“I shouldn’t lift my hands, Yangchen?” I said.
“Umm. Maybe it is better to trust,” Yangchen said. She was much too patient and polite a girl to just come out and say No, you shouldn’t.
“Girls,” I said, “I wouldn’t be able to do this alone.”
“You would be afraid?” Choden said.
“I would be very afraid.”
“Oh, ha,” Choden said.
“Do not be afraid,” Yangchen said. “We are watching you.”
All the blind students spoke this way—We are watching you. Nice to see you. See you again. Please let me see that book. For them, the vocabulary of vision was metaphorical, a symbolic representation of human connection, interest, and concern.
The girls coaxed me forward with their slender arms, never breaking their stride. I heard passing voices speaking Tibetan and Chinese, the sound of a small spluttering engine like that of a generator or an idling motorbike, the distant shrieks of children, a horn that sounded like a loud fart, something metallic scraping briefly on the pavement behind us, someone sneezing richly nearby, and all the while Choden’s noisy cane rattling along in front of us like a yapping little dog leading the way.
Yangchen had a habit of humming as she walked. Each time she spoke, she had to interrupt her own humming, putting it on hold until there was silence between us again, whereupon she would resume the tune approximately where she had left off. I asked the girls how long they had been blind; both said from a very young age. I asked them what they had been doing before they came to Braille Without Borders in Lhasa.
Yangchen said, “I was only at home. Just praying something and helping my mother.”
Choden said, “I’m too home. Praying and helping.”
“Were there any other blind kids where you lived?”
“My country don’t have blind kids,” Choden said. “Only me.”
“Not my country either,” Yangchen said.
I knew that what they meant by “my country” were the villages they had come from, small mountain hamlets with mud-brick houses, muttering flocks of chickens, some goats, shaggy yaks with matted hair, and little else but the biggest sky in the world, an all-engulfing sunlight, and a distant backdrop of seriously jagged snowcapped mountains.
Yangchen informed me out of the blue that her father died when she was young and that her mother was, at present, dying. I was so taken aback that I couldn’t bring myself to ask what her mother was dying of. Prompted by the mention of parents, Choden said, “My mother was pregnant with me, and a cow kick her in the stomach one time, and so that is why I got blind.”
I thought about the physics of this. “Are you sure that’s why you’re blind, Choden?” I said.
“Yah. Sure,” she said cheerfully, and she gave my arm a little squeeze, as if to assure me that it really was quite all right to have the future of your eyesight mystically predetermined by a wayward, mud-encrusted cow’s hoof even before you were born. Like most Tibetans, the blind students were deeply conscious of reincarnation and karmic retribution. The widespread Tibetan impulse to go to the temple and pray was not just an effort to achieve a higher spirituality but also a warding-off of the malign and omnipresent supernatural forces believed to be pressing upon each individual’s life and destiny.
I asked the girls if they still prayed now that they were in Lhasa. Yes, every morning at seven they went to the temple to pray. What exactly were they praying for? For the goodness, they said, and good things and to make up for sins.
What kind of sins?
There was a silence while they thought about this. “Mmm, sometimes we broke some things at school,” Choden said.
What things?
“Everythings! Braille machines and desks and—”
“And windows,” Yangchen interjected.
“Because we cannot see and we make an accident sometimes.”
I pointed out that these were not sins but forgivable mistakes. They thought about it, then agreed with me. A long silence followed while they searched their souls for real and purposive sins. I knew that the silence was due not to their reluctance to tell me their sins but to their inability to find anything really worthy to confess.
“Okay,” I said, “never mind the sins.”
“And anyway now we go right,” Yangchen said, gently steering me with her arm.
“How do you know that?”
“You feel the ground got different here under your feet?”
I had felt nothing. But now that Yangchen had brought it to my attention, I realized that the ground we were walking on was very uneven. When I told the girls that I had felt nothing different, that the ground had seemed to me to be always uneven, they stopped, turned me around, and took me back to the start of the street.
