For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  Mingmar turned her face to me in puzzlement. “Who,” she whispered, “is this one?”

  I was about to say That’s the Monk, but I stopped myself. Before I could give his proper name, Mingmar had felt the beads on the boy’s wrist, and, smiling with recognition and nodding sagely, she said, “Aha, it is Dawa.” Then, leaning close to me she added very softly, “Rose, he is praying. Om mani padme hum.”

  Mingmar listened awhile to Dawa praying, and then, quite unexpectedly, she put a foot on the bench, hoisted herself clean up onto the table, crawled across it on her hands and knees, forcibly removed Dawa’s hands from his head, and pressed his fingers to the Braille paper in front of him. She said something fervid and sharp to him in Tibetan. It sounded distinctly like Come on, you son of a gun! Quit moping and get down to work! And then she stretched out flat on her back on the table between us, placing her head on my page of Braille. Her eyelids were nearly shut. All I could see was a whiteness as bright as typing paper in the slits between her lids. She turned her face toward me, and her small smiling mouth worked her little wad of chewing gum with sumptuous pleasure, smacking and snapping with great involvement. She crossed one knee over the other and casually bobbed her foot in the air like a woman idling on a park bench. The toe of her sneaker swung dangerously close to the Kampa girl’s forehead. Mingmar let out a sigh that I can describe only as the embodiment of contentment. “Rose?” Mingmar said.

  “Yes?”

  “I should say that I like you very much.”

  “I like you too, Mingmar,” I said, which was true. Mingmar was a saucy little thing and had about her a delightful atmosphere of verve, warmth, curiosity, and intrigue. I’d liked her immediately. Mingmar sealed our friendship by reaching out and patting my arm in a motherly way. Unsolicited, she began to teach me how to count to ten in Tibetan. Upon hearing my voice reciting Tibetan numbers, Kyumi instantly appeared behind the Monk, looking extremely cross. He reached over the Monk’s shoulder and gave the table a loud, stern slap with the palm of his hand. Unable to see the slap coming, Mingmar and the Monk jumped in surprise.

  “Rose!” Kyumi cried. “You are not learning numbers today. You are learning Tibetan alphabet. Ka! Kha! Ga! ”

  Still supine, Mingmar barked at Kyumi in Tibetan. Kyumi barked back at her. And then, perhaps to establish his seniority and thus his authority in the room, Kyumi proclaimed in English, “I am sixteen years old.”

  In a flash Mingmar sat up on the table, knocking the Monk’s page of Braille to the floor in the process. She turned in the direction of Kyumi’s voice, her little spade-shaped face slack with utter disbelief. A dark silence followed while she gathered her thoughts. Then, anchoring her hands on her hips, she cried indignantly, “No! He is not sixteen. He is only twelve. And I am too very twelve.”

  The beleaguered Monk slid his chair a few inches closer to the window, away from the fray. Taking advantage of the distraction, he replanted his elbows on the table and fit his head back into his palms, this time with the fingers of one hand fitted delicately over his useless eyes. Settled back into his customary position, he emitted a sigh of complete inanition. His was not a case of mere indifference but a depression so consuming, he was unable to concentrate on anything else. The nascent hair on his close-shaven head fairly glittered in the window light.

  A heated exchange ensued between Mingmar and Kyumi, during which the other children at the table turned their faces in the direction of the shouting. The irritable little boy beside me got up, staggered to the wall, and began to climb up to the narrow window. He moved with the agility of a cat, using the bench and then my thigh as a ladder. He stood on the windowsill, tried the window lock, opened the window partway, then slammed it shut again. The windowsill was barely wide enough to accommodate his tiny feet. I raised my hands behind him in case he tumbled backward but was careful not to touch him for fear I might provoke his ire and suffer a slap.

  I knew that this was not a formal class, that it was just a forty-five-minute pre-lunch period in which Kyumi had offered to share his linguistic and Braille skills with the beginners, but things seemed to me to be getting out of hand, and I had the sense that I was somehow the cause of the chaos. Apparently sensing the same thing, Kyumi walked around the end of the table and marched toward me. “Rose,” he said with some consternation, “I am happy to help you learn Tibetan alphabet, but…please, you must study.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “I’m very sorry for interrupting you.”

  “No problem, Rose. But please listen.”

  “Yes, Kyumi, I certainly will.”

