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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  In the subsequent months, I would lose count of the number of times Paul Kronenberg cited his good fortune in life, and every time he did, it struck me anew. I had never met a person who felt so lucky with his lot and expressed that feeling so often, and I’d certainly never met anyone who felt lucky to be spending his life in the constant service of others.

  “One thing we’re very concerned with is the development of affordable technology for the blind,” Sabriye said. “Most good technology is really expensive or not even available for people in poor countries. Who in the developing world can afford a Perkins Brailler? Who can afford a Marburg Brailler? Nobody! They cost two hundred and fifty dollars apiece! The less expensive ones are no good. We use a machine in Tibet that’s a shitty version of the Marburg machine. It falls apart if you press on it too hard. It’s not a pleasure to write with that machine. Paul is a mechanical engineer. He’s designing a Braille machine that’s light and small enough to fit in your pocket. We want to get input from our participants here to create new technology for the blind that’s high-quality and low-cost.”

  “There’s a lot you want to do,” I said.

  “Yes,” Sabriye said, turning her blue eyes to me and shrugging her shoulders, “and why not?”

  As I got up to leave that night, Sabriye gave me a flashlight to use on the walk home. I said good night, went out to the road, and set off at a brisk jog to get the return trip over with as quickly as I could. Similar to the way Sabriye wagged the tip of her white cane before her, I shone the beam of light from side to side as I ran, looking for any threat. The sides of the road were littered with palm fronds and bits of coconut shells. I hoped that the sound of my heavy footsteps would scare off the snakes and turkeys, and I thought that if some snake was chasing me, he wouldn’t be able to catch me if I was running. (When I finally saw my first rat snake, I realized that even if I sprinted, I could not outrun it. I had been walking on the main road near Vellayani Temple amid scores of people heading home on foot after work when I turned my head and saw an enormous, sinister mustard-green snake the thickness of an engorged fire hose wriggling vigorously toward me across an empty lot. The snake, nine or ten feet long, was moving at what I can describe only as an urgent pace, as if being chased. It slowed suddenly when it reached the hot pavement and then glided its way idly across the crowded road amid the feet of the pedestrians. Appalled, not quite believing my eyes, I stopped in my tracks. But when I saw that the snake evoked no reaction whatever from the Indian crowd—the people stepped blithely, some of them shoeless, over or around this slithering, glistening mass of muscle—I began walking again toward the snake with my heart in my throat. I continued walking because I suffer the sin of pride; I am loath to reveal that I am afraid of a physical threat. I simply refused to be the only person in the crowd with her palms to her cheeks screaming, Mother of God, don’t you people see that the biggest, grossest snake in the world is about to wrap itself around your ankles? So, I carried on, doing what the Indians did. I made sure to show no emotion whatever, although every inch of my being was recoiling in primal disgust and fear. The snake disappeared into the long grass on the other side of the road but stayed horribly in my mind for days afterward.)

  The state of Kerala suffers much the same poverty, overpopulation, pollution, disorder, and general social mayhem that the rest of India suffers, but Kerala has the added hardships of a rampant wildlife and an overbearing climate. To my mind, Kerala is extremely India. When people asked me where I was going to be in India and I responded, “Kerala,” they inevitably said, “Oh, Kerala is beautiful!” Kerala may be beautiful, but I am unable to see the beauty. I have never been in an environment so antithetical to my idea of pleasing, so far from my concept of hospitable, so far from my notion of beautiful. Much of my discomfort arose from the heat and humidity. On most days in Trivandrum, the temperature was about 92 degrees, with a humidity of 88 percent. This is nothing like the heat of Egypt or Greece or even Death Valley or the Dead Sea. In those hot places the heat is sharp and clean, like an elegant knife blade that cuts you in a mercifully swift and tidy fashion so that by nightfall you forget you’ve been wounded. Here, the heat is not just constant but incontinent. It is pervasive and sloppy, suffocating as a pillow placed in boiling palm oil and then pressed firmly over the face. It seeps into every crevice and corner and adheres to whatever it touches. It creeps into the mind. It fouls the atmosphere. In Trivandrum, after one’s clothes have been hanging in the closet for a few days, they begin to smell powerfully musty. There were days at the IISE when the afternoon heat and humidity were so great that I felt I could not breathe in my room, and at those times, I headed out to the balcony in a pathetic, reflexive way, telling myself, Go outside, it will be better there. But unlike the thin air of Tibet, which was always the same, outside or in, the air in Trivandrum was always worse outside. Outside, there seemed to be less air, and the air on my balcony usually smelled like broiled urine because the outhouse of the family of five who lived just over the school’s boundary wall was situated extremely close to my bedroom. And the air was often dosed with smoke from the coconut shells and palm fronds and assorted domestic waste the local village families were in the habit of burning outside their huts.

