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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  How did the women react to the frustration and misfortune? They laughed. They laughed at the driver’s blunt insensitivity. They stood at the bus stop, shoulders back, spines straight, heads high, laughing at their bad luck as they settled in for the usual hour’s wait for the next bus. They exchanged a few light words, smiling and sighing cheerfully in a way that meant it would certainly have been too much to expect this little thing to go their way, that they had gotten ahead of themselves in their ambition to get home quickly, that in fact it was probably much better that they had to wait here in the dirty rain another hour. They patted their sleek hair and stared eagerly up Mahatma Gandhi Road, smiling brightly and with a patience that from my perspective resembled insanity.

  I pictured myself under the same circumstances. The image was not pleasant. Had the same thing happened to me, I would have removed my shoe and heaved it at the driver’s window as he passed, hoping to smash the glass and hit him on his petty, insensitive head. I would have run after the bus, one foot bare, hurling after it every foul word I could think of. And my entire evening would have been thoroughly poisoned by anger.

  I exaggerate. Of course I would not have done exactly that, but I would in my heart have done it. In my heart and mind, I would have condemned the man to a life of suffering and pain, and as we know, it’s the thought that counts. Patience is admittedly not my strong point. I often think that I must be the most impatient person I know aside from two of my brothers. (The third brother is patient to a fault; his patience sometimes makes me impatient.) I regret this. I have consciously tried to become a more patient person, but at fifty-one, I still have not come close to the degree of patience I wish for, have not achieved the superior equanimity I hope for, have not managed to tame a shred of my inherent irritability. I was born impatient and annoyed.

  I fitted the crook of my elbow over my eyes and thought then about the patience the newly blind would have to cultivate, and eventually I fell asleep knowing that I would never be able to achieve that level of patience. I would never be a well-adjusted blind person. I was not even a well-adjusted sighted person.

  I dreamed that night that Sabriye Tenberken was not really blind, that she had only been pretending to be blind. In the dream she reacted with horror to a motorcycle accident we had witnessed, and suddenly I understood not only that she could see perfectly well but that for years she had been conning the world with an elaborate ruse of blindness. In the dream, the revelation was disturbing and impressive. But, of course, it was only a dream. Sabriye was indeed completely blind. The dream was surely an expression of my own wonder at her grace and complete ease with her blindness. The more I got to know her, the more her blindness receded from my consciousness, until it seemed not to be there at all.

  A few hours later I was woken by an unpleasant sensation on my skin, a general stinging all over my body, as though the bedsheets had been scattered with fiberglass particles. I threw the top sheet off but the stinging continued. When it became unbearable, I climbed down the ladder from my bunk and tried the light switch, and mercifully the lights came on. I climbed back up and didn’t have to look hard at the bed before I realized that it was full of tiny red ants. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I stood on the ladder, staring with disbelief. Then I yanked the sheets off the bed, went out to the balcony—where I heard some living thing of considerable heft skitter away from my bare feet—and shook the sheets over the railing as hard as I could. The night was dense but for a distant light glowing feebly but hopefully in a little house beyond the trees. (Every light in Nemom Po tended to look feeble but hopeful.) An unidentified creature clacked below me on the ground. A bird down toward the lake whooped loudly in long rising notes, as if practicing a tonic scale. I heard what could only have been a coconut thumping heavily to the ground from a great height. I went inside, put the sheets back on the bed, found my flashlight, turned the light off, climbed up, lay down again, stashed the flashlight under my pillow the way people in war zones stash guns, and fell asleep for an hour or so before I was awakened again by the same burning on my skin. I sighed very heavily at the ceiling. Then I fished out my flashlight and shone the light on my legs. The bed was again full of flesh-eating ants. Where the hell were they coming from? I got up, spanked the ants off my body, repeated the sheet-shaking exercise, and climbed wearily and with a great sense of futility back into the untrustworthy bed.

  At six in the morning I was awoken by a shockingly shrill noise, like a police whistle being frantically blown in a riot. It was a bird in the mango tree outside my window. I got up, bleary-eyed, and looked around the room. There was a bloodstain on the wall near the bathroom and broken glass on the desk; the inked words in my notebook were dissolved by the water I had spilled, and my cell phone lay squarely in the top right corner of the desk, taunting me. I went into the bathroom to find blood all over the floor, my toothbrush and comb lying in the toilet, and beneath the sink an enormous puddle of ants feasting on spilled cough syrup—the unknown object I had knocked off the sink the night before. Leading directly to the puddle was a long solid line of ants marching boldly into the bathroom through the seam around the small window. I filled a bucket with water and splashed the ants down the shower drain.