“Rose, now we show you. You must go and feel the street here.” Yangchen tapped my shin firmly with her cane to indicate that I should try the street out with my foot; the gesture was surprisingly authoritative. It was also intimate in the way the gestures of a good teacher often are. “You feel how it feels.”
I smeared the soles of my shoes around. “It feels smooth, like concrete pavement.”
“Yah, smooth. Now come and you walk.” We walked ten paces on the smooth pavement and then, very abruptly, the pavement changed and became something like cobblestone or roughly hewn brick. The first time around, I hadn’t registered the change, which astonished me, because the contrast was in fact sudden and marked. I had simply not been paying attention to what was under my feet. Why would I? When one is in the habit of anticipating the path ahead by sight, one rarely makes conscious note of or even actually feels in any lasting way the texture of that path.2
“When we feel the ground coming different under our feet, we know where we find ourselves,” Yangchen said.
“Do you know when a person is walking close to you?”
“Yes, because we can hear them. And also sometimes can smell them. And also our cane can describe to us whatever is near us.”
I told the girls their English was quite good and asked them if they were continuing to study the language.
“Yah. Now we are learning how to speak in a restaurant,” Yangchen said.
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. By way of explanation, Choden said in the tone of an extremely nervous, extremely unctuous waitress, “Hello, madam. You are so very welcome. Good evening, can I help you, please? What would you like to please eat?”
In the voice of a customer who had memorized the entire menu and was bored stiff by it, Yangchen responded, “Yes, please. I would like to have please one yak s-t-e-a-k.”
“Oh, very fine,” Choden said. “Please, how would you like your yak s-t-e-a-k to be cooked?”
“I would like to have my yak steak to be cooked m-e-d-i-u-m rare, please.”
“What would you please like to drink, please? Would you like to drink some of coffee?”
“Please,” Yangchen said, “I would like a bottle of white w-i-n-d.”
“Yangchen,” I said, “w-i-n-d spells wind. A bottle of white wind would be something very rare, if not completely impossible.”
Yangchen stopped in her tracks and positively guffawed at her mistake. “Oh, ha-ha-ha! No! Please, a bottle of white wine, please, I mean.”
I told the girls that it was not necessary for them to use the word please every time they opened their mouths in a restaurant.
“No?”
“No. Once or twice is really enough. Otherwise you will become quite annoying.”
“What does it mean, annoying?” Yangchen asked.
I explained that being annoying meant that soon enough the person you were serving in the restaurant would have a strong desire to slap you. Immediately they understood. True to Tibetan form, the girls did not let the word annoying go by without asking me how to spell it.
We walked on, listening to the sounds passing by—hammering, a squeaky wheel, birds chittering, voices speaking in Chinese and Tibetan, a horn being blown
—and suddenly at my right shoulder, Yangchen interrupted her humming to ask me, “Rose, what is your hoppy?”
This question always surprises me and makes me uneasy, perhaps because I never have a plausible-sounding answer to the question. If a hobby is something one pursues purely for pleasure, then reading the Greek-English dictionary and another excellent book called 600 Modern Greek Verbs: Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses is my hobby. I can become engrossed in those books so deeply—one word leading to another—that I fail to notice an entire hour passing. But how to explain this in an offhand way to a person you don’t know well? As a hobby, it sounds not only pointless and dull but pretentious and pedantic as well. I have no desire to explain it. Anything I could truly claim as a hobby I am always reluctant to reveal. And the very concept of the hobby strikes me as too parochial, too specific, by definition too distinctly separate from life’s main activities.
I told Yangchen that in general I liked rowing a boat, riding a bicycle, and making things out of wood—all the activities I liked that seemed to need no explanation or defense.
Yangchen said, “I like sing a song and learn some song and I also like rotten.”
“Rotten? What’s that?”
“Rotten. Rotten.”
“Can you spell the word for me?”
“I cannot.”
Choden tried to spell it for her. “Rot. R-o-t. R-o-t-e-n.”
“Well, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure what you mean by it,” I said. “Rotten is an adjective. It cannot be a hobby.”
“Tchah! I am wrong.” Yangchen tittered and laid the side of her face against my upper arm, half in embarrassment and half in apology.