  In Trivandrum, the sky always had a yellowish tint, even on the clearest, sunniest day, and a great weariness seemed to hang over everything. The buildings along the main road going into the city looked senile and decrepit. And everywhere I looked in Trivandrum, I was, strangely, reminded of death. Nothing looked fresh. On an overcast day, even the clouds looked sad and exhausted and seemed to droop onto the tops of the buildings. The tropical birds didn’t sing a pretty melody in the way of birds that I was familiar with. Instead, they shrieked and howled like women being stabbed with a carving knife. They wailed and whooped as though irate and besieged. Even the local chipmunks had a savage streak. When angered, they raised their tails at you in a threatening way and barked maniacally, and you knew for certain that if one of those creatures managed to get within an inch of your face, it would surely claw your eyes out. In the morning, carrion crows by the score made sharp, extremely loud retching sounds. Sometimes they were so loud I had to close the windows in order to hear myself think above the racket.

  People always said that Lake Vellayani, which abutted the school, was beautiful. To my eyes, the only thing about it that was beautiful was that it was a wide-open space, a merciful break in the claustrophobia of coconut, banana, and mango trees. Also, it did allow a breeze to sweep through the west side of the campus. When I first looked at the lake, I thought, Is it really a lake? Or is it just a swamp? The lake water was an opaque mud-brown. There were snakes in it and water rats and leeches, so I heard, and frogs that were frighteningly large. And where the lake was not covered with lily pads the size of manhole covers, it was blanketed with water bugs pullulating on the surface. And although I don’t think I ever saw one, I was told there were mongooses there. I knew that the mongoose is a red-eyed, foxlike thing with a thousand carpet tacks for teeth. When someone informed me that the mongoose is our friend because he eats cobras, all I could think was that if a mongoose is bold enough and clever enough to eat a cobra, he’s clever enough to eat me. One day I saw at the edge of the lake an enormous brown ratlike thing with a wrinkled, smashed-in sort of face, like a Chinese shar-pei. I had never seen such a creature before and never did determine what it was. At certain times of the day dragonflies by the dozen hazed the surface of the lake. The dragonfly is a beautiful insect, but in numbers like this, they concerned me. I would see these flickering, flashing droves and think, You could be overpowered by them and get your nose chewed off.

  I sound like a fearful person. I am not, truly, but I am a firm believer in one novel thing at a time and everything in its place. Kerala’s wildlife was ever present, seemed to come at me all at once, even into my bedroom, multiplying before my eyes. It was attention grabbing and distracting. In her poem “This Is Disgraceful and Abominable,�
�� the poet Stevie Smith barked at her readers, “Animals are animals and have their nature / And that’s enough, it is enough, leave it alone.” Gladly I would leave it alone, if only it would leave me alone.

  I ran all the way back to the gate of the school, deposited Sabriye’s flashlight in her office, and returned to my room at the end of the dormitory. The dormitory rooms were connected by an outside walkway that was covered with a kind of porch roof, rather like the design of a motel. My bedroom was a pleasant, comfortable, square space with yellow walls and red terra-cotta tiles on the floor. It was appointed with a small armoire, a desk, two chairs, and a bunk bed set against one wall. There was a large electric fan affixed to the ceiling and two smaller fans that had been mounted on the walls, one just above the top bunk, where I slept. The bathroom was utilitarian but clean and bright. A screen door opened onto a small balcony that looked out over the rear of the building to the plot of coconut and mango trees just beyond the school’s wall, and a large window on the opposite wall opened over the outdoor staircase that led down to the ground floor. There were screens on the windows. I had everything I needed.

