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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  “It isn’t just a snake,” I said. “It’s a cobra. Please, all of you, move.”

  At this, a few of them lifted the tips of their canes off the ground, but still they did not turn and leave. Why weren’t they running away screaming, the way I was on the verge of doing if they didn’t hurry up and move? They just stood looking puzzled and apprehensive and even a little bored. I began to push and herd them off, saying, “Go! Now! Move back to the buildings immediately!”

  When they heard the distress in my voice and felt my hands on their backs, they began to skitter and stumble up the footpath. The noise frightened the snake, of course, and it disappeared into the grass. I stood on the path staring at that spot in the grass, waiting for it to return or for some other unbelievable creature to emerge. I was afraid to look away, but I had to in order to see where my class had ended up. They were huddled at the top of the footpath, silently clutching their canes and facing in five different directions. I knew that if they had been able to see that snake, they would not have been standing there like that. They would have been long gone and safely indoors. But most of them had no idea what a snake looked like, let alone a cobra. All they knew was that snakes were something that sighted people found deeply disturbing. They had to take our word for it. But then I too had had to take someone’s word for it. Never having been bitten by a snake or strangled by a boa constrictor, I had had to take someone’s word for what those creatures could do to me. Many of the things that sighted people fear, we fear not from firsthand experience but because we’ve been warned. It is no different with the blind.

  I looked back at the grass, regretting that I was the only one who had seen the famous, awful, unbelievable creature. And what sighted person would believe that I saw it? Who would believe a fabular story about a bunch of blind people being chased by a cobra? It made me feel lonely to realize that I had no fellow witness. As frightened as I was, I was delighted to have seen it and a little disappointed that the snake was gone. I looked from the grass to the students and back. Was it safe to sit down there again? I wasn’t eager to risk it. “Well, okay. I think he’s gone,” I said. “Let’s just go to a classroom and finish our work.”

  As we went up the path, the Africans eagerly offered advice about how to keep snakes away. “Put garlic around the lake!”

  “Spray Cuprinol on the grass!’’

  “Burn a lorry tire nearby! They do not like that rubber smoke, it is said.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but neither would we. Just beat the grass with your white canes the next time you come down here, and the snakes will run off. They’re more afraid of you and your canes than you are of them.”

  One Saturday afternoon, a couple of other teachers and I organized a class trip into the city on the public bus. The bus stop was a quarter of a mile away from the campus, on the main road. Eight or nine students and two teachers, Nora and Isabel, and I set off down the narrow Nemom Po lane on foot. Nora was German, and Isabel was Spanish and French—both were smart, extremely hardworking, empathetic, and strong. Robbie, who had traveled a great deal in his life and who was comfortable navigating in unknown surroundings, led the pack with his white cane. Robbie had lost his vision to a brain tumor when he was not yet two years old, and his father had abandoned the family. He was highly intelligent, a bit of a loner, a talented and imaginative writer, and, after living in Ireland for five or six years, where he worked for a radio station, he spoke English every bit as well as I did. Like Jessie, the other German student, Robbie could be moody: one minute laughing and eagerly participating, the next minute defensive, superior, sullen, and aloof. He had long frizzy hair that he parted in the middle. His face was soft and pale and fleshy, and in repose he sometimes looked woeful and beset. His eyes appeared completely healthy, but his eyelids often drooped in a way that made him look drugged. He had a reddish mustache, a small shapely mouth, and very red lips. Robbie was tall and nearly as thin as Gyentzen, with long legs, a high waist, and a short torso. He often adopted the Indian style of dress, wrapping a paisley-patterned cotton cloth around his waist instead of wearing trousers, and on his feet he wore black rubber Crocs. The Indian skirts exposed his pale thin legs. Of all the students at the institute, Robbie had the most impressive scars on his shins, perhaps a result of his fearless eagerness to venture into the world, move about, and have adventures.

