Johnson clasped his hands, fingers intertwined, on the table before him, and for a moment he looked like a handcuffed prisoner. “But I refused to go. I said to my brother, ‘If you want me to go to the country, you must force me. You must tie me up and carry me there! Yes! I say, tie me up!’”
The two other Liberians at the end of the table, also wearing very large dark glasses, their faces shining in the morning heat, supported Johnson with murmurings of “Praise God!”
This was more of a personal introduction than I was expecting, but I had no desire to stop it. I was interested in the story and drawn in by Johnson’s style, and I could see by the expressions on his classmates’ faces that they were too. He went on: “My brother said to me, ‘One thing about you, brother Johnson, you have a big mouth!’”
Several of the students laughed at this, and hearing them laugh, Johnson smiled, encouraged. He stated gravely that he had refused to go to the country and so was rejected by his family. He ended up begging for food and money on street corners. Eventually he discovered that there was a school for the blind in Monrovia. He stayed in the city and attended the school, determined to finish the education that had been interrupted. Having completed his education, he began to teach and earn money, and eventually the same brother who had taunted him came to him seeking financial help. Johnson said, “I saw it in my heart to help my brother.”
At this, Pynhoi, a tiny, cheerful, heavily bespectacled young woman from northeast India who had been sitting literally on the edge of her seat throughout Johnson’s story, suddenly blurted out at the top of her voice, “Oh! Such a strong man that is!”
At the alarming and unexpected sound of Pynhoi’s voice, the two Liberians at the far end of the table chimed in in agreement: “Praise God, he is strong!”
Startled by their response, Pynhoi covered her small face with her hand and ducked down in her seat. Then, slowly straightening up, she raised her glasses higher on her nose with the tip of her index finger and strained to see the Liberians with her feeble eyes. She seemed delighted to have elicited a response from these two Africans. She turned to Johnson and said expectantly, “Mr. Jason, you can please continue that tale.”
But Johnson seemed to have wound his story down. “That, my people, is my tale until today. I came to International Institute to continue my education so that one day I can help the blind people of Liberia.”
“Praise God,” Victor said.
Swept up, Pynhoi said, “Praise!”
I thanked Johnson and asked Jessica, sitting beside him, to introduce herself. Jessica was a twenty-six-year-old from Germany. Born prematurely, she had suffered retinopathy, a common problem in premature babies caused by an underdevelopment of blood vessels in the retina and often exacerbated by too much oxygen in the incubator. Jessica was blind by the time she was a few weeks old. Jessica’s English vocabulary was good but she had had very little practice speaking. She spoke haltingly and in a monotone, like a child reading aloud, separating each word from the next with a short pause. She was self-deprecating and often made references to how stupid she was, which in fact she was not. Within a week of meeting her, I understood that she was one of the most intelligent and original students at the school.
Now Jessica said, “I am Yessie from Germany and my English is not so well. I am sorry. Where I lived in Germany, blind children were not allowed to go to normal kindergarten. I was sent to a boarding school when I was three years. They beat me. My parents both were working. My father was an engineer on the sea, driving boats. My mother worked in a bank.”
Jessica went on to say that eventually she was integrated into a regular school, where she had to work harder than the other students because she was blind. The other students didn’t want to mingle with her because of her blindness. And because she was the only blind student, she was treated as special. “For me it was a big problem to have this special position,” she said. “I did not want to be special or different. I wanted to be normal, like everyone else. I have made a really good examination at that school. I was the best in the class, but I did not want to be the best. Sometimes I wanted to be lazy and be like the other students and have fun. I am a little bit juvenile and I am like a child and I want to relax.”
Jessica’s hair was the exact pale yellow-blond of corn silk and was cut in a jagged shag around her face. Her face was pale and long and narrow, and her eyes had a slightly Asian slant. Her left eye wandered freely as she talked. She was thin, with long arms and legs, and she had already taken to going shoeless around the campus. As she spoke she dangled her hands limply above the table, like the paws of a begging dog, and stirred them in the air in small explanatory circles. Jessica’s personality—her frankness, good humor, and unpredictability—made her entirely appealing. There was a refreshing mood of insubordination about her. She had a habit of grinning, ducking her head, and raising her shoulders as if in self-defense whenever she tossed out some provocative or witty line.