  I put on the light and the ceiling fan and sat at my desk, preparing to make some notes before going to bed. As I was reaching for my notebook, all the lights on the campus went out. I had been informed that scheduled half-hour power cuts would occur every evening in this part of Trivandrum, a blunt energy-saving measure geared to ensure there was enough electricity to go around. Though the area looked like a wild jungle to me, there were thousands upon thousands of people living around the lake, and the supply of electricity was obviously not meeting the demand. When the lights go out at night in Vellayani, whatever room you happen to be in goes not just dark but completely black. It is like having a canvas sack pulled over your head.

  I patted my hands around my desk, searching for my cell phone, thinking to use its illuminated screen as a way to find my own flashlight, which was still at the bottom of my suitcase. In my clumsy search, I smashed a water glass, dumping water over the pages of my open notebook. I cut the heel of my palm on a shard of the broken glass and failed to find the cell phone, although I knew it was within arm’s reach. I could feel the sticky wetness of blood running down my fingers. I stood up and went across the floor in the direction of the bathroom with my hands held out in front of me to protect myself from what I couldn’t see. I had occupied this room for only three days and was still not entirely familiar with its contours. My hands met the wall. As I slid my bare feet across the floor in the direction of the bathroom, I smashed my big toe badly on the foot of the armoire. Limping now, I felt my way along the wall, entered the bathroom, moved to where I knew the sink was, and in groping for the faucets, I knocked my toothbrush and comb into the open toilet beside the sink. I knew they had fallen into the toilet by the taunting little tinkling sound they made against the porcelain. Eager to wash my bloody hand, I turned the faucets on. No water. (I wasn’t yet aware that on this campus, no electricity meant no water pump and often no water.) In taking my hand away from the faucet I knocked something else onto the floor but wasn’t sure what it was. I crouched down, patted the floor, couldn’t find anything, and as I moved to get up again I banged my head on the sink. I turned from the sink, shuffled to the wall beside the toilet, ran my fingers down it until I found the toilet-paper dispenser, and wrapped my hand with paper. With timid, mincing little steps and my hands held up before my face (which, I realized after a while, was tensed into a grimace of self-defense; not only that, but I was walking with my head bowed so fearfully deeply that my chin was literally pressed against my chest), I caromed back to the desk chair and sat there in the mounting heat. (No electricity, no ceiling fan. And, yes, unlike in most places in the world, the heat in Trivandrum, which by sunset is already plenty unbearable, seems to continue to mount for a few hours after the sun goes down, as if spitefully proving that it can.)

  Fuming both physically and mentally, I blinked at the darkness and asked myself how I would get through three months of this. Obviously, I considered the fact that this was what it was like to be blind, that for the majority of the people who were living in this building with me, this inability to see anything, this engulfing darkness, this groping around one’s own desk to find a book or a glass was the way it was all the time.

  I sat still and tried to accept the darkness, imagined that I was blind, tried to imagine this darkness as a permanent fact of my life, to believe that this was all I would ever see again. The room seemed to hum and the darkness to press in against me gently from all sides. If I were blind, how would I know day from night? How would I have any sense of time or distance? How would I know anyone? Just at that time I was reading a book called Touching the Rock, by a British professor of religion named John Hull who had completely lost his sight in his forties. One sentence in the book had stopped me cold: “It is three years now since I have seen anybody.” The thought of being in that position bothered me terribly. Hull had a wife and two children and many colleagues he worked with daily. But three years had passed and he had not seen anyone. A paragraph later he wrote, “It distressed me considerably when I realized I was beginning to forget what Marilyn and Imogen [his wife and daughter] looked like.” Forgetting the appearance of people you loved was, to my mind, even worse than not seeing anyone. I had said out loud to the book, “God, I would die.” And then, a few pages later, Hull wrote, “I find that I am trying to recall old photographs of myself, just to remember what I look like. I discover with a shock that I cannot remember.…Is this one of the reasons why I often feel I am a mere spirit, a ghost, a memory?” and it scared me so badly I had to put the book down and focus on something else.

