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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  “It’s a very pretty outline of a horseshoe.”

  Yoshimi seemed surprised. “It is?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “No,” she said. “I could feel it, but I didn’t know what it was. My older sister, she is six years older than me. She chooses most of my clothes and things for me, but she doesn’t say much about them.”

  I remarked that her sister must have very good taste, because Yoshimi was always nicely dressed.

  “My sister never tells me I look nice in my appearance. Well, once I cut my hair a little bit different and she did say it was nice. But that was all.”

  That seemed strange to me, and mingy. I said, “Well, probably your sister is just envious of you.”

  Yoshi laughed loudly at that. As I was leaving the laundry room, she lowered her voice and said, “Rose? I found a pair of…well, a pair of…things that we wear under the skirt in my laundry, and I know that they do not belong to me. I don’t know what to do with them.” She seemed extremely embarrassed to be bringing this up.

  “Those things are called underwear.”

  “I know that,” she said, ducking her head, “but I don’t like to say that word.”

  “It’s just a word, Yoshi. We all wear it. It’s not shameful.” Yoshi was a bit innocent and very sweet; she had told me that she cried every time she saw The Sound of Music and that she knew all the words to every song in the film; she’d also said that one of her favorite songs in English was “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands,” but still, I hadn’t realized she was so prudish. Certain that I was about to send her into a tailspin, I said, “Well, the best way for you to return them to the person who owns them is to make an announcement about it in a general assembly.”

  Yoshimi nearly had a heart attack. She clapped her hands over her mouth, then threw them full force in my direction, then hopped up and down in front of the ironing board with her hands squeezed into fists and her black bangs trembling, then screamed in protest: “Ohh! My God! Rose! Are you kidding me? I could never do that!”

  I told her that if she was too shy to do it, I would be happy to make the announcement for her.

  “Okay,” she said. “Announce it. But, God, please do not mention my name or anything about me to do with the…the things!”

  Now Yoshimi was lying sick in her bed with the bawdy, freewheeling Jayne and Lucy ministering to her. Yoshimi had taken to calling Jayne and Lucy the Kenyan sisters, and because Yoshi was so technologically advanced, the Kenyans referred to her as Techno Jap. Beside her pillow, Yoshi had set up a little shrine of Japanese Buddha figurines. Jayne had found them and was now making them dance the Watusi on the mattress.

  Chelsea came around from the foot of the bed with her white cane, tripping on shoes and clothes as she did, and declared happily to me that they had all just come from the city, that she had guided them in and back without mishap, and that she had even haggled with the bus driver over the price of their tickets and they had got away with paying only eight rupees per person.

  “But,” Lucy said with admiration and envy, “Chelsea paid nothing.”

  “Because,” Jayne said, “she is Indian and has a government pass.”

  I said that I wouldn’t mind having a government pass, and Lucy agreed, backhanding my arm and saying, “Hey!”

  Chelsea, who was a rather literal person, stated that I was not eligible for such a pass as I was not Indian and not blind.

  Chelsea was twenty-four and had been completely blind since birth. She was born in Chennai to an upper-class family and spoke elegant English with a slight stutter and an extremely refined accent. She was small and slender and, in my opinion, the best-dressed person on the campus. Every morning she appeared at breakfast in yet another freshly washed and pressed traditional Indian outfit in a colorful pattern, with a flowing silk scarf around her neck and her short black hair styled sleekly against her head. She wore gold bangles on her wrists, small gold earrings, and pretty necklaces. She exhibited several distinct blindisms, including an occasional flicking of her fingers as she talked, a slight wagging of the head, and a habit of pressing her thumbs against her eyelids when she was concentrating carefully on something. Now and then, I saw her talking to herself under her breath, but I certainly could not attribute this to blindness, as I often did the same.

  Chelsea’s mother had died when Chelsea was very young, and now she lived in Trivandrum with a hired woman whom she referred to as her maid. Her upper-class upbringing had given her a strict set of codes, manners, and rules for life. She would never wear trousers in public unless she was accompanied by someone she knew well. Her grandmother, who was English but lived in America, had sent her a Jackie Collins novel; Chelsea had deemed certain explicit scenes “too hard to handle.” Her father was a Sikh who not only cut his hair short but did not wear a turban; she disapproved of this unorthodox behavior. In addition, the father, who spent a lot of time in Thailand, had girlfriends. Her relationship with him was rocky because he had, as she put it, a double standard. When Chelsea told me that she had a boyfriend, I was surprised, as that didn’t seem to fit the upper-class pattern. Young men and women were not allowed to mix until they were married. Chelsea later emended the term boyfriend by noting, “Well, I should say he is not actually a boyfriend but a boy who is a friend, and actually I have not seen him in three years. We talk on the telephone. My father hates this so much. He does not want me to have a boyfriend, even though he himself has girlfriends. Sometimes he recorded my telephone calls with the boy and said he would have the boy’s mum dismissed from her job if we talked again. So, it is a double standard.”

