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

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  “Well,” I said, “are you blind or aren’t you?” I had actually begun to wonder.

  She laughed. “I really am blind. Completely. I cannot see you. I cannot see anything.”

  “So, if you’re blind, how do you know that I lowered my head?”

  “You were talking when you bent your head to write. I could hear the direction of your voice change in a very particular way.”

  “But that’s a change so subtle that I would never be able to hear it in another person. And how do you know I didn’t just bend my head to examine my fingernails? How do you connect it so assuredly to the act of writing?”

  “I’ve had so many people interview me and have heard it so many times, I know what that direction means.”

  So, she knew what a writing voice sounded like. It was uncanny. And still I wasn’t sure I believed that she was completely blind. I had noticed that wherever I stood or sat in relation to Sabriye, she always looked directly at me when she or I spoke. If I moved, her head turned to follow me. If I stood behind her, she turned a hundred and eighty degrees to look at me. I mentioned this to her, and in my voice I heard a challenge, an overtone of impatience and doubt that sounded to my own ears rude.

  “This is something I’ve learned. Blind people who haven’t been trained often speak to a wall, because they don’t know how to follow the voice of the person they’re talking to. It doesn’t matter to them as long as they’re heard. But if you want to be effective, if you want to connect to people, you can’t be putting your face to a wall while you’re talking to them. To a sighted person, that looks very strange. So you have to learn to read by sound where a person is in relation to you, what direction they’re faced in.”

  “I understand,” I said, and as a final personal test, I gave her the finger and held it up for quite a while, hoping to provoke the sighted person’s reflexive response. She didn’t react, didn’t seem to notice, just continued to talk. I felt thoroughly weird sitting in this blind stranger’s office boldly thrusting my middle finger at her. I dropped my hand to my lap, and when she had finished talking I said, “Let me just ask you this one thing: How many fingers am I holding up right now?”

  She exhaled through her teeth in amused exasperation. “You really don’t believe I’m totally blind, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I do. I believe you. I’m just surprised by how extremely attuned you are to what’s around you.”

  “The thing is,” she said with a wry little smile, her brilliant blue eyes looking directly at me, “I actually do know how many fingers you’re holding up.”

  “Really?” I said. “How many?”

  “None.” She laughed at this raillery and gave her desk a little slap.

  “Good guess,” I said.

  1 By 2013, 250 students had benefited from the Braille Without Borders program.

  2Fear of noise is common among the blind. The blind French author Jacques Lusseyran described the phenomenon in his memoir And There Was Light. “For a blind person, a violent and futile noise has the same effect as the beam of a searchlight too close to the eyes of someone who can see. It hurts.” By the way, Lusseyran’s memoir of his involvement with the French Resistance contains a description of life in a German concentration camp that is more vivid and affecting than any other account I have read.

  3In his memoir Touching the Rock, John Hull, a British professor of religion who lost his sight at age forty-two, remarked on the “amazing power of the human voice to reveal the person” and maintained that he could “often hear many things which the speaker may not know are there.” Similarly, Jacques Lusseyran wrote of his exceptional ability to read personality and mood in voices. “A man who speaks does not realize that he is betraying himself.”

  The Blind Leading the Blind

  I sat with a group of the blind children at a long table in the dining room at Braille Without Borders, waiting for an informal beginners’ Braille class to start. The room, appointed with three long wooden tables and accompanying benches, was dark and cool, lit only by the sun coming through its tall windows. Like all the rooms in the school, this one was fancifully detailed in the candy colors of a carousel—the door was a pattern of fire-engine red and royal blue, the window frames were dandelion yellow, the trim boards were sky blue, and the lower half of the walls were tangerine orange. The paint finish, even on the walls, was of a gloss so high and extreme that the colors glistened like ice. The building had once belonged to relatives of the thirteenth Dalai Lama and was obviously very old. The plaster ceiling was supported by ancient wooden beams so beautifully crooked and bowed, they looked more like a carefully designed work of art than architectural underpinnings. On one wall hung a large, full-length mirror, which seemed to me a superfluous accessory in a school for the blind. In the corner stood a box that held students’ white canes.

  I sat at the end of the table, near the windows. On a shelf behind me I saw a book: The Little Mermaid, in Braille, edited by Sabriye Tenberken and printed by Braille Without Borders. Through the window I could see Pookie, the vicious mastiff, lying on his side in the dirt, baking in the midday sun.