  If given the news that I was truly permanently blind, I’m certain that I would become completely hysterical, like the pitiful soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front. I, too, would sob and scream pathetically, I can’t see! I can’t see! And then I would become furious and try to fight the blindness somehow, literally pushing at whatever was around me in the belief that if I pushed enough, I’d be able to see again. And when that failed and I had exhausted myself, I would become inconsolable. And then utterly despondent. I would give up fighting and beg for the relief of death.

  Being blind was too difficult to imagine, too far beyond my conceptual reach. I tried to relax in the chair, and the more I gave in to the dark, the less the pressure felt like a threat and the more it became like an embrace. I was sweating profusely. I placed my hand on the desk to position myself in relation to something, to anchor myself. By now I was well aware how graceful and efficient, calm and patient the blind were, though they lived in perpetual darkness. I stood up and decided to see how gracefully, patiently, calmly, and efficiently I could put myself to bed in the complete dark.

  I did not get terribly far that night before I banged my forehead smartly on the edge of my bunk bed and shouted “Fuck it!” so loudly that my two completely blind neighbors from the room next to mine came running to my screen door to check on me. And how quickly they came running!

  One of them, Yoshimi, who was Japanese, said apprehensively, “Rose? Are you all right?”

  Embarrassed, I said, “I’m fine, thank you, girls. I just banged my head in the dark.”

  “Bleeding?” Kyila said. Kyila was from Tibet.

  “No, just painful and annoying.”

  Yoshimi laughed. “I bang my head too.”

  “And I bang my head also,” Kyila said supportively.

  “Yes,” I said, “but do you lose your temper the way I do when you bang your head?”

  Yoshimi said in her nearly flawless English that she could not afford to lose her temper all day long every time she did something clumsy.

  Kyila said, “And also we are so used to this.”

  Their voices were warm and amused and somehow sweetly innocent coming at me out of the night. Their concern was genuine. I said, “We had a power cut. I’m not very good in the dark.”

  “We k
now it,” Kyila said.

  I assured them that I was all right and that they could go back to bed.

  “We were not in bed,” Yoshimi said.

  “You weren’t? What were you doing?”

  “Reading,” Yoshi said.

  “Organizing my clothes,” Kyila said.

  “And so, Rose, if everything is okay, then good night.”

  I said good night to the girls, and, since I could not read, sort my clothes, or do anything else productive in the dark, I went to bed with my hand wrapped in toilet paper, because I couldn’t find the Band-Aids I had brought with me.

  I lay in the narrow bed, roasting and unwashed, and realized that when in the village of Nemom Po, one must nightly do as the blind do. One must fumble around one’s bedroom, banging one’s shins and knocking one’s head and spilling water, and while doing it, one must show a blind person’s patience, which it occurred to me was akin to an Indian person’s patience.

  The afternoon before, I was walking in the rain up Mahatma Gandhi Road in Trivandrum at four forty-five when I saw three beautifully dressed women coming out of an office building after a long day of work. They began to make their way up the street when suddenly they spotted a city bus coming toward them, and from the way they reacted at the sight of it, I understood that this was the perfect bus, the one bus that would get them home swiftly and without need of a transfer or a long walk at the end of the line. And what luck to have found it so quickly! They looked profoundly delighted, a delight that electrified their pretty brown faces. They began to run toward the bus stop at the end of the block, waving six arms at the driver to stop him as he drove past, their copper bangles rattling up their forearms to their narrow elbows. They shouted and gestured and smiled eagerly, their white teeth flashing in confidence, as though the driver were a dear old friend. But the driver reached the stop before they did, collected some passengers, and then stepped on the accelerator and roared off just as they arrived, choosing to ignore them as they knocked on the door of the bus.