“Most disabled persons in Germany are unemployment,” she said. “It’s because of many people’s opinion that the disabled people can’t live independent life and can’t work accurately. They think we are retarded.” She grimaced and made a moronic lowing sound to illustrate for us the essence of abject mental retardedness, then she laughed with her white fingers to her mouth. “Am I like this? No! I think it is very important that people change their attitudes about disabled people. You know what I mean? They have to have more understandment about the blind and disabled. It is trickical for a blind person to express to a sighted person how she can live alone and take care of herself. So, my English is not very well. You will think, Oh, so stupid girl that is! Maybe she really is retarded. I am sorry my English is not better. Okay, and that is my introduction.”
When she had finished talking Jessie dropped her hands into her lap and lowered her head until her chin was resting on her chest, and suddenly she appeared to have passed out. The breeze from the ceiling fan made the fine hair on her head twitch. When I thanked her for telling us about herself, she did not raise her head but lifted a hand in the air and rotated it from the wrist in a signaling way, as if to say, It was my pleasure, and I am actually not unconscious. I am still with you. Carry on.
Next it was Pynhoi’s turn. On being asked to speak, Pynhoi slid farther forward in her seat until she hardly seemed to be sitting on it at all. “Pynhoi Tang. That is my name. And really I am coming from a small village in Shillong Province, north and east part of India. And okay, so I am twenty-three years old.”
She did not look twenty-three. She looked fourteen. She had the body of a child and she dressed in the utilitarian cotton trousers and collared shirt of a Catholic schoolboy. Her name was pronounced “Pin-hoy.” She spoke without pause or punctuation—the rapid-fire clatter of a sewing machine. The night before, she told me that when she was very young her family had been nomads, constantly moving and sleeping in a bamboo hut with a grass roof. Wherever they went they simply threw a new hut together and moved in. They survived by eating whatever animals her father could catch and kill with a bow and arrow, a spear, or, sometimes, with his bare hands. Cheerfully she rattled off for me the various types of animals she had eaten in her life: tiger; monkey; wild pig; squirrel; rat; some sort of forest rat that she could not specifically define except to say that it had a large nose; deer; horse; snakes of many kinds; dog; cat; frog; forest hen (also not precisely definable); turtle; lizard; rabbit; this; that; another thing; crow, turkey, sparrow, parakeet, and really any bird at all except eagle. When I asked why they didn’t eat eagle, she said, “Because we doon ting dat bahd is healty.”
Pynhoi went about with an expectant, ever-present smile on her face, as if constantly prepared to be surprised and entertained. Her pale brown skin was smooth as a toddler’s but for a small dark mole on her left cheek. She wore her hair in a ponytail that swept down her back. “And okay so I had lot of trouble with my eyes, my seeing was not good since I was young, and I had one teacher who
help me in school but after grade six no one help me so I stop school. My parents were poor. And teachers not patient and that is the problem with them. They must respect what life we have, but there is too many in the villages who don’t get help because of disability. So, there comes my mind thinking, What about the others who don’t get help? Some of the parents, it seem they don’t like their children because they are disability. And when I finish my study I want to help the disability, and I never dream that I would go so far from my home place and come to here in Vellayani. And I am so happy to meet all you new my friends coming from the far places of the world.”
Pynhoi laid her arms flat on the table and peered around the room at her new friends, beaming gamely behind the dense lenses of her glasses. She seemed hardly able to believe her good fortune. “Oh, I am so happy,” she said with irrepressible sincerity and appreciation.
