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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  The teacher called on a girl in the second row. The girl stood up. She had a pigtail protruding horizontally from behind each ear, and abnormally large eyes that were almost solid black in color and opaque as stones. There was next to no differentiation in the pigment of her dark brown eyeball—no discernible iris or pupil and very little white. They brought to mind the eyes of a horse. Her name was Dechen, and despite the strange eyes she was extremely pretty, with full red lips and pink cheeks and long black lashes. Dechen was shy and spoke her assigned sentence haltingly. “Heez coawat eeez beeeg.” When the students applauded, Dechen sank back into her seat and put her head on her desk in mortification, and the two pigtails angled up like the handlebars on a tricycle.

  Sangmu stood up and repeated Dechen’s sentence clearly: “His! Coat! Is! Big!” The teacher said something brisk to Sangmu in Tibetan, and Sangmu sat down again, grinning hugely and swinging her feet beneath her chair, seemingly delighted at having been told to pipe down. She was so eager for new experiences that even a dressing-down from the teacher was a welcome excitement.

  An old man with a very wrinkled face and a battered fedora perched on his head at a rakish slant appeared at one of the open windows. He stared into the room with a look of complete puzzlement, trying to make sense of what was going on here. A boy with the anxious face of Peter Lorre stood up and said, “I sell you!”

  Sangmu could not contain herself. Without even bothering to stand she twisted around in her seat and cried, “No! That is wrong. You must say, ‘I see you.’”

  Chagrined at his mistake, the boy swiped his hand down the length of his own face, as if to erase it. He accepted Sangmu’s correction. “I see you.”

  “But you cannot see me!” Sangmu cried with great mirth.

  A chubby boy behind her with a pair of worn bedroom slippers on his feet offered suddenly, “I can see a little with this eye but not with this one.”

  “Because you are blind!” Sangmu said, as though his blindness were cause for celebration. “We are blind,” she added, and the other students laughed in proud agreement.

  Why were they laughing? That was the question constantly at the back of my mind as I made my way among the students of Braille Without Borders. Why had so many said to me “I am happy I’m blind”? Why were they happy and laughing, eager to do their studies, eager to teach one another? Why weren’t they all brooding and languishing like the poor little Monk or crying out, Why me, God? Plenty of them had started life with sight and then gradually lost it, so they were at least vaguely aware of what they were missing. Beggars and others who could not afford to be choosers had spat at them and thrown stones at them, ridiculed and spurned them. Some of them had been abandoned by their families, some beaten, some tied to furniture. Where did the cheerfulness come from? Was it simply that they had, for the first time, found other children like themselves? Was it that they had, purely by chance, been found by someone who saw beneath the surface of them, who knew that behind their dull eyes, a whole universe of thought was simmering, waiting to be given a chance?

  The old man in the window squinted and stared, leaning on the windowsill with both arms, his mouth hanging open in interest and absorption. He looked somehow mistrustful of the sound of this foreign language coming from people so young. Because the students were facing away from him, he couldn’t see that they were blind. He called something to the teacher across the students’ dark heads. The teacher, who could not see him, ignored him, and so he harrumphed and went away.

  I was the only person in the room who could see that the students in this classroom were blind. Most of them looked blind, with eyes that were damaged or skewed or just plain didn’t open. Most of them had no idea what their classmates looked like; most would not know that Sangmu’s eyes jittered or that Dechen’s eyes were like a horse’s or that Ngudup’s eyes were sunken or that Mingmar’s eyes were slits. Most of them could not see Mickey Mouse adorning their clothing and accessories, raring to go with his white-gloved hand raised in a convivial wave to the world at large and his pink tongue annoyingly visible in his perpetually smiling mouth. Most of them could not see the teacher’s ponytail or the shiny orange walls of their classroom. Most of them could not see me and knew who I was only by the sound of my voice or the smell of my shampoo.

  “Hospital is on the left!”

  “M-i-n-u-t-e-s!”

  The classroom ticked with the sound of the Braille machines. The teacher read out more sentences.

  “Go straight then left to the hospital,” said a girl whose blind eyes were hopelessly crossed. (This girl had asked Sabriye soon after her arrival at the school, “Why is it that the children in my village throw stones at me, but everyone here is nice to me?”)

  Kalden, a grinning snaggletoothed boy with a big head, a gnomish face, and a red scarf tied around his neck, stood up and said, “He buys a gun.” Kalden’s eyes were obscured by the cloudy white film of cataracts, a common affliction here.

  Someone at the back of the room made the sound of a gun, and the class collapsed in giggles.

  “This is my foot.”

  “This is my eyes.”

  “Y-o-u-r mother is a bye!”

  “No!” Sangmu cried. “Your m-o-t-h-e-r is a girl.”

