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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  The pilgrims had stared unabashedly too. They stood before the temple and bowed and prostrated and kowtowed over and over in a ceremony that had been going on for centuries, but as they enacted their repetitive prayerful motions in service and sacrifice to a higher enlightenment, they were looking around them in wonder, gawking at the fascinating scene, at the other pilgrims from other parts of Tibet, and at the scores of foreign tourists—Japanese, Germans, British, Americans like me—who had come here to gawk at them. Their bodies were going through the motions of prayer in pursuit of a more transcendent reality, but in their eyes, I saw a firm preoccupation with this reality. Their eyes were to blame. Like me, they couldn’t stop looking.

  Now, today, with a blindfold over my eyes, I stood in front of the temple and saw none of it. This was an experience of another sort. I absorbed information that I hadn’t noticed before: the unceasing sibilant whisper of hundreds of pilgrims’ hands sliding along the paving stones as they stretched out to lie down. I had seen the pieces of cardboard and cloth and wood that they used to protect their hands, but I hadn’t registered fully the pleasing sound that all that protective matter made. It was the sound of a hundred besoms being lightly dragged along the pavement, the sound of a swan’s great wings stirring the air as he passes overhead. On my first visit to the temple I hadn’t really noticed the constant monotone lowing of a holy horn being blown by a monk, how soft and melancholy and human it sounded, like a secret, lovelorn sigh accidentally picked up by a public-address system.

  I was dying to remove my blindfold and have another look around. I wanted to see the pilgrims in their wild haberdashery. I wanted to see them seeing us, the three blind visitors. Surely we would be drawing a few stares by now. But I had vowed to follow this experiment through. Knowing that there was so much activity going on around me and not being able to see any of it made me feel faceless and featureless, like a child who in covering his eyes with his hands believes he’s become invisible. I asked the girls if they knew what was happening here and did they know what it looked like. They said they knew what was going on but they could only imagine what it looked like. I tried to tell them what it looked like, and as I spoke, Choden occasionally punctuated my narrative with her polite and somewhat automatic “Oh, ha,” which had the effect of making me think, Why am I telling them this? It occurred to me that maybe they didn’t give a damn what the scene looked like. Maybe they were happy with their own experience of it. But on my previous visit to the temple, I had been so captivated by the visuals of the scene that I selfishly went on describing it to them, perhaps as a way of seeing it again myself. When I finished talking, Yangchen said in her extremely polite way, “Thank you very much for telling us,” and announced it was time for us to enter the temple. With their canes, the girls picked their way carefully through the crowd. “Now we are in the entrance to Jokhang Temple,” Yangchen said. “The ground has changed. You feel it with feet and stick.”

  The toe of my shoe hit something like a step. “Is this a step?” I said.

  “Yah.”

  Hands on my wrists, the girls directed me verbally: Step up, turn here, stop, straight now, spin this prayer wheel, duck your head. Just as they knew the city by heart, they knew the temple by heart. The sounds in the temple seemed closer to our faces than the sounds outside, and each time we moved into a narrow space I could hear the low voices of pilgrims gathering in a tighter circle around us, almost like a whispering in our ears. I heard small bells jingling and a baby howling somewhere ahead of us. I heard again the sound of splashing liquid. Yangchen, who had respectfully stopped her humming as soon as we entered the temple, said, “Now we are in front of statue of Buddha.” How did she know? “We smell the beer the people are giving the Buddha.”

  “Beer?”

  Choden said, “Yah. Some Buddha, they need a beer. But not really. We just pour some beer on them in case it is true! Ha-ha.” It sounded to me as though the pilgrims were hurling entire pints of beer against the Buddha’s plump, laconic face. I smelled something savory cooking.

  “No. That is smell of butter lamp. In the temple there’s many butter lamp. Like a candle made from yak butter. You feel the floor got slippery because of the yak butter spilled?”

  Sure enough, the floor was slippery under my feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a yak,” I said.

  “Not?”

  “No, not. And if I keep this blindfold over my eyes, I never will see a yak.”

  “Ha, Rose,” Yangchen said mirthlessly, because my joke was really not very funny. “Funny you.”

  A woman’s voice spoke roughly and loudly close to my ear, and then she let out a high burst of laughter that sounded like a rooster saying, literally, Cock-a-doodle-doo. I asked the girls what the woman had said.

  “She has asked us are you a blind foreigner or not a blind. We told her you are yes blind!”

  The girls snickered a long time at their own bald-faced lie. I could hear two men whispering behind us. Though I couldn’t see anything, I knew we had drawn a group of spectators. Someone with very rough fingers grabbed my arm and thrust a handful of warm coins into my palm. I was speechless for a moment, and then I said, “Thanks a lot,” because I didn’t know what else to say. As we walked on, I heard pitying tsk-tsking sounds from sighted pilgrims making their rounds of the temple. I imagined they were saying to one another, Look at those three pathetic blindies, and one of them’s a helpless old foreigner who has to be dragged about by the other two.