I felt a soft breeze on my cheek. “Now it’s a little windy,” I said.
“Windy, yah.”
“How come all of a sudden?” I guessed the answer. “Are we out of the closed street and in an open place?”
“You are right,” Yangchen said. “We are in open and it is wind and there is a cloud.”
“How do you know there’s a cloud?”
“I do not feel the sun on my nose.”
“I didn’t notice that,” I said.
“Oh, ha,” Choden said.
By now I had learned that this was Choden’s default response. When she didn’t know what to say but wanted to maintain active participation in the conversation, she said encouragingly, Oh, ha.
I heard the sound of water splashing, like a hose or a downspout pouring onto a pavement. “Where is that splashing water coming from?” I said.
“Not water,” Yangchen said. “That noise is frying of dumplings. Here is a small restaurant in the street.”
Before long I heard the crashing sound of thunder.
“No,” Choden said. “Not thunder. That is only the door of the marketplace. They are closing it. It makes a big noise.”
The closing door sounded so much like thunder that I wanted to pull off my blindfold and look around to be sure that Choden wasn’t tricking me. I asked Choden if she was sure it wasn’t thunder.
“Yah, Rose, sure. Don’t worry.”
“Now I smell gasoline,” I said.
“No. That is shoes smell.”
“What?”
“Shoes smell. Hongo.” The two girls conferred in Tibetan, trying to figure out how to explain to me what I was smelling. “It is the smell of shoes. They are selling the shoes here in the street.”
I heard birdsong coming from somewhere behind us, a clear wandering whistle like that of a robin. I remarked on it, and Choden said, “No, it is not a bird. It is…” She said something to Yangchen in Tibetan, looking again for a word.
“Alarm. It is the alarm for a car in case a person tries to steal it.”
They knew everything about their city. They knew what everything was and where it was and how it sounded and smelled and felt. They knew it by heart and with their eyes closed. It seemed to me that they knew the city every bit as well as its sighted residents, and I was beginning to wonder whether I too couldn’t benefit from knowing my environment from this different perspective.
“Now the cloud went and the sun came shining,” Yangchen said, and as soon as she said it I felt the sun on my head.
“Now we turn left,” Choden said.
“How do you know we turn left?”
“We smell the incense. That smells very nice. It means we are nearly in Jokhang Temple.”
The moment Choden mentioned it, the air was full of the smell of incense. Again, I hadn’t noticed it until she alerted me to it. The girls were always one step ahead of me, maybe two. I had detected very little of what was taking place around me on this walk, perhaps because I was nervous and disoriented, but also because I was so used to navigating with my eyes that my other senses, relative to the senses of the blind girls, were atrophied. I stumbled along uncomfortably, feeling out of control and disliking that I was so slow in grasping and noticing what they noticed.
Sight is a slick and overbearing autocrat, trumpeting its prodigal knowledge and perceptions so forcefully that it drowns out the other, subtler senses. We go through our day semi-oblivious to a whole range of sensory information because we are distracted and enslaved by our eyes. Taste, touch, smell, and hearing can hardly get a word in edgewise to the brain. Those of us who have sight do not realize that our experience of life and the world is overpowered by our vision. In this sense, we too are handicapped. I began to envy Choden’s and Yangchen’s skills a little. In their presence, I saw that I had been missing a great deal of what was happening in my daily life, and I realized that it was not the blind person’s deficiency that was drawing me into this subject but the revelation of my own.3
Now that the girls had drawn it to my attention, the smell of incense was very strong. It was sweet and flowery, cloying as cheap perfume. I sensed there were many people near us now. I heard soft voices, tinkling bells, and a horn being blown on a low note. I knew where we were and what was taking place, because I had been here a few days before. Jokhang Temple, located in Barkhor Square in the center of Lhasa, is the most sacred temple in Tibet. Throngs of Buddhist pilgrims come from all over the country to worship here. I knew (because I had seen it) that in front of the Jokhang Temple, where the girls and I were now sightlessly standing, there were so many pilgrims prostrating themselves that the square looked like a refugee encampment. There had been so much to look at when I was last here—multicolored, fantastical, and bizarre—that I hadn’t really noticed the smell of incense, even though it burned in great quantities in a kind of specially constructed pear-shaped chimney that looked roughly a thousand years old and that sent great gouts of bluish smoke billowing into the air in front of the temple.
