Yesterday, the two of us went out anyway.
Every place she wanted to see, we went there. Slowly. Patiently. No one checked the time. No one complained, but the entire day, she kept apologising for needing help. “Cautious.” “Wait.” “Hold my hand.” “Slowly.” Tiny sentences. The kind people say when they’re afraid of becoming heavy in someone else’s life.
By the time we were driving back home, she went quiet. Then softly, almost looking out of the window more than at us, she said — “I’m not going out again until I can walk on my own. You all have to go through so much trouble because of me.”
And just then something inside me stopped for a second.
Because I knew that sentence. Not from her. From myself.
I’ve said those words several times before. In different forms. To different people. Sorry for needing help. Sorry for taking time. Sorry for being difficult. Sorry for not being easy to carry.
I looked at her and said — “Whenever you want to go somewhere, just tell me. I don’t feel troubled. Honestly… not even a bit.”
She turned towards me slowly. “Really?”
“Really,” I assured.
And then she smiled. Not a big smile. Not dramatic. Just that small, relieved smile people have when they realise they are still safe to need someone.
That smile stayed with me longer than the entire day.
Because standing there, I realised two things at once.
One — I genuinely had not felt burdened. Not while waiting. Not while walking slowly. Not while helping her stand. Not once.
Two — and this one surprised me more — it felt good to be needed. Not important. Not praised. But “needed.”
There’s a strange warmth in being trusted with someone’s weakness. A quiet kind of meaning. The kind you cannot demand from life. The kind that only appears when someone lets their guards down enough to lean on you.
Maybe that’s why love feels so heavy sometimes. Not because caring is difficult. But because people spend so much of their lives trying not to need anyone at all.
I did not expect to still be thinking about it three weeks later. But here I am.
What I See Now: a glimpse into my life with vision loss
My book, What I See Now, is about moments like this one — the two things you understand when you finally stop performing long enough to actually feel something. It is about building a life with retinitis pigmentosa in India, where there is no cultural script for what you are, where the only options on offer are tragedy or inspiration, and you find yourself inventing a third option somewhere between dark humour and radical honesty. It is, as far as I know, the first honest memoir about progressive vision loss written by an Indian.
It is also, unexpectedly, a book about what it feels like to be on the other side — to be the person who is allowed to help.
It is funny in the places where most books about this life flinch. It is honest in the places where most books perform.
Here is what it looks like from the inside:
- Chapter 1: Can You See Me Now?
- Chapter 5: I Was the “Inspirational Story” in Someone Else’s TED Talk
- Chapter 8: Conversations with My Retina
- Chapter 9: I Pretended to See the Red Flags — But Only Because She Was Hot
- Chapter 12: I Don’t Know What You Look Like, But I Miss Your Face Anyway
Five chapters out of twenty-four. Each one a different room inside the same house — some that will make you laugh before you realise what they cost, some that will make you stop and sit quietly for a moment, most that will do both at once. Which is, I have come to believe, the only honest way to tell this kind of a story.
Writing it did not fix anything. But it made the things that were broken feel like they belonged to me.
About Rishabh Gupta and What I See Now
Rishabh Gupta is 25 years old and from Raipur — a city in central India, where he has spent most of his life thinking harder than the situation required and eventually finding that useful.
He is an entrepreneur who has been navigating retinitis pigmentosa since childhood. He naturally connects ideas across completely different worlds — psychology, food, music, human behaviour — and finds the place where they quietly overlap. He loves singing, not in the way that leads anywhere particular, but in the way that certain things only make sense when you are making noise with other people in a room.
He wrote his first book because he needed one such book to exist and it did not, so he wrote one for himself and for all those who might not know yet that they need such a book.
What I See Now is that book. Find it on Bookshare and Amazon, and follow Rishabh on Instagram.