  James and Johnson followed behind Robbie that day, their white canes examining the pavement. It pleased and amused me to see these two big family men holding hands as they walked, with their heads lifted high, as if to smell their surroundings. Behind them, Yoshimi and Victor, also with canes, walked arm in arm. Yoshimi was pretty, olive-skinned, petite, and had long thick glossy black hair cut in blunt bangs across her forehead, a style that seemed to me quintessentially Japanese. She was fond of frilly blouses, short skirts, and modest high heels. Yoshimi’s eyes were pinched shut most of the time. She had plump round cheeks and smiled easily, revealing strong, evenly shaped white teeth. She was brilliant, capable, diligent, always good-natured, versed in all the latest computer technology, and after studying for one year in the United States she spoke English better and with less of an accent than any Japanese person I had ever met. Arm in arm, little Yoshimi and the enormous, nearly unintelligible Victor were a highly unlikely pair. I wondered as I walked behind them whether they would have been walking so easily together if they had been able to see each other. They were good friends.

  Khom, who had forgotten his white cane, walked behind Gyentzen with his hand on Gyentzen’s shoulder. And Lucy and Jayne straggled at the rear in broad-brimmed hats. They walked in an ambling way, talking all the while.

  As we passed through the village, local people working in their yards dropped what they were doing, came to the edge of the road, and stared. When was the last time they saw a parade of blind people walking down their little road? And not just blind but African, Japanese, albino, Tibetan, Nepalese, and European. The sight was so unusual that some of the local children backed away as we neared, and one very small one burst into tears. A man and wife came out of their house to watch. The man pointed at his own eyes and said to me, “Blind school?” I said, “Yes.” A barefoot woman smiling toothlessly and carrying a bucket of earth on her head sat down on the raised root of an enormous banyan tree to watch us go by. A couple of chickens skittered across the road in front of us. Crows glided in and out of the mango trees. The road was overhung with tree branches, palm fronds, impossibly tangled electrical wires, and vines of bougainvillea. Farther along, a little girl standing at the gate of a house watched us for a while, went into the house, and came back out with another girl, and they both stood at the gate, staring with their mouths open. An old woman who had been crouched on the ground hacking at a palm frond with a crescent reaper dropped the reaper as we approached and stood up to stare at us with her hands on her hips. She smiled; her teeth were stained dark orange from the betel nut she was chewing.

  The students walked on undisturbed. They could hear the locals speaking the Malayalam language to the left and right along the way, and certainly knew they were being watched, but this was nothing new to them.

  At the bus stop, we sat on the bench and waited in the sickening heat. Yoshimi had brought a paper fan and fluttered it before her face. Jayne fanned herself with her hat and said, “It is better on campus because of the breeze from the lake. The breeze cools down things when things are heated up.”

  Lucy stared straight ahead and said in her poker-faced way, “When are things in Trivandrum not heated up, Jayne? Eh? They are heated up all the time, Jayne. How are things now? Cool? Are they cool?”

  Jayne fanned Lucy with the hat. “They are heated.”

  Lucy dabbed her forehead with her ever pristine hankie and said, “Hey! Is it not true?”

  Side by side, Jayne’s and Lucy’s arms contrasted as sharply as black and white chess pieces. I could feel the heat wafting up from the pavement beneath our feet; it was like the heat from a piz
za oven with its door flung wide. I had to stand up and pace back and forth to get away from it. Barefoot Indians walked languidly up and down the roasting road. Motorized rickshaws, taxis, motorcycles, bicycles flew by in a noisy tangle, thoroughly ignoring the fact that in India, vehicles are supposed to drive on the left. A bus whose sign read Ananthapuram Fast bounced by, followed by a yellow school bus with Little Flower Convent School written on its side. After that came the Mar Georgis EM Church bus, the English medium school bus, and a dump truck with Christ Jesus painted on its front in bright colors. Once a fertile breeding ground for missionaries, the city of Trivandrum was full of Christian churches of every imaginable denomination, some of which I had never heard of, including the Syro-Malabar Christians of Saint Thomas.

