Cracks around the eyes are ordinarily signs of old age. But in the case of the old woman, they signify much more than mere physical features. The old woman’s eyes are just two gaping holes filled with empty air, with the hills and the sky. Then the cracks begin around her eyes, spreading beyond her skin and then the hills crack, the temples crack and the sky cracks and the sky finally shatters and falls like plate-glass. The old woman herself is shatterproof and nothing happens to her.
Only you get instantly reduced to a small change in her hand. It is you who shatter because her eyes are already bullet-holes which are formed with the cracks around the holes. You are shattered with the realisation that the whole system which is guilty of testing the grit and determination of an old woman is full of cracks; people who look at the old woman as a pest are full of cracks; monuments themselves crack in the face of the tenacity of the old woman. Thus the old woman, despite the cracks around her eyes, is actually the only one who is shatterproof.