I thought Pynhoi was finished and moved to invite Gompo Gyentzen to speak. But Pynhoi was not finished. She went on, telling us that when she got a bit older she went to an integrated boarding school with sighted students and that occasionally the sighted students used to test her strength and mind because she was blind. “It was difficult,” Pynhoi said. “I had to show that I was able to do things. I had a friend, she want to cook something, so she just took the basin from me. I told her don’t do this for me. This is not your, it is mine, and she beat me, and the next day when she went to beat me again, I just hold her and squeeze her there.” One day when the sighted students were playing basketball, Pynhoi asked to play with them. They told her she couldn’t play because she couldn’t see. “I said, ‘Let me see if I can play.’ But they pull me down and trap me. And they said, ‘How can she go to college, she is totally blind!’”
Pynhoi peered vaguely around the room, not smiling now. Again I thought she was finished, and I began to speak. But, no, she was not yet finished.
“Not only I finish college but I come here to Trivandrum. When I came traveling to Trivandrum last week I am in the airport and I try to make a phone call in the airport but I had no coins so I beg one rupee off of each person I meet in the airport and my friend who came to say good-bye to me tell me, ‘Pynhoi, by time you arrive at Trivandrum, you will be a blind beggar!’”
She tittered at the notion. “So I find enough rupees to make the phone call. Then, while I am talking on phone, the airline man at the gate is waving to me to come along, my plane is leaving, but I cannot to see well enough him, then finally he come to me and grab my arm and pull me and because I think he is kidnap me I shout—”
She gripped the edge of the table to brace her little body and demonstrated for us exactly the piercing way in which she shouted Help! Help! at the top of her lungs. All the chins around the oval table lifted a little higher at the shocking sound. At the punch line of her own story, Pynhoi began to laugh so hard she doubled over and gasped for breath, and the sound of her tee-hee-ing and snorting and gasping was so amusing and infecting that the others began to laugh too. Pynhoi had worked herself up into a frenzy with her rambling monologue. She was helpless with laughter. She had to hold on to her glasses to keep them from falling off her face. Tears of mirth streamed down her little round cheeks. She had started to tell us a little about herself and before we knew it, she had thrown in the basin and the basketball and the kidnapping too. This, we would soon come to learn, was her habit. Once Pynhoi began to talk, she picked up speed and found it difficult to stop. She talked so much and so fast and veered off on so many tangents that it was easy to fade out while she was talking, not unlike the natural human response to the thrum of the cicadas, and yet often when you faded back in you realized with a start that what she was saying had great logic to it, a moral, a worthy punch line, or simply something very poignant. Her rambling had a touching coherence.
Above all, Pynhoi had the gift of being able to laugh at herself. She said now, “Okay and now I am talk so much, oh my God,” and sat back in her chair, clearly resolved to keep quiet. But she could not quite do it; she was compelled to add one more thing. “And my maddah sometime scold me for my loud voice. She say, ‘Doddah, your voice so loud and sharp it is like a sword! It can cut down a tree with one chop!’”
Her classmates laughed, and Jessie lifted her head from her chest to tell Pynhoi, “Yah, Pynhoi, so I think your mother is right!”
Pynhoi grinned and sank lower in her seat.
Gyentzen, sitting beside Pynhoi, was the thinnest person I had ever seen walking upright, thinner even than the Indian gardener outside the building. He was so thin that he could wear a wristwatch strapped above his elbow. Beneath his cotton T-shirt, his shoulders looked like the wings of a wooden coat hanger. He had a large face with a strong jaw and pronounced cheekbones, a handsome Tibetan icon of a face. Gyentzen was shy and quiet and completely blind. His eyes were shrouded behind a dense white film, and his thick dark hair, cut short, was like a glossy fur hat upon his head. That morning he sat holding hands with Kyila, who was sitting beside him. He and Kyila had attended Sabriye’s Braille Without Borders school in Lhasa and had essentially grown up together. They were not lovers, nor were they siblings. They simply had a habit of holding hands or linking arms, as blind acquaintances often do.