  We climbed onto the Trivandrum city bus and sat amid the sleepy passengers nodding in the heat, and the bus careered its way into the city.

  Once we arrived, we walked from the bus stop to Big Bazaar, the main department store in Trivandrum, and the students dispersed through the aisles, eagerly touching everything on the shelves. The store was new and, relative to every other store in Trivandrum, quite modern; it had one of the few escalators in the city. Most of the students rode happily up to the second floor on it, and Lucy and Jayne in their enormous hats rode up and then down again for fun, but Victor refused to go near it. “Is that an electric stair?” he asked me, clutching his white cane with one hand and feeling the moving handrail with the other. I said it was. “Oh, I do not want that one,” he said. “That thing will make me feel unoriented and throw me down.” I tried to coax him onto it, told him I would hold his arm and be sure he didn’t fall, but it was no use. He was dead set against anything that might take his feet out from under him. I asked him which he was more afraid of, a cat with supernatural powers or an escalator.

  “Auntie Rose, do not joke!”

  Victor was so adamant that I relented and led him up the conventional staircase at the back of the store.

  That day Victor wore a sleeveless orange basketball shirt with the number 17 on its back and front; walking among all the small Indians, he looked, except for the white cane, like a professional basketball player on holiday. People jumped out of his way when they saw him coming. Victor went gleefully through the store selecting more merchandise than he could afford. And he was fussy about his purchases. He wanted skin cream and soap. “But,” he said to me, “I want them to smell nice.” He stood in front of the shelf of bath soaps and sniffed at eight different brands, rejecting them one by one until, finally, he selected the most expensive. Then he picked up a blue polo shirt, spread it against his chest, and said, “What color is it?” I told him. “Does it suit me?”

  “Beautifully.”

  “Are you sure, Auntie Rose? Because I like to look nice.”

  “You look great.”

  That satisfied him.

  Lucy and Jayne passed by us, squinting and smiling. Jayne put her face to mine, raised her index finger, and said, “Rose, this store is not good. They have more men’s clothes than women’s.”

  “Yah,” Lucy said, and added in her deadpan way, “they are gender-insensitive.”

  Jayne slapped her thigh. “And the Indian size underwear is too small for us!” They hee-hee’d a lot at this and then drifted on.

  After forty-five minutes of exploration, of laughter, of knocking merchandise off the shelves, of trying on Indian clothing and sniffing Indian produce, the students gathered at the registers and made their purchases. The Indian staff were surprised and fascinated by them but polite and very helpful. When we went out onto Mahatma Gandhi Road, I was amazed to see James plunging alone across the wildly busy avenue with his white cane raised over his head to command the traffic to stop. I watched him with my heart in my throat. The traffic was extremely dense, but the drivers had no choice but to bring their vehicles screeching to a standstill while James passed through with his head held high, like Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus. He reached the far sidewalk and stood there for a minute or so, listening to the traffic, then he raised his cane again in an authoritative, declarative way and stepped back into the street. The traffic stopped once more, and he crossed safely back to us. As he approached the sidewalk, I took his arm and said, “James, what on earth are you doing?”

  “In Liberia,” he said, “that is how we cross the street. I just wanted to see if it works in India.”

  “It would probably work anywhere. But it’s not the best way for anybody, blind or otherwise, to cross an Indian boulevard. Next time you want to cross the street, promise me you’ll just go to a corner and cross on the crosswalk like everybody else!”

  When I turned around, I saw Robbie standing statue-still in the middle of the sidewalk holding a digital device at arm’s length in order to record the cacophony of noises in this soot-colored city. A crowd of young Indian men with tight jeans and slicked-back hair had gathered near him to stare; they looked completely puzzled by the sight. With his skirt and his wild hair and his pale white face and long scarred shins, Robbie the German was in some ways a more striking sight than the Liberians. The young men were snickering at him; Robbie either didn’t know or knew and didn’t care. As far as he and James were concerned, Mahatma Gandhi Road was theirs.