  “Good. And after this I teach them English alphabet such as A, B, C, D.”

  Kyumi had not got much farther in the lesson before he put his hand to his crotch and announced to the room that he had to pee. He informed us that he would go out of the room briefly, that he would promptly return, and that we should all carry on with our work without interruptions or delay. He ran to the door, swung it open, and dashed down the hallway.

  The class members applied themselves to their work. Mingmar, sitting cross-legged on the table, seemed at a loss for what to do now. She drummed her fingertips on her lips, as if searching for ideas. Remembering the Monk, she scooted down and lit into him again, forcing his hands onto the table where she thought his page of Braille lay. The page, however, had fluttered to the floor. When I told her this, she leaped off the table, fell to her hands and knees, and began patting the floor around the Monk’s chair until she found it. She jumped back onto the table, put the page before the Monk, and spoke to him with good-natured urgency, entreating him to try. The Monk was a year or two older than Mingmar and almost twice her size, yet he allowed her to manipulate his hands on the page. Gradually, as he listened to the zeal in her piping voice and felt her small jabs of encouragement on his upper arm, the corners of his mouth began to show the faintest trace of a smile. “Ka,” he said, because what choice did he really have?

  Satisfied that the Monk was on his way, Mingmar jumped off the table and ran into the kitchen singing a song in Chinese. Kyumi returned from the toilet and began to read aloud a list of words from a page of Braille. Minutes passed. We listened and learned. At one point Kyumi stood behind me, said a word in Tibetan, then said, “Rose, in English this word means ‘screet.’ Do you like screet?”

  I twisted around in my seat to look at him. “Screet? I don’t think we have such a word in English.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, “it is this!” He raised his fingers to his lips and pretended to puff on an imaginary cigarette. “It smells nice and there is smoke.”

  “Cigarette, you mean?”

  “Yes. I like to smoke screet. Do you like?”

  “No, I don’t smoke.”

  “And I like to fight.” Kyumi continued to drag on the nonexistent cigarette with one hand and made a threatening fist with the other.

  “You like smoking and fighting?”

  He crossed his arms in a stance of defiance. “Yes. I like. And tomorrow I fight all China.”

  “You’re going to fight all of China? Why?”

  “I don’t like China. I want to kill all China. Because one Chinese man, he say to me, ‘Kyumi, I kill you.’”

  “A Chinese person said that to you?”

  He put his hands on his hips, unafraid. “Chinese want to kill all Tibet. So I want to kill all China. Rose, do you fight China?”

  With his right hand, Kyumi grasped his own left wrist and began to flap his left hand rapidly up and down in the air; it fluttered like a cotton dishrag. Kyumi was so small, I could probably have hoisted him up onto my shoulders and carried him half a mile or so without tiring. I looked at the jug ears, the amusing round pink face, the fluttering hands—he was a fussy bundle of nerves and totally blind, but he was extremely intelligent and confident enough to believe that he could take on all of China with his fists in the air and a cigarette dangling from his ruby-red lips.

  “I have no reason to fight the Chines
e,” I said, “and fighting is not a good way to solve problems anyway.”

  Determining, I think, that I was not only disruptive but an irredeemable dummy and a bit of a bore, Kyumi moved away to the far end of the table and began collecting the Braille sheets. “Time for lunch now,” he said.

  Other children had begun to come into the dining room, throwing their book bags into a corner and spearing their white canes into the cane box. I had noticed a schedule on the wall outside the dining room indicating what child was assigned to what communal task on which day. There was a cleaning schedule, a dishwashing schedule, a serving schedule. A sixteen-year-old boy named Ngudup came into the dining room with a bunch of spoons in his hand and began laying them out on the tables. Ngudup had hollow eyes, shaggy black hair, and heavy eyebrows. He was extremely gangly. The sleeve of his jacket was split at the seam, and his trousers were cinched around his narrow waist with a stiff leather belt. Ngudup was one of the older students in the school; I could see the faint shadow of a mustache beginning to present itself on his upper lip. Ngudup had spent the first eleven years of his life locked in a small dark room.