I had met Gyentzen once before in Tibet and I mentioned that now to the class. I asked Gyentzen to tell us something about himself. He smiled and lowered his head and moved closer to Kyila until their shoulders were touching. He remained silent, grinning into his lap. Finally he said, “My name is Gompo Gyentzen. You can say Gyentzen. And…” He made a fist of his right hand and dropped it five or six times into his left palm. “And my name means ‘victory.’”
Kyila, whose blind eyes were perpetually crossed, leaned slightly away from Gyentzen to listen to him.
“I come from Tibet,” he said. “And”—his fist fell into his left palm again, an expression of apprehensiveness—“and twenty-two years old.” He paused, visibly searching for the next word. “Now I am in India.” He paused again, let out a dry laugh of surrender, laid his bony forearms on the table, lowered his chin onto them, closed his damaged eyes, pressed his lips together, and stopped talking completely. The sudden silence allowed the whine of the cicadas and the vomiting of the crows to fill up the room.
Kyila tilted closer to Gyentzen now, her mouth hanging open, her oval face utterly frozen, waiting with the cocked and concentrated appall of a woman crouched behind her bedroom door listening to the sounds of the burglar downstairs. She waited in vain, for nothing else was forthcoming from Gyentzen. The silence went on long enough that finally Kyila gave him a gentle nudge with her elbow; their friendship was so intimate that clearly she felt a personal responsibility for his performance. Gyentzen sat up and whispered something furtive to her in Tibetan; she whispered back with a look of disbelief on her face.
I asked Gyentzen if he was finished. He dropped his fist onto his thigh in frustration and chagrin, sighed through his teeth. “Finish.”
Gyentzen obviously spoke English poorly, and having to perform in front of ten colleagues had paralyzed him. Kyila’s face was clouded with disappointment. Since I already knew something about him and had read the introductory essay that accompanied his application to the institute, I asked his permission to tell the class a bit more about him. He was relieved. “Okay, yes.”
Gyentzen had lost his sight at age nine and was told that the cause of his blindness was bad karma and therefore he would not be able to do anything with his life. His parents were farmers. By chance he met Paul and Sabriye when he was twelve. At Braille Without Borders he learned Tibetan, Chinese, mathematics, computer technology, and Braille. After graduating from BWB he attended a regular school with three other blind students; they were the first blind children ever to be integrated into a mainstream school in Tibet. Upon finishing regular school, he took a job at BWB teaching and printing Braille books for the students. He won a scholarship to study for a month in Thailand, and he and Kyila had gone on a very difficult climb
ing expedition in the Himalayas with an American climbing team, Paul and Sabriye, and some of the other blind students from Braille Without Borders. An American production company had filmed the expedition and made a documentary about it called Blindsight. At one surprising, highly entertaining point in the film, Gyentzen had sung an absolutely raucous Tibetan folk song at the top of his voice.
Kyila giggled, remembering this, and whispered to Gyentzen again. When Gyentzen comprehended what I had just said about his song, his face ignited in a glowing confusion of delight and embarrassment.
“And finally,” I said, “I believe Gyentzen’s dream is to establish a Braille publishing house and Braille library in Lhasa. Is that correct, Gyentzen?”
He nodded his head and ventured, “That is correct.”
“Okay, then, Kyila, would you like to tell us something about yourself?”
Kyila Tsering was a slight, ponytailed young woman in jeans and a T-shirt. She was the one in Lhasa who had passed me in a hallway of the BWB school and determined who I was solely by the way I smelled. Kyila was now twenty-four. She had been born near Mount Everest in a village of eight hundred people. “My father, me, and my train brothers are all blind,” she began.
I interrupted her. “Sorry, your what brothers?”
“Train.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Trains. Two brothers born at the same time.”
“You mean twins?”
“Yah. Trains.”
I asked Kyila to say twenty. She said, “Trenty.” I asked her to say twinkling. “Trinkling.” She couldn’t pronounce the letter w, nor did she know what the letter w looked like. Jessie raised her head to confess that she, too, did not know the shape of a w. James, one of the Liberians at the end of the table, said, “Me too. I don’t know how the double-u looks.”
For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Page 18