  I went out onto the balcony and saw, in the thinly dawning light, still more ants rounding the corner of the building in a dense unbroken river that ran the entire length of the outer wall. I traced the river’s flow under my screen door, across the bedroom floor, up the leg and framework of the bed, and into the upper bunk. I then began to mutter profanities. With a wet rag I wiped the bed and the floor clean, dropping the rag now and then into a full bucket of water to drown the hundreds of ants that clung to it. Then I brought the bucket out to the balcony and splashed its contents against the outer wall of the building, thereby sweeping a good segment of the marching line of ants to the ground. I repeated the process several times, then went around to the staircase at the front of the building and splashed the ants from the opposite end of the wall until the entire dark line of them was obliterated. Somewhere beneath all that moist underbrush visible from my balcony, another freshly hatched army of ants was already organizing, already stampeding its way toward my room, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know that in the jungle of Kerala these lines of intruding ants were famous, renewable, and unending. I didn’t know then that my hydropathic remedy against them would become a daily task (sometimes twice daily), as necessary and natural to me as brushing my teeth and combing my hair.

  I took the mop from my bathroom and went out to my balcony again, where an irate chipmunk clinging to a nearby palm tree was screeching demonically. It was six fifteen; already I was sweating, and dizzy with exhaustion.

  Muttering rather loudly now, I mopped up the water I had spilled all over the balcony floor, and when I looked up for a moment I saw, through the palm trees and the smoky morning mist, Sabriye Tenberken striding briskly down the dirt road toward the institute. I leaned on my mop and watched her move. She had the look of a person who had already accomplished several hours of work and was raring to accomplish a great deal more. She fairly flew, wielding her cane like a broadsword, daring the jungle with it.

  1In 2012 the name of the institute was changed to kanthari.

  The Blind Leading the Sighted

  The first class I taught at the IISE took place at seven in the morning in a bright, clean room in the brand-new classroom building. The walls of the room had been painted butter yellow, and toward their tops was a fanciful dado of stonework. At the center of the room was a long oval table surrounded by chairs. At seven in the morning, it was already hot enough that I had to open the windows wide and switch on the ceiling fan that hung above the table. Through the windows I could see wands of sunlight slanting through the coconut palms and mango trees, teasing the morning mist. Though it was hot, the ground and the shrubbery were still damp with dew. Wherever the sun struck the campus rooftops, wisps of mist danced upward. Standing at the window, I could
smell burning coconut husks, the damp earth, the chemical smell of the wax the classroom floors had been polished with, and, faintly, the muddy water of the lake. Cicadas drummed up a metallic background buzz, like a power saw eating its way through an oak plank; the noise was so constant it had a way of eventually receding entirely from one’s consciousness and then unexpectedly returning full force at moments of drifting attention. Carrion crows crouched on the roof of the dining room shouting their hysterical protest at some invisible menace. Now and then an unidentifiable insect the size of a hummingbird swayed and lurched against the window screens hard enough to cause a small thumping noise. Two slender Indian women, housekeepers, came out of the office building with buckets and mops and glided up the brick walkway toward the dormitory. The women were dressed in saris so colorful and elegant that they looked nothing like poverty-stricken Nemom Po residents on their way to scrub toilets and everything like diplomats on their way to an embassy cocktail party. Beyond them in a garden bed, a skeletal, barefoot, knobby-kneed old man stood hacking at the damp red earth with a pickax. He was naked but for a strip of rag tied around his waist. Every time he raised the heavy ax over his head, his ribs stood out in shocking relief.

  The purpose of this first class was to determine what sort of help the students needed with their basic English. Several of the other students—the South African woman, the Kenyans, the Norwegian woman, Yoshimi the Japanese woman, the Sierra Leonean, the man from Saudi Arabia, and the Ghanaians—were already fluent in English and didn’t need this course in English conversation. I would be working with them on other subjects. But the rest of the students had wildly varying degrees of skill in English and needed a great deal of practice.

  We sat that morning around the long oval table, eleven students and I. Although I had been on campus with them for four days already, I noticed for the first time how clean and well groomed they were, how polite and prompt. Though they had had only a short time to acquaint themselves with the campus, not a single one out of eleven was late to the class. About half of them arrived with white canes, and some carried Braille styli and boards in order to take notes. Jessie, the German girl, and Khom, the Nepalese man, came into the room at the same time with their white canes and both tried to sit down in the same chair. Victor, the largest of the three Liberian men, came in and tried to sit down on top of me, and when he realized what he had done and understood from the sound of my voice that I was the teacher, he was mortified and backed away and said in his strong, ringing voice, “Oh! Auntie Rose, I am sorry. Please forgive me.” The Liberians had immediately begun calling me auntie because, they explained, I was older than they and it would be rude for them to address me simply by my first name. I was older than Victor by a mere five years. Though they knew English well, the Liberians were in the class to work on their pronunciation.

  There was a screen door on the classroom, and several of the students who had never encountered such a door before walked directly into it on their way in, banging their noses on it, not realizing it was there because it had so little mass and reported no echo. After walking into it they put out their hands and felt the screen with expressions of surprise, puzzlement, and curiosity. I had to explain to some of them what the screen was for.

  I asked the students to introduce themselves one by one. Johnson, sitting to my left, raised his chin and began to speak to the ceiling fan, his brown hands laid flat upon a yellow page of Braille notes on the table in front of him. “I am Johnson K. Kortu, blind, from Liberia,” he said. “I am grateful to God that we are counted among the living. My mother is late, but my father is alive. I am thirty-eight years old.”