  At the end of the class the teacher stood up and began gathering her books. Some of the older students made their way to her desk and handed her the Braille pages they had typed. Then some returned to their desks and continued working. None of the students seemed in a great hurry to leave the classroom. A few of them wandered close to where I was sitting and, realizing that I was there, began to question me and investigate my possessions. Kalden approached, bumped into my desk, found my hand, and held on to it. The boy who looked like Peter Lorre came and took my pen out of my other hand and pretended to write on the desk with it. He was wearing a jean jacket with embroidery on the breast that depicted a man playing tennis; beneath the man was written WE R’E # 1! Sangmu came over and ran her hands over my little desk. When she found my notebook, she said, “What is this?”

  “That is my notebook,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For writing down ideas.”

  Sangmu smiled, opened the notebook, lifted it to her blind eyes, and pretended to read what I had written: “‘Sangmu is a very, very good girl!’” That notion cast her into a seizure of laughter.

  1What Kyumi was doing with his hands is one of many common habits known as blindisms. Blindisms are most often displayed by blind children but sometimes by blind adults as well. They include repetitive behaviors like rocking or swaying, spinning in place, continuous rubbing or pressing of the eyes, and rapid flicking of the fingers. (Note the marked way that Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder sometimes wag their heads as they perform—this, by their own admission, is not just excitement about the music but a form of blindism.) The scientific consensus about blindism is that the lack of visual stimulation causes the energetic blind person to engage in this sort of physical self-stimulation. The gestures of blindism—like the untrained blind person’s unwittingly speaking to a wall—appear to the sighted as bizarre or comical and are often interpreted as signs of either retardation or mental instability. Blindisms have no doubt contributed to the stereotype of the blind as mentally impaired.

  The Neglected Senses

  At Braille Without Borders, you learn quickly not to stand idly in doorways or on staircases or in narrow hallways, for the consequence is that eventually somebody blind will slam into you. In settings familiar to the blind, the unobstructed navigability of transitional passageways is something they quite reasonably take for granted. A doorway exists solely to be passed through, a staircase solely to be ascended or descended, a hallway solely to be traversed on the way from one room to another. Unable to see that a two-hundred-pound man is sitting in the middle of a staircase, a pack of blind students will most likely fail to anticipate his anomalous presence and fall headlong over him as they attempt to skip down the stairs. The
students at BWB race around their school, sprinting down the hallways, turning corners crisply at five miles per hour, skirting tables and chairs, opening doors without groping for the knobs, reaching for objects on shelves with surprising precision. They kick soccer balls, rearrange furniture, zip their own zippers, throw things and catch things (yes, sometimes they miss the catch and the things end up hitting them in the face), fill their own soup bowls, go for walks downtown alone, make purchases without getting shortchanged. They know their realm so well that after a few days at the school, I began to forget that they were blind and would not have been entirely surprised to find a blind child successfully juggling three apples or using the banister as a balance beam. I realized that those who had some vision actually moved more hesitantly than those who were completely blind. The slightly sighted, still depending on their weakened eyes, had to take time to make out what they were seeing—to locate a doorknob, for example—and sometimes they thought they could see where they were going but miscalculated and ended up crashing into tables or posts. Also, those who could see a bit were more distractible than those who couldn’t see at all, and they occasionally tried to read their Braille with whatever sight they had left, holding the embossed pages an inch from their eyes, a habit that Paul and Sabriye adamantly discouraged, because it taxes whatever vision remains and because it is much less efficient than tactile reading.

  I was surprised by the ease and harmony the blind students had with their physical realm and was eager enough to understand it that at Sabriye’s suggestion I agreed to let myself be blindfolded and led through the streets of Lhasa by two blind teenage girls, Choden and Yangchen.

  The girls and I set off from the school and as soon as we crossed the big boulevard, Chingdol Dong Lu, I took a blindfold out of my pocket. Yangchen and Choden stood on either side of me, waiting expectantly, holding their white canes before them, clearly amused by the challenge. Yangchen, a shy, round-faced, cross-eyed sixteen-year-old with her hair in a ponytail, was completely blind in one eye and saw only faint impressions of light with the other. She wore a baseball cap, clodhopper boots, a plaid flannel shirt buttoned up to the throat, denim trousers, and a jean jacket. Yangchen’s perpetually crossed eyes gave her the appearance of slapstick confusion. I came to learn, however, that Yangchen was a level-headed, sober, practical girl and possessed of considerable poise. Choden, a year younger than Yangchen, was pink-cheeked and ever smiling. She too wore a ponytail, plaid flannel shirt, denim jacket and pants, baseball cap, and hiking boots. Side by side in their rough-and-ready attire, the girls brought to mind a pair of lumberjacks ready to chop their way through a forest. Choden’s eyes were pinched shut most of the time, but her left eye occasionally opened and seemed to range around in its orbit taking in some light and color.

  The girls’ blindness, their white canes, and my foreign presence with them had drawn a group of onlookers on the city sidewalk. As I pulled the blindfold over my eyes, I said to the girls, “We have a lot of people looking at us.”

  Excited and embarrassed, they hooted “Heeoo!” into their fingertips.

  “And,” I added, “one of the people looking at us is a tall Chinese policeman with a gun.”

  To that dire piece of information they responded with a moment of shocked silence. And then they lowered their heads and muttered gravely, “Tchah!”