I knew, because I had seen them, that the Tibetan pilgrims carried prayer wheels that looked a little like soup cans mounted on sticks. They spun these wheels incessantly. They wore cowboy hats and porkpie hats and conical fur hats and ten-gallon hats and skimmers and bowlers and fedoras. Sometimes a pilgrim wore just a flap of cloth in, say, tartan plaid or neon pink, draped loosely over the head like a dinner napkin over a fencepost. Men and women alike wore long silky braids down their backs interwoven with brightly colored strands of cloth; they wore colorful striped skirts over their trousers, and bright vests and turquoise earrings and silver bracelets and necklaces of carnelian and agate; they wore high felt boots and sometimes cowboy boots and sometimes sneakers and once in a while they went barefoot. Sometimes they wrapped their long braids around the tops of their heads like fabulous tiaras. I saw plump bare-armed shaven-headed monks in saffron robes. I saw grannies in cotton wimples of the sort you see in seventeenth-century Dutch portraits. (Some of the grannies wore headdresses exactly like that of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.) I saw men with Incan faces who’d poked a hole in each earlobe, fed a length of string through the hole, then hung a heavy piece of turquoise from either end of the string. They loped along the streets of Tibet, turquoise swinging.
Most of the p
ilgrims had traveled to Lhasa on foot, and most came from extremely far away. Nevertheless, they walked into the city with their hands clasped comfortably behind their backs as though they were just finishing up an afternoon stroll. Some of them spun their prayer wheels; some of them led little tangle-haired Lhasa apsos on rawhide leashes. Some of them came these long distances not walking but prostrating themselves the entire journey. The pilgrim stepped out the front door of his little house in a village hundreds of miles away from here, lay down on his belly, slid his hands out, and touched his forehead to the ground. Then he stood up, placed his feet where his hands had been, knelt down, and stretched himself out on his belly again. And he repeated the process over and over until he reached the city of Lhasa, creeping along the ground like a caterpillar. Some of the supplicants wore leather aprons to keep their clothes from wearing out on the roads; some wore wooden paddles strapped to their hands to protect the skin of their palms. Some particularly zealous pilgrims bound their lower legs together to prevent themselves from committing the crime of actually taking a step forward. They entered the city this way, crowding the boulevards and alleys, and when you walked through Lhasa, you had to be careful not to step on them. They circled the city a prescribed number of times (a hundred and eight, a thousand, maybe thirty-two—whatever seemed right to the individual pilgrim), prostrating themsleves along body length by body length until finally they arrived at the temple, where they would continue to prostrate themselves, sometimes for hours, kneeling, lying down, sliding their hands out in front of themselves, and standing up again with blackened palms pressed together in the position of prayer.
I knew all this because I had seen it, and what had struck me most about the Tibetan pilgrims was the look in their eyes. There is in the Tibetan gaze a vivid clarity, a gamesome look of wildness and freedom and good humor. These pilgrims had just walked possibly hundreds of miles and had been sleeping out under the stars and the birch trees for months on end, and yet somehow they didn’t look fatigued or pained or put out or self-congratulating. They didn’t look self-conscious in any way. They looked fresh and full of energy. Their cheeks were the color of pomegranates and had developed a kind of polished shell of hardness, like a varnish against the wind and sun. And despite the fact that they most likely had not had the benefit of a shelter or roof for ages, they looked extremely happy. When they weren’t smiling, they were laughing. What they were doing was entirely natural to them and they looked delighted to be doing it, to be sliding along Lhasa’s streets on their shirt buttons. For a Tibetan Buddhist, the visit to Lhasa was one of life’s high points. This big city was as alien to them as it was to me, and now that they had reached it, they were every bit as fascinated by what they saw as I was. The day that I had come here by myself, I stood in front of the temple unabashedly staring.
For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Page 8