  The children found seats on the benches; there was some jostling for space, some clashing of elbows, and one or two of them accidentally sat down in other children’s laps. Once they were settled, the cook and two of the older students began serving the food—rice, vegetables, and yak meat—in metal bowls. They sat with their bowls before them, waiting patiently until everyone was seated and served. Finally, they all raised their bowls off the table in a worshipful way and began singing a Tibetan prayer that involved a lot of om-om-om-ing. Then the bowls were returned to the tabletop and they dug in with their spoons. They ate in silence, leaning forward with their mouths very close to the edge of the bowls. Some of the smaller ones lifted the bowls to their lips and shoveled the food directly into their mouths. They were very small and thin, and their clothes, obviously secondhand donations, were ill-fitting, but they seemed very much at ease and at home here. A few of them spilled food on the table, then unwittingly rested their sleeves in it. Some rice and vegetables landed on the floor, but overall the meal was surprisingly tidy. And when they finished, they either brought their bowls to the kitchen for more or carried them to the sink to be washed.

  I sat in the dining room until the last child, Dolma, had finished her lunch. Somehow Dolma knew that I was still sitting at the end of the table. She made her way to me, blinked her strange blind eyes at the sky that was framed by the windows beside me, and confessed to me that she did not like her own name. She wanted a different name. Did I have any ideas for a better name for her? I was so surprised by the request that I said too quickly, “How about Shirley?” Why I said this, I do not know. I have never liked the name Shirley. As soon as I said it, I regretted it. A girl from a warrior tribe such as hers deserved something a bit more sturdy and dignified. But it was too late—she seized on Shirley with great glee, and when she repeated it, it sounded very much like a Chinese name. Dolma headed out the door of the dining room smiling and blinking and announcing proudly to no one, “I am Shirley!” I forgave myself with the thought that “I am Shirley” was, at the very least, a step up from “I am a witch.”

  As I was getting up to attend the next scheduled class, Ngudup came back into the dining room with a mop in his hands and began cleaning the floor. He seemed to know the exact location of all the furniture in the room. He mopped swiftly and smoothly beneath the tables and benches, never bumping into anything and not missing any sections of the floor, and all the while he hummed a tune steadily under his breath. For a few moments, when he mopped the floor in front of the full-length mirror, his figure was reflected in such a way that he appeared to be a pair of people mopping in graceful tandem. He could have had no idea that his image was being duplicated like this. As I walked by him to leave the room I realized that the song he was humming was the Turtles’ 1960s hit “Happy Together.” Sensing that I was passing near him, Ngudup raised his head and stopped humming. It seemed rude to go by without saying anything, especially as he could not have known who exactly was in the room with him, a situation I would find vexing and unpleasant were I to find myself in his position. I said hello to him, and he smiled and nodded his head at the sound of my voice but was too shy to say anything in return and continued pushing his mop.

  As I was going down the hallway, I saw Kyila, the nineteen-year-old girl who would soon be going to England, coming toward me from the opposite direction. I had spoken to her only once since I’d arrived at the school, but as she passed me, she said, “Hi, Rose.” Surprised, I stopped her and asked how she knew it was me.

  She said matter-of-factly but politely, “Oh, smell.”

  “Do I smell?”

  She laughed. “Well, not in a bad way. But you smell…different from the other people.”

  I was fascinated and eager to know what it was that she smelled. “What is it?” I said. “What is the smell?”

  The girl stepped closer. She paused a minute, thinking. “The hair, maybe? Shampoo, maybe. Or soap.”

  The hallway was dark. I tried my best to smell the girl from the same distance that she was smelling me. I smelled nothing but the lingering aromas of lunch drifting down from the kitchen. I knew there was no way that I would be able to tell one individual in the school from another just by smell, even if I stayed here a month. No way in the world. But why was that? If this girl could do it—even though it seemed extremely odd to me that she could—shouldn’t I be able to learn to do it? After all, I could identify people on the telephone just by their voices. I could identify foods just by tasting them. I might even be able to recognize a familiar face just by feeling it, though that would be a difficult task if I hadn’t seen the person in a long time and wasn’t expecting him to show up beside me.

  As I was crossing the courtyard to the classroom building it came to me that even before I had opened my mouth in the dining room, Ngudup most probably had known that it was I who was in the room with him and no other person. It began to dawn on me then that it is very difficult to hide from a blind person, and that if you think you can take advantage of another person’s sightlessness, you are probably in for a surprise. It was a revelation I would be reminded of countless times over the next few years.