  Johnson had a gentle self-containment, an aura of stillness that commanded respect. He had a strong brow, a broad flat nose, thick lips, and an enormous, ready smile. His large head, shaved to near baldness, was impressive—it had the perfect roundness of a cannonball. To shade his blind eyes, he wore the huge dark glasses of a rock star. A deep vertical line of a scar appeared at the right side of his forehead, traveled downward in the direction of his right eye, and disappeared behind the dark lenses. There was another smaller scar at his hairline in the center of his forehead. He was dressed in a lime-green suit of lightweight linen; the suit had been so crisply starched and pressed that the creases at the front of his trouser legs were sharp as the folds in a paper airplane.

  Like the other two Liberian students, James and Victor, Johnson was a Christian minister and had adopted a preacher’s emphatic style of public speaking. Many of his sentences began with “By the good grace of Almighty God,” and he addressed the group of listeners as “my people.” Often he repeated a simple sentence for dramatic effect, and like his two compatriots’, his accent was particularly congested and difficult to understand. All three of them had a habit of dropping consonants, particularly the consonant at the end of a word, leaving the previous vowel dangling. The word respect sounded like “respeh,” the word good was “gooh,” bad was “bah,” interaction sounded like “intahasho,” and the word and was a lonely little “a.” Arriving in Trivandrum, the Liberians were impressed to find that India was blessed with electricity. Because of the Liberian civil war, they had not had electricity in their homes for a very long time. They marveled that there was hot water in the dormitory showers, and when Victor—at forty-two the oldest of the three—was introduced to the washing machines in the laundry room, he crouched down and examined one of them very carefully with his hands, praised God once or twice, and asked whether someone could show him (a man who had been washing his clothes by hand for thirty years) how this wonderful machine was to be operated.

  On their first day at the institute, the Liberians, who had never flown in an airplane until that week, told me that the most remarkable event of their journey from Monrovia to Trivandrum was their experience of the moving sidewalk in the Dubai airport. Progressing through the airport toward a connecting flight, they had unwittingly walked onto the moving belt, and within seconds all three of them had fallen down in a jumble of carry-on luggage and white canes. “We did not know what had happened to us!” Victor said, laughing. They had never been on an airplane before, but the experience of flying was as nothing compared to that thoroughly unexpected and inexplicable electronic sidewalk.

  In class now, Johnson continued, speaking slowly, dragging his words out, pausing between sentences, carefully arranging his thoughts but with no contrivance or self-consciousness. Though his style had studied, preacherly flourishes, it was also humble. He seemed to be reliving his experience as he spoke, and the emotion in his voice, a kind of stunned disbelief, was genuine. “In my country, Liberia, if a child is blind, they want to kill that child because he is a burden.” Silence. “What good can come from that child?” Silence. “They teach the blind child nothing. Yes, I tell you! Nothing! They tie a rope to a bush beyond the house and attach the other end to the house. They tell the child, ‘When you have to pee, you hold that rope and follow it to the end, pee there behind the bush and follow the rope back straightly.’” Silence. “The child is like an animal, sitting useless all day. All day!”

  It would try my patience and yours for me to re-create in print what Johnson’s words actually sounded like; I could see from the looks on the faces around the table that quite a few of the students were straining to understand him. Several of them sat with their heads cocked in an effort to hear him better. In addition to his heavy accent, Johnson had a tic of speech that involved the occasional rapid-fire repetition of the conjunction to or and, as though he had got hung up on the word. It was not a stutter but a kind of temporizing. He would say, “You ah respossah to to to to to to to tick kee da chah” (“You are responsible to take care of the child”) or “Come a a a a a a a lah” (“Come and learn”). At moments of extreme incomprehension, I interrupted his monologue and repeated what I thought he had said, and if I was wrong, he corrected me patiently and without offense.

  “In 1996,” he continued, “I was blinded in Monrov
ia when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded against a wall I was standing beside. There was a civil war. Charles Taylor the warlord wanted nothing good for the people, just power for himself.” Silence. “Power for himself! I had stopped going to school because of the war. There was no support for students. I was selling things in the market in Monrovia to make my living. I was twenty-six when I was blinded. The doctor told me, ‘I’m sorry, your sight has been destroyed.’”

  At this Johnson raised his hands over the table, fingers spread wide as if to show that that was it, there was not a thing at all that he could do about it. (Only four of us in the room were able to see his hands, and two of us were seeing them very poorly.) I noticed that his sunglasses were too tight for him; their plastic arms made pronounced indentations in the soft flesh at his temples. The brand name written on the sides of the sunglasses was Ray & Ban. He dropped his hands into his lap and sat back in his chair. “I felt discouraged. Yes! Discouraged. My friends who used to come around me would not come around me again.” He paused and exhaled wearily. “This did cause me to live in a different world—the world of invisibility. My family understood I got blind. Instead of helping me, they tried to send me away to relatives in the rural area. My people, let me tell you.” Silence. “I had a biological brother who used to tease me because I was blind. He said, ‘Brother, you are blind and there is nothing useful you can do now. You must go to the country.’”