  I asked the girls what the people were saying about us. They hesitated; I knew they were reluctant to tell me. “Well, they have said we are blind people,” Yangchen said diplomatically. “And that they will pray and we should pray.”

  We went up some stairs and down again. Footsteps followed us. Cymbals, or maybe it was kitchen pots and lids, crashed somewhere off to the right. To the left I heard the sound of a cowbell being vigorously hit with a stick. I heard someone wheezing just behind me, and now, instead of feeling I was in a boat moving over the water, I felt I was moving under the water. I heard a kind of squawking, more bells ringing. Other unidentifiable noises floated spookily by us. It was like passing through a particularly chaotic house of horrors. I kept expecting to be struck in the face by something very unpleasant. Suddenly Choden lifted my hand and put it down on a table scattered with cold coins.

  “Rose, do you feel money?” she said. “Some people make donation here for Buddha.”

  Some of the coins felt sticky, probably with either beer or yak butter. “I will make a donation too,” I said, dropping onto the table the coins that my blindness had moments ago attracted, and then instantly I regretted it, because what if it was bad karma to give away coins that another person had donated to you in pious pity? But if I tried to take the coins back now, it might look as though I were stealing from Buddha, and anyway, how would I be able to tell my coins from the coins that had already been there?

  Choden continued holding my hand as we walked on, and soon she lifted it onto something cold and metallic. “Rose, you hold this!” It was some kind of bar. “Now you turn it around and around. This is prayer wheel.”

  I did as I was told, heard a soft rumbling sound as the huge metal prayer wheel turned, and then I was led up what felt like a steep pile of large rocks and down the other side. It was actually a rough staircase, like a stile.

  “Up and down, up and down,” Yangchen said with amusement.

  I had the sense that we had entered an area that was very dark, but possibly it was simply the effect of the changing sound. Voices began to seem extremely close around us; noises became very clear. I felt as though we were walking inside a large drainpipe. I heard men’s voices singing loudly in prayer, a muttering repetitive kind of droning. We turned more large prayer wheels. High-pitched bells rang out frantically. We went down more stairs, and Yangchen said in an almost incantatory way, “Down, down, down.” As I walked I felt something slender and firm rub against my hand and somehow I realiz
ed that it was the bill of Choden’s baseball cap.

  “Did you take your cap off, Choden?”

  “Yes. When we go in the temple we have to take off our cap head.”

  “From respect,” Yangchen added.

  “Yah, respect.”

  I heard more voices praying in unison and asked the girls what exactly they were saying. “Om mani,” Yangchen said, abbreviating the mantra. “Some of them been praying five and four years.”

  “You mean here in the temple?”

  “Yah and also anywhere.”

  “You mean they pray for that many years without stopping?”

  “No stopping.”

  I asked her what om mani padme hum actually meant.

  “I cannot translate. It is something very old. People who had big sins pray this.”

  The people—it sounded like a group of men—were praying at a fast pace. Tom Waits seemed to be among them, growling and groaning. Yangchen joined the prayer, whispering under her breath—if she couldn’t continually hum a tune while in the temple, at least she could pray, which in Tibetan sounded like just another form of humming. I could feel that the room we were in now was extremely crowded. Several times my feet knocked soundlessly against soft objects that felt like overstuffed pillows, but I soon realized that the objects were actually body parts and that all the people in this room were sitting or lying on the floor. I could hear at a level around my knees a lot of rustling and coughing and limbs shifting amid the thrumming drone of the prayers.

  The girls began to lead me very carefully, Yangchen in front and Choden behind. We walked single file and linked by the hands through the crowd of people. My feet got tangled in something that felt like a plastic grocery bag, and I tripped and fell heavily forward against Yangchen, who in turn stumbled and stepped on one of the sitting people, triggering a loud snarl of protest.

  “Oh! I am falling down onto one grandfather!” Yangchen muttered with distress. “My cane got crazy.”

  Myself, I couldn’t imagine how her cane was finding any reliable pathway here at all. Choden’s cane kept nipping at the backs of my ankles and scratching at my shoes and tapping the insides of my knees, and at one complicated moment, the cane goosed me completely. We bumbled along, leading one another like the Bible’s accursed blind sinners.

  Choden whispered just behind my left ear, “These people are praying something special. It is a special day. They have said they need some money.”

  “They are asking us for money?” I said, incredulous.

  “Asking everyone.”

  “But we are poor blind people,” I said. “We are supposed to be asking them for money.”

  This sent the girls into another unholy fit of giggles. They seemed to find it incredibly funny that I was passing myself off as blind. We staggered forward, giggling and lurching, tripping and groping at one another. There were so many people packed into this small space that the air was hot and humid and smelled of sweat and leather and yak butter. I heard tom-toms thumping at a slight distance and, again, tinkling little bells. A man’s voice said something loudly and, to my ears, roughly beside us. Choden stopped in her tracks, responded to the voice, and then suddenly her voice was rising up from below my right elbow. “The man has said my shoe is not tied correctly.” She had crouched down to tie the shoe.