  The next class I attended was a formal English class in which some of the older students practiced their English Braille typing. The students sat at small individual desks of the sort you’d see in any grade school. The desks had probably once been arranged in regular rows, but now they were slightly scattered and aslant of one another, having been repeatedly knocked into. The more experienced among the students used Braille typewriters; the others used Braille slates—flat boards with Braille templates cut into them. The slate was worked with a thing called a stylus, a knob roughly the shape of a champagne cork with a blunt needle at the end of it; with the needle, the student punched the dots of the Braille letters through the template and into the paper below it. There was a gentle tapping sound on the desks, like light rain on a rooftop, as they worked their pins.

  The teacher, a young blind woman named Pema, sat at a large table at the front of the class reciting lines for the students to type out. I sat at a small desk beside hers. The windows of the classroom, several of which were open, faced a public street. The occasional sound of drilling drifted up from a construction site nearby. Pema wore her hair in a long ponytail tied with a pink ribbon. The older girls in the class sat at the back of the room, working hard, glowering at the ceiling as they thought, or lowering their heads intently to their machines. They had plump faces and were shy and diligent, and they too wore their hair in long ponytails tied with brightly colored ribbons. In their early teens, they were more focused than the younger girls, calmer, and seemed intent on getting on with their learning. They ticked out Braille words with their typewriters, now and then feeling the words on the page to make sure they had formed them correctly. Occasionally they reached over and felt
each other’s pages, squinting critically, consulting one another in Tibetan about an English word. Once in a while, a page would jam in the typewriter, and then the girl would suck air through her teeth with frustration and wrestle the page free, her fingers flying over the metal components of the machine. Once the page was loosened, the girl felt its surface carefully to make sure the raised type hadn’t been damaged.

  The teacher asked individual students to translate into English a line or a phrase that she read out in Tibetan, and when the student answered correctly, the entire class applauded. She said something in Tibetan, and a girl at the back of the room stood up and replied, “Food is good.” That met with a round of applause. Another girl in the front row jumped up uninvited and improved upon the answer by shouting, “Food is dee-licious!” Then she knocked on the wall for emphasis and added, accurately but quite off the script, “This is a wall!,” and sat back down. The girl’s name, I knew, was Sangmu. She had the unbecoming bowl-like haircut of a medieval serf. Her eyes were whitish blue with cataracts, like the eyes of an aging dog, and now and then they jittered up and down in their sockets with an almost electronic rapidity. I later learned that while Sangmu was living with her family in a small remote village, her father used to beat her repeatedly, irked no doubt by her blindness and her jittering eyes.

  The teacher recited another phrase, and the entire class said in unison, “My bicycle is old!”

  Sangmu stood up again and in a correcting way repeated the sentence with perfect clarity—“My! Bicycle! Is! Old!”—showing them all how proper English should sound. She wore a rough brown checkered jacket that looked as though it had been made from an old woolen blanket. Her red corduroy trousers had Mickey Mouse embroidered on one leg. On her wrist was a tin bracelet, and beside her chair lay a Mickey Mouse book bag of pink and blue. (Looking around, I realized that Mickey Mouse was represented seven or eight times in the room, on backpacks and jackets and trouser pockets.) It quickly became evident that Sangmu was the most confident English speaker in the class—when the teacher called out a phrase, she had finished translating it before anyone else had even begun. “Small nose! Big tree! Nice car! Where is the h-o-s-p-i-t-a-l?” Like many of the students, she had the distinctly Tibetan habit of spelling out the words she heard as a way of learning and remembering them. She seemed a bit bored and fidgeted ceaselessly at her desk, tearing a piece of paper off her Braille page and twisting it into a slender corkscrew shape that she then fitted carefully up her nose in a testing way. The test made her sneeze rapidly three times in a row, delicate little sneezes that sounded like a match being struck repeatedly. She put her head on her desk, felt the wall, picked up a baseball cap that had been lying on her desk and put it on her head, took it off again, and scribbled on the wall with a fingernail. She pulled something out of her jacket pocket, held it to her nose, and sniffed at it several times. It was a metal bottle cap that obviously still retained the pleasant scent of whatever soft drink it had once kept contained. I understood by now that blind children were always searching for any kind of sensory stimulation for entertainment—sound, smell, touch, and motion. Sangmu’s fidgeting seemed to express innate optimism, an enthusiasm about simply being alive. Finally she lowered her head and returned her hands resignedly to her stylus.