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A whole new world of sensation has opened up for artist Satish Gujral with a revolutionary cochlear implant. Computerised electrodes in his brain help him keep a bionic ear to the ground, and offer hope for others similarly afflicted.

To overcome physical disability and achieve artistic distinction has impressive precedents in the music of Beethoven, the paintings of Van Gogh and in our times, the quantum physics of Stephen Hawking. Destiny brings its own defining moments and such a one came the way of sculptor, painter, author and muralist Satish Gujral, in the seventh decade of life. Many men live and work beyond the Biblical frame of three score and 10 years but very few can ask to live life anew by setting the clock back to when they were nine....

That's when the walls of silence shattered his reality, exiling him for 63 years to a world of illusion. "The silence I lived with was maddening,'' he says, "yet, its world, inspite of its unreality, had become my world as I spent in it my childhood, youth and middle years.'' Gujral could see but had to guess at what he saw. Today, he says: "It's a state not far from insanity--if you live consistently with silence, your illusions become your reality. Now that I know both worlds, it is dreadful. Every night, when I switch off my receiver, those moments of silence before sleep are death-like. I tap a teacup with a spoon as soon as I wake up to make sure I can still hear.''

No, Gujral doesn't hear the world like we do. He edits out the background noise when he's outside, he switches to another programme when he wants a one-on-one discussion with his wife, there's software for phone conversations which he will use as his perception of sound grows, and so on. No, he will never hear the natural timbre of wife Kiran's voice but the electronic approximation that reaches him grows keener every day. One pitch at a time, he is slowly reprogramming the 24 electrodes which feed into his implant to keep pace with his growing auditory ability.

These days, he's doing it on the Internet. Apart from his own miracle doctor, Professor William Gibson, leading audiologists and implant surgeons around the world monitor his progress daily. At 72, Gujral has the distinction of being the world's longest-ever hearing-impaired person to receive a bionic ear. That too, only because he amazed doctors with his ability to speak. However distorted and oddly pitched, Gujral had clung to speech in six decades of silence. Usually a person becomes mute after one year of deafness as the brain forgets how to identify sound. In fact, doctors have never encountered a similar case. Did he hang onto his speech with a premonition that, if he lived long enough, technology would come up with a solution one day? "Subconsciously, yes. Two years ago I started going to qawaalis even though I was stone deaf,'' says Gujral.

Ever the cyber surfer, he had kept close track of developments in this field since an exploratory visit to New York 10 years ago. But technology was rudimentary: there were only two electrodes being implanted then, today there are 24 and they have invented a way in which all future development can be added so further surgery is eliminated. This made the crucial difference. Networking with hundreds of implantees around the world for six months--there are 18,000 today--convinced Gujral it was a risk worth taking. And risky it is--the three-hour surgery involves scooping out a cavity in the base of the skull near the facial nerve. The possibility of facial paralysis and loss of taste in the tongue are very real. But the commonest symptom is vertigo caused by the electric charge to the brain.

Dr Gibson's track record of 450 implants at the International Cochlear Foundation in Sydney made him the best choice. "No one else has done even a quarter as many implants, and though the surgery itself is only 25 per cent of the total treatment, it has to be impeccable or the consequences can be terrible,'' says Gujral. Besides, Cochlear, the company that invented the device, is Australian and remains the leader in the field.

How it works: A titanium case containing an array of electrodes is embedded in the cochlear area behind and above the ear which houses the hearing nerve. In most cases of deafness, the nerve remains alive but ceases functioning because of pathologies in the inner ear. The embedded electrodes are connected to the nerve canals and when activated through a computer, produce electric charges making the nerve respond to sound impulses. This re-establishes the lost contact between the inner nerve and the middle ear. To feed sound into the electrodes, a receiver (shaped like a tiny satellite disk) is placed in the skull and connected to a speech processor resembling a pager that Gujral wears around his waist. It is the processor which contains the software menus for listening.

The entire package for surgery and implant was Rs 20 lakh in Australia--excluding the cost of a two-month stay which Gujral reduced from the standard six by getting his audiologist to fly down to Delhi at three-month intervals to upgrade his programming. In USA and UK the process is much more expensive.

Gujral relives a deeply emotional moment: "I was in this room full of equipment and computers and the doctors asked me to describe the first sound I heard. I kept repeating `I hear firecrackers' because I was stunned to hear my own voice saying it.'' And so began the remaining part of the treatment, the business of learning to identify sounds and speech. Has his perception of people changed now he can hear them speak? "Greatly, it's like being able to see a person's facial expression when they speak,'' he says. "A deaf person always associates different voice characteristics with different people. One still has to do this with a bionic ear but it is more realistic. The voices produced by the implant are electronic not human but the deaf person doesn't feel this. He will always wonder if the voices he associates with certain people are based on his impression of their character rather than the real tone of their voice.''

In the two months following surgery, Gujral went through 51 programmes, a new one every day as his perception changed. Hooked to a master computer which monitors the 24 electrodes embedded in his brain, he works with the audiologist. "Every electrode was brought before my eyes (on-screen) to a different pitch till I told him it was right and it was fixed at that level. It's like tuning a piano,'' he says. In the three months past the greatest gain has been in his speech. Before surgery he recorded a passage which he then reread 15 days after the implant. "The difference was astonishing,'' he says. In fact, those who know him--he's an exuberant artist and party-goer--find they can now understand his naughty jokes, his good-natured teasing/flirting and his keen observations without wife Kiran's interpretation. His greatest compliment, however, came from brother Inder Kumar Gujral who said "your speech was like it used to be before you became deaf''. Gujral is now toying with the idea of undergoing hypnosis so he can access the speech and natural sounds stored in his memory when he was nine.

"My wife says I am obsessed with the theme of communication,'' he grins as he unveils his new collection. Who can blame him? The canvasses are surging with talking parrots, singing birds, cochlears, musical instruments "because now I can catch the rhythm even if I can't hear the music completely with this level of technology''. The canvasses show a vibrancy of colour and joy not seen before. "Because now,'' he says, "life is so much more worth living.''

--Prabha Chandran

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