  I told Chelsea that it was not just a double standard but a gross interference in the lives of three people.

  Chelsea said that her father’s extreme overprotectiveness was due in part to her blindness, that most things in her life had been done for her, and that even now her maid and her father continued to tell her “You can’t do this; you can’t do that.” When she met Sabriye, Chelsea was amazed at how much Sabriye was able to do for herself. “I never saw a blind person being so assertive and independent in my life.”

  Chelsea had already learned a great deal from Sabriye and the other blind students. Leading the shopping expedition into the city was clearly a point of great pride and satisfaction for her. She was delighted that others had trusted and relied on her. And she was finding her own voice. When we made a visit to the government grade school for the blind in Trivandrum, Chelsea came along. The mustachioed principal of the school, a well-intentioned but passive and inarticulate man with a potbelly and strands of hair combed over his bald spot, had been completely blinded as a child after he fell out of a coconut tree and hit his head. In a grim classroom with a concrete floor, plywood doors, one fluorescent lightbulb hanging crooked on the wall, and great cobwebs clinging to the beamed ceiling, the principal told us that the school had only twelve Braille typewriters for fifty-four students and that the government was very slow in providing them with the proper Braille books for their curriculum. But all in all, he said fatuously, his blind students did not face any problems in the world beyond his campus. “Most people in society are eager to help the blind.” The clock on the wall behind him said 6:45. It was in fact 10:55. When asked about mobility training and the use of the white cane, the principal said, “In Kerala, blind people think that a white cane marks them as inferior. I myself have stopped using it because I was becoming dependent on it.”

  I could see my blind students shaking their heads in disapproval at this, and quite unexpectedly Chelsea stood up and roundly chastised the principal in both English and Malayalam, saying that blindness was not a curse, that blind people were not the same as sighted people in certain respects, and that to downplay that was to ignore an important difference. “You want to be seen as a normal person in society, so you won’t allow yourself to benefit from the use of the white cane. But blind people should be proud of their white canes. We should be p
roud of our blindness and not try to hide it.” Chelsea, of all people, had boldly articulated what everyone else was thinking.

  The sound of sweeping and the burbling Malayalam conversation of the cleaning ladies drifted up from the courtyard below Yoshimi’s dorm room; a bird let out a sharp wolf whistle, and then fierce barking came from the back of the building. Chelsea cocked her head at the sound. “When a dog barks, it signifies death.”

  Karin the Norwegian said, “We say that if a dog howls it means earthquake.” The barking continued. “Rose,” Karin said, “I have been meaning to ask you, what exactly is the view from our dorm windows at the back of the building?”

  I was surprised by the question. I knew the students so well now that I tended to forget that they couldn’t see. I went to the back window of the room and began describing the view to them. Beyond the wall of the institute, which was close behind the dorm, was a large lot of coconut and mango trees. At that moment at the end of the lot, two small cows stood tethered to a tree, and, closer to us, two men were raking mango leaves into a pile with tiny brooms made from twigs. Just to the right of them, three boys were hacking at the trunk of a mango tree with machetes. One of the boys I recognized, as he was often in this lot with his mother. In fact, the mother was now approaching the boys with a twig broom in her hands. She wore a long loose gown and what looked to me like an entire bedsheet wrapped artistically around her head. The boy, who was not more than eight years old, could climb a coconut tree with the ease of a monkey. He was so skinny that he looked almost weightless. His legs were like a spider’s. Many times I had seen him shimmy barefoot up the shaft of a coconut tree to a height of at least fifty feet with his machete tucked into his belt while his mother stood impatiently watching from below, her hands on her hips and the broom tucked under her arm. The boy would draw out his machete, brace the soles of his bare feet against the trunk and hug it with one arm, and hack at the fronds of the palm until they plummeted to the ground, whereupon the mother would gather them up and drag them away to a hut at the far end of the lot.

  “What do they want the palms for?” Karin asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But it must be important, because the boy often risks his life to get them. Also, sometimes when he’s at the top of a tree, he tries to look through our windows.”

  All the girls gasped in alarm. I reassured them that he probably couldn’t see much.

  Holi said, “I smell smoke.”

  She was right—the two men had set the pile of mango leaves on fire, and the smoke was just beginning to curl over the institute wall.

  Yoshi said from the bed, “Something is always burning out there.”

  “Oh, and I hear the announcement,” Karin said.

  We were all familiar with the announcement. It was a loudspeaker connected to a truck that roved through the villages of the area exhorting the people to fight polio by availing themselves of free polio vaccines. Every few weeks, the polio truck would creep along the Nemom Po road through the palm trees, loudspeakers blaring with alternating male and female voices. On this day, the polio truck was followed by what I had come to think of as the ice cream bike: a man dressed like Gandhi riding through the village on a bicycle with a basket of cones attached to its front and a box of ice cream attached to its rear. Children trailed after him.

  I went on describing what I could see from the window—the ice cream bike, the children, the men with their brooms—and finally Yoshi said, “It must be very beautiful.”