  “But,” I said, “never mind the people. I have put the blindfold on and cannot see them anymore. I am now putting my sunglasses on over the blindfold so that I can see even less.”

  “Good,” Yangchen said. “Now you are blind?”

  My eyes were sufficiently bound that I could see nothing at all—no light, no forms, nothing. The bright and varied colors of the buildings of Lhasa had disappeared, and I was presented with nothing but the backs of my own eyelids onto which my heartbeat was projected in rhythmic flashes of orange. In the high altitude and resultant low atmospheric pressure of Lhasa, I was often aware that my heart was struggling to do its job. Nowhere else in the world had I been so conscious of my own pulse. At night when I lay in bed, my heart pounded in my chest, ears, and eyes and I felt short of breath to the point that I slept with my mouth open and occasionally woke up feeling that I might actually be suffocating, whereupon I had to get up and walk around my enormous hotel room.1 Sometimes I even had to stand by an open window and inhale deeply (which only gave me the comforting illusion that I was getting more air when of course the reality was that the atmospheric pressure outside the room was exactly the same as it was inside it) until the suffocating feeling passed.

  “I can’t see a thing, I assure you,” I said. “Now, listen, girls, you won’t let me get lost in Lhasa, will you? You know I don’t speak Tibetan.”

  With a hint of gloating pleasure Choden said, “Yah. We know it.” Then she took my hand and thrust her white cane into it.

  “Oh, am I taking a cane too?”

  Yangchen, the older of the two, interjected nervously, “Cane? Well, no. Maybe no cane. Choden must have her own cane. Otherwise she can lose her road.”

  I passed the cane clumsily back to Choden. “Take your cane, Choden. God forbid you should lose your road while you’re leading me.”

  The girls positioned themselves on either side of me, hooked their arms through mine, and we headed up the street. Immediately I had the sensation that the ground beneath my feet was tilting. Sound seemed to become louder, smells became stronger, and the breeze on my face felt more forceful and distracting. I tripped on a raised lip of pavement, and the girls quickly tightened their grip on my elbows to keep me from falling. The dragging clicking of one of the canes on the pavement sounded for all the world like the jittering ball in a spinning roulette wheel. I asked Choden if it was her cane that was making all that noise.

  “Yah. Very nizey is my cane.” Compelled to imitate the gravelly sound of her cane, Choden said with relish, “Zaaaarrrrr!”

  Sensing that I was nervous, Yangchen said, “Rose, how you are feeling?”

  “Well, I’m not really afraid,” I said, “but I feel as though I’m in a boat that’s moving. You know that feeling when you’re in a boat and the water is moving beneath you and you’re a little bit unsteady on your feet?”

  “Oh, yah, I know it! Funny,” Choden said. “You are a little bit nervous, is that right, Rose?”

  I confessed that I was indeed a little bit nervous.

  This seemed to please Choden. “Oh, ha!” she said, audibly smiling.

  “Have you ever been in a boat?” I asked her.

  “No, I never.”

  “Well, then how can you say you know how it feels?”

  “Oh, ha! You are right.”

  “Tell me, girls, how do you feel? Does the ground feel steady to you?”

  “Yah,” Yangchen said, “is always steady. No problem. And now we must turn left.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because the sound of many televisions.”

  Until Yangchen mentioned it, I had not noticed the sound of many televisions. I had vaguely heard some background noise beyond us, an insignificant presence at the periphery of my attention, but distracted by my nervousness, I had not identified it. Now, focusing on it, I realized that the sound of many televisions was quite loud; riotous, in fact—it was that unmistakably tinny television sound, a counterfeit, thinner version of firsthand sound. What I was hearing was the many-times-multiplied voices of two people having a tense dialogue in Chinese; they spoke with the razor-sharp accent of Beijing. And then I heard rapid gunfire; filtered and squeezed through the many televisions, the gunfire sounded feeble and fake, like plastic popguns in a penny arcade. I was disturbed that I hadn’t noticed these sounds from a distance.

  “That is men always selling televisions in a shop,” Yangchen said. “Sometimes it is war films. When we hear the televisions, we know we must turn left.”

  It was a matter of familiarity, then, a recognizable constant in the girls’ journey into the city.

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nbsp; We carried on at an alarmingly brisk pace. I expected at any moment to crack my forehead on a lamppost or go plummeting into an open manhole. I felt terribly vulnerable and had to fight the impulse to lift the blindfold off my face. As I walked I realized that I was holding my chin much higher in the air than I normally would, the way I do when I’m swimming and trying to keep my head dry, and each step I took had the same quality of awkward anticipation as those last few exploratory, drop-footed steps taken toward the bottom of a staircase one is descending in the pitch-dark. I couldn’t help lifting my hands in front of me in self-defense, like a pathetic caricature of a blind person. Linked at the elbows with the two girls, I found it difficult to lift my hands; nevertheless, I kept trying to lift them, and Yangchen kept gently pressing them down to show me I had nothing to fear.