  Sight Regained

  Reading the case study of a twelve-year-old congenitally blind Parisian girl who, in 1850, suddenly came to understand the nature of sight, I was struck by how accurately the girl’s perceptions and feelings defined the aspect of blindness that I would fear more than any other. After having the power of sight described to her, the girl devised an experiment whereby she might test what she had now come to suspect about sighted people. She got up one morning and put on an old dress that had become much too short for her growing body and that, consequently, she had not worn for some time. Without saying a word, she entered a room where her sighted governess was working. Upon seeing the girl, the governess expressed surprise that she had put on the old dress that “only reaches to your knees.” The girl uttered a few “idle words” to the governess and left the room. Later she stated:

  This was enough to convince me that, without laying a hand upon me, Martha had immediately been able to recognize that I had again put on the dress that was too short. So this was seeing. I gradually recounted in my memory a multitude of things which must have been daily seen in the same fashion by the people about me and which could not have been known to them in any other way. I did not in the least understand how this happened, but I was at last persuaded. And this led gradually to a complete transformation of my ideas. I admitted to myself that there was in fact a highly important difference of organization between myself and other people; whereas I could make contact with them by touch and hearing, they were bound to me through an unknown sense, which entirely surrounded me even from a distance, followed me about, penetrated through me and somehow held me in its power from morning to night. What a strange power this was, to which I was subjected against my will, without, for my part, being able to exercise it over anyone at all. It made me shy and uneasy to begin with. I felt envious about it. It seemed to raise an impenetrable screen between society and myself. I felt unwillingly compelled to regard myself as an exceptional being, that had, as it were, to hide itself in order to live.1

  These feelings, among a host of others, would be my sentiments exactly if I were blind and had never known sight. They can all see me from across a football field and thus know a thousand things about me, but I can’t see them and cannot know a damn thing about them without going right up and putting my hands on them. It would frighten and irk me exactly as much as if I were unable to walk down a street briskly and with ease. The vulnerability and the imbalance of power would infuriate me; it would gnaw at me; it would make me come to dislike myself a great deal and make me dislike sighted people a great deal more. I too would want to hide.

  Although the girl’s reaction seems to me entirely justified, her negative response to her understandi
ng of sight is not one that the blind often express; in fact, in my extensive reading about blindness and the experiences of the blind, I came across only one other similar statement. (In his memoir of his blindness, John Hull spoke of wanting to hide his face from other people. “Is this a primitive desire to find some kind of equality? Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you?” But he also addressed the unique way in which the blind could make the sighted feel inadequate: “The disabled person tends to render other people powerless. One flusters them, covers them with confusion, covers them with uncertainty and embarrassment, makes them feel gauche and insensitive, awkward and intrusive.”) And, surprisingly, not once have I ever heard an acquaintance who was blind—congenitally or otherwise—speak with resentment or unhappiness about this particular imbalance in the powers of perception between the sighted and the blind. No blind person I have ever met has expressed to me any displeasure at all over the fact that sighted people can see the blind while the blind cannot see the sighted. (Many, however, will freely express resentment at the prejudices the sighted visit upon them.2) This doesn’t mean they don’t think about the sighted having this power or feel a discomfort about it similar to the French girl’s; it just means they don’t tend to bring it up. Or perhaps they don’t bring it up with sighted people. Further, the majority of those congenitally blind whom I directly questioned about whether they would want to gain their sight if it were possible said that they were happy as they were and would prefer not to acquire that fifth sense. I can attribute this only to the fact that most of them have lived successful, contented lives without sight for so long that its sudden advent would be superfluous, and perhaps even disruptive. Sabriye, who was in some ways happier with her life as a completely blind person (as opposed to a partially sighted person), had turned down a chance at corrective surgery for the same reasons. When I asked Yoshimi Horiuchi, the twenty-six-year-old Japanese student, if she would want to regain her eyesight (she lost it at approximately age five), she said vehemently, “Never!” When I asked her why, she said, partly in jest, “I would never want to be a part of the whole corrupt sighted racket!”3