  I turned from the window, slightly taken aback and at a loss as to how to respond to this. While the view here had certain small charms, I would not have classified the place as beautiful. But the perception of beauty is subjective. Did my vision give me greater authority in assessing whether the place was beautiful? Sight was one thing—sensibility was another. In saying the place must be beautiful, Yoshi seemed to be deferring to my sighted opinion, bestowing on me an authority that I didn’t feel I had a right to accept. I didn’t think this place was particularly beautiful, but many people did.1 And I was curious to know how she and the others perceived their surroundings before I contributed my interfering and not entirely appreciative perspective. They must by now have created an image of their environment. “What do you think?” I said. “In your mind, is it beautiful?”

  Propped up in her bed, Yoshi said yes, she thought it was beautiful. She based this on the sounds she could hear (the birds, the babbling of the turkeys and the lowing of the cows, the Indian voices, the rattling of the palm fronds in the wind) and on the things she could feel (the coconut trunk and its long fronds, the smooth mango leaf, the cool lake water, the feel of the movement of the air). She had determined that the place was beautiful; the others had too. Their sightless perception was as real to them as my sighted perception was to me.

  In her book My Path Leads to Tibet, Sabriye had written about this question.

  What’s the definition of real? Does it mean that, for sighted people, reality is limited to what their eyes see? Is priority accorded to visual impressions, which overwhelm the other sensory perceptions?…If the eyesight is “privileged”—as is the presumed case for those who can see—are we implying that the other senses do not contribute to the total perception of reality?

  I once asked Jessie, blind since birth, how she imagined human faces. Her quick response was “I don’t.” A person’s face was not, for her, the locus of an individual’s being. Physical appearances were irrelevant. She turned her attention to the voice, to the words it created, to the mood and the ideas it formed, and this was fully satisfying for her. She and her blind colleagues lived in a realm dominated by thought rather than appearances and visual details. John Hull, the British professor of religion who lost his sight in his forties, went through a period of great despair and difficulty over the loss. But eventually, after a tremendous emotional struggle, the despair passed, and he entered a phase of his life that to me, pointlessly preoccupied and distracted as I am by every little visual detail before me, seemed pure and clean and almost enviable:

  There has been a strange change in the state or the kind of activity in my brain. It seems to have turned in upon itself to find inner resources. Being denied the stimulus of much of the outside world, it has had to sort out its own functions and priorities. I now feel clearer, more excited and more adventurous intellectually than ever before in my life. I find myself connecting more, remembering more, making more links in my mind between the various things I have read and had to learn over the years. Sometimes I come home in the evening and feel that my mind is almost bursting with new ideas and new horizons.

  Hull summarized this experience by saying that as a blind person, “one begins to take up residence in another world.”

  A month and a half into my stay at the IISE, Aias, my boyfriend, came to visit me for a few hours. Not having spent time with any blind people before, Aias was not entirely comfortable with my blind colleagues. I could see his discomfort in the way he shook their hands, in the way he talked to them—or seemed not to know how to talk to them—and in the way he had to work to hide his unease when he looked at their eyes. Their blindness struck him uncharacteristically silent. And when we had left the school and gotten on a bus to the city, he said to me with concern and disturbance in his voice, “Those poor people. What a life!”

  “Do you feel sorry for them?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course I do,” he said.

  “But they don’t feel sorry for themselves. They’re strong and happy and very capable. You just don’t know that yet. You don’t know them. Because they’ve accepted their blindness, it can’t stand in their way. They’ve found a way around it.”

  “But they can’t see anything,” he said in frustration. “They’re missing so much. And they’re helpless and vulnerable to everything.”

  Aias offered that he would rather die than be blind. I understood his perception, of course. I had felt the same thing. For most of us, vision is the primary way
we interpret the world, the most elementary, and so how could we connect and identify with a person who cannot see? We take our physical health and integrity so much for granted and rely so heavily on it that those who don’t have it seem alien and pitiable. I remember being surprised by a statement that the British writer Geoff Dyer made in The Missing of the Somme, his compelling book about the Great War. In describing the mute impassivity and vulnerability of the many British war memorials, figures of soldiers in bronze and stone that stand forever subject to the whims of vandals, graffiti artists, and the elements, Dyer wrote, “Powerless to protect themselves, their only defense, like that of the blind, is our respect.” I remember thinking how perfectly the comparison encapsulated the age-old cliché that having no eyesight is tantamount to having no brain and therefore no power. Dyer, an extremely intelligent, perceptive, and talented writer, had, like so many people, overlooked what the blind have most in common with the sighted: they are capable of thought. And unlike figures of bronze and stone, they can speak for themselves. In matters of the blind’s self-defense, sighted people’s respect for them is irrelevant. The blind can well enough defend themselves. Aristotle posited in Rhetoric, “It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.” Since it is the human brain and the human heart that differentiate our species from animals, since it’s the ability to reason and communicate that make us extraordinary, what matter that the physical body may not be entirely whole or meet a prescribed ideal? Blindness is a physical disability. It is not a mental one.