  As I stood waiting for Choden to be ready so that we could continue stumbling onward through the darkness of our blindness, I wanted to see the people in the room with us. I wanted to see their faces, and particularly their eyes. So much valuable information is reflected in a person’s eyes. How could I know what was really going on here without seeing that? I could imagine it, yes, but as fabulous as imagination is, I thought, there is no substitute for sight.

  Once we were outside again in the square in front of the temple I removed my blindfold and thanked the girls for the tour. Yangchen said, “Now you know how is it to be blind?”

  “I have a much better idea of it, thanks to you.”

  They smiled. It was strange to me now to see their faces after having come to know their personalities without looking at them. They both looked much younger than they sounded. Their damaged eyes were not expressive but their mouths were extremely so; their smiles revealed pride, eagerness, expectation, and excitement. I had forgotten what they were wearing and was surprised again to see the jeans and the plaid shirts. They stood with their hands laid one upon the other on the tops of their white canes, like weary lumberjacks resting on the butts of their axes.

  With my blindfold finally removed, I thought the square looked even brighter than it had the last time I was here. Lhasa is a city of short buildings situated on a flat plain. In the distance, the towering mountains are always visible, blue at their bases and capped with snow. A few misshapen clouds, like crumpled balls of paper, raced low across the impossibly blue tent of the sky. In Lhasa, the sun always seems to be directly overhead. The air is thin and dry and therefore sound carries clearly and easily. The buildings around the square were constructed of mud bricks the size of bread loaves and painted white. Everything in Lhasa looked crisp, if not entirely clean.

  An elderly woman approached us and peered unabashedly at the two blind girls and at me. As the girls and I conversed, the woman’s gaze jumped from my face to theirs in a baffled, figuring way. She squinted in the sunlight and shaded her eyes with her hand, the better to understand what she was seeing. Apprehension clouded her wrinkled face. Finally she asked Yangchen and Choden what language they were speaking. English, they said. The woman put her crooked fingers to her lips and stared at their blind eyes and then at me, confused and concerned. She seemed to be thinking, They are Tibetan and blind and can speak English. I am Tibetan and not blind and I cannot speak English. She looked distinctly as though she thought an elaborate trick was being played on her.

  We headed back toward the Braille Without Borders campus, the girls still leading me by the arms. I asked them to teach me a Tibetan song, a request that delighted Yangchen. “We will teach a song that is easy and very short,” she said, “because otherwise you will have to remember too much and then you are going to become annoying.”

  I explained to Yangchen the grammatical details of the word annoyed. Correcting herself, she said, “And then you are going to be annoyed,” and she began singing her short and easy song. This is what I heard: Mnachntso namaringnanatso dela zongsong. Ngala chongstiyo. Dendo zomngyo. Chongna. When I attempted to sing all this back to her, she and Choden hooted louder and longer than they had all day. I asked them if I had sung it wrong.

  “Well, not so wrong. But, okay, some small mistakes. When we have some party we sing this and we are very happy and we wish each other good things.”

  We practiced the song a bit and as we walked I was struck again by how cheerful and good-natured the two girls were.

  We came upon a small open square where three Chinese soldiers sat playing cards beneath a tree in front of a Tibetan restaurant. China’s presence was everywhere evident in Lhasa. Much of the city’s infrastructure—the roads, the telecommunications—had been built by the Chinese military, and the signs on Lhasa’s shop fronts now displayed more Chinese characters than Tibetan. But many of the Chinese who lived in Tibet seemed to have about them the glum, bored, slightly resentful air of the incarcerated. They looked as though they were just killing time here, waiting until they scraped together enough money to hightail it back to Beijing. The soldiers smoked cigarettes and thumbed lethargically through their fans of worn playing cards.

  A woman wearing an apron appeared in the doorway of the restaurant. She was deftly peeling an apple with a ten-inch meat cleaver. When she saw the two blind girls with their white canes, her face ignited with interest. She turned and called to her coworkers inside the restaurant that a couple of blind kids were passing by. The coworkers quickly appeared in the doorway and sized up the girls literally from head to toe as we approached. They zeroed in on the girls’ faces, staring at their corrupted eye
s, trying to determine what exactly was the matter with them. The expressions on the workers’ faces registered a complicated mix of fascination, fear, pity, disgust, and even a touch of malice. The woman in the apron stood with her hands frozen in the air, apple in one hand, cleaver in the other.

  It’s impossible for one human being to really know what is passing through another’s mind, and so it would be unfair for me to tell you what the restaurant workers were thinking. Yet I felt strongly that, in their eyes and in their expressions, I could read what they were thinking: If those kids can’t see anything, how are they out on the street walking around like the rest of us? It must be awful being them with the world totally dark all the time and not knowing where they’re going and constantly bumping into things. They’ll never be able to ride a motorbike or drive a car or see the television. How would they know if I was to throw a stone at them? I could do it and they wouldn’t know it was me. If I threw a stone, would they react? How can they think if they can’t see the world? Can they talk? If they can hear, they must be able to talk. Maybe they can’t hear either.