What is the theme of the story "The Eyes Are Not Here" by Ruskin Bond?

Ruskin Bonds
short story The Eyes Are Not Here is very brief but is also intriguingly complex. Although
most worthwhile stories cannot be easily paraphrased or reduced to a single theme, this story
definitely seems to deal with issues of human perception. In this tale, three people, at least,
prove to be imperceptive in various ways: the unnamed man on the train, the unnamed woman on the
train, the storys reader, and, perhaps, also the new male passenger. Bonds story is the kind of
tale that makes readers want to read it immediately a second time as soon as they have finished
reading it once. Only on re-reading, in fact, does the story reveal its full richness and
complexity as a meditation on human perceptions and perceptiveness and how both are influenced
by the assumptions we make.

Briefly, the plot of the story is this: a man
(presumably a young man) is sitting in a compartment in a train when a woman (apparently a young
woman) also enters the compartment. The woman doesnt notice that the man is blind, and he does
not tell her. Instead, he asks her a series of questions that allow him to infer certain facts
about her. She also converses pleasantly with him. After she gets off the train at her stop,
another male enters the compartment and mentions in passing that the young woman who just left
the compartment was blind.  Thus, the young man on the train failed to perceive that the young
woman was blind, as did the reader of the story. The young woman apparently also failed to
perceive that the young man was blind, and this may also be true of the male who enters the
compartment near the end of the story.  In a very brief tale, then, Bond has managed to create a
remarkably complex story about the limits of human perception and perceptiveness and about how
people tend to make assumptions and then take those assumptions for granted in ways that
influence what they perceive or fail to perceive.

Once the story is re-read,
the reader notices various intriguing details and clues, including the following:

• The girls parents are very concerned about her when she gets on the train,
  but both we and the young man assume that there is nothing special about their concern. It
  doesnt occur to us that the girl may be blind.
• The young woman is startled
  when the young man speaks, but both we and he assume that she is startled simply because he is
  sitting in the dark. Once again, it doesnt occur to us that the girl may be blind.


• The young male, commenting on the fact that the young woman was startled, thinks to
  himself,

Well, it often happens that people
with good eyesight fail to see what is right in front of them.

• Later, of course, we realize that this statement is a sly comment, by the
  author, on the imperceptiveness of readers. After all, it doesnt occur to us that the girl may
  be startled because she is blind. We make an assumption, and then we perceive all the rest of
  the events in light of that assumption. So, too, does the narrator, and so the narrators joke at
  the expense of sighted people is also a joke by the author at the expense of the narrator. 
  Rather than being offended by the authors sly trick, we ultimately appreciate all the ways in
  which he tricks both us the narrator, because we (both readers and narrator) ultimately learn a
  very valuable lesson about the influence of initial assumptions on the ways we perceive (or fail
  to perceive) the world and other persons.