  Across from me at the table sat the Monk in his orange clothing. He had wrapped his prayer beads around his wrist, giving them a rest, and was sitting with both elbows on the table and his head propped up heavily in his hands. He was so removed from what was going on in the room, so seemingly oblivious, that he looked doped. His lips were moving, and for the first time I heard what he was saying: Om mani padme hum, over and over again in a droning monotone. He had long ears and long fine hands. Beside the Monk sat an intense, sober-faced little girl named Dolma who, according to Sabriye, was a member of the Kampa tribe. The Kampas were fierce warriors and horsemen, wild, proud, nomadic, and given to wearing elaborate headdresses and ornate jewelry. Dolma’s mother had been a prostitute; her father had disappeared. One day when Dolma was three or four, the mother got fed up with having to care for her blind child and simply abandoned her by the side of a road. Eventually some Kampa horsemen happened upon the sobbing girl, and, taking pity on her, they took her in, fed her, and bought her warm clothing. Somehow the horsemen had heard about the blind school in Lhasa. They traveled a very long distance on horseback to bring Dolma here. They arrived at the school, got off their horses, dropped the girl in the courtyard, and, without ceremony or explanation, turned on their boot heels to leave. Annoyed at their presumption, Sabriye (who can be fearsome when angry) chided the men and told them how rude it was of them to just dump their child there without discussing it with her. Wounded, the horsemen wept and pleaded that Dolma was not their child, that they had only found her crying in a ditch one day, and that they just wanted to help her. (I pictured the proud horsemen tremulously backing away from Sabriye, wringing their hands in distress and mopping their tears with the tails of their braids.)

  True to her Kampa nature, Dolma—who at that moment in the dining room was gnawing feverishly on the end of a pencil—was a bit mischievous and unruly. When she arrived at the school, she had told the other children, “I’m a witch,” because her mother had insisted that this must be the case, otherwise why would she have been born blind? As a result, the other children had avoided her. The first time I saw Dolma, I thought she was a boy. There was little to differentiate the girls from the boys at this young age. They all wore the same sort of sturdy pullovers and trousers, and their black hair was cut short in a unisex style. Dolma’s blind eyes had a slightly eerie aspect. They put me in mind of a pair of eyes moving furtively behind the oval holes of a Halloween mask.

  At the far end of the table sat Panden Tsering and Kileh, two boys I was already acquainted with. I’d sat in a car with them on the long ride to Lhasa from Shigatse, where Sabriye and Paul had established a small farm to train blind adults in agriculture and farm management. Arriving at the farm, Sabriye and Paul and I had found these two young boys sitting all alone in the kitchen—having heard about the Braille Without Borders project, their famil
ies had simply dropped them there a few days earlier. Panden Tsering was six and Kileh was fourteen, too young to stay long-term at the farm. Sabriye invited the boys to return to Lhasa with us so that they could attend the school, and without hesitation, both boys said they would be very happy to come. We were three unfamiliar foreign adults, yet when it came time to leave Shigatse, the two boys climbed eagerly, smilingly, into the car with us. They had never been in a car before. They had probably never traveled more than forty miles beyond their homes. They carried nothing with them. No luggage, no diverting toys or gadgets, no toothbrushes; they had nothing at all but the clothes on their backs. Though they knew that Lhasa was far from their home and that they wouldn’t see their families again for months, they made no protest and voiced no regret during the arduous ride over rutted roads. I marveled at their level of trust and realized I did not know a single American child who would willingly do what they were doing. During the ride I asked Panden Tsering if he was happy about going to the school; the face he made in response said, Are you nuts? I’m thrilled! When I asked Sabriye why these boys would join us so trustingly, she answered, “They have nothing. No friends, no future. Perhaps they’re so low they feel they have nothing to lose.”

  Now they both sat smiling at this dining room table in the middle of Lhasa. Across from them sat a boy who had his trousers on backward. Beside him was a child with his sneakers on the wrong feet and the hems of his trousers tucked into his socks. Beside me sat the youngest child in the school, a three-year-old boy named Nimen Penzo. Fresh out of toddlerhood, Penzo had the face of an irritable grandfather, an adamant, stumping way of walking, a penchant for climbing anything within reach, and a devilish habit of striking out at people’s legs as they went past him.

  I had noticed that when the blind children were sitting idly together, they always sat huddled close and draped about one another—arms slung around necks, elbows linked, heads gently touching, hands entwined with hands—and I began to understand that when they held hands, they were not simply holding hands in the way that you and I might hold hands (were we to actually know and like each other) but were, more accurately, holding lightly on to one another’s hands. This constant connecting of hands was not just a gesture of affection but a form of communication, a way of conveying and receiving subtle emotions and even ideas, much the way sighted people convey emotion or thought with glances and facial expressions. The children’s eyes reflected nothing of their moods or thoughts but rolled uselessly, like milky blue marbles. It was only their hands and their voices that revealed them.

  Presently the door banged open and the teacher, a boy named Kyumi, came importantly into the room. “Now,” Kyumi announced in English as he crossed the floor, “we learn Tibetan alphabet!”

  Kyumi was twelve years old, but like many of the children here, he looked four years younger than his age. Unlike the others, he had the fussy, no-nonsense manner of an overworked forty-year-old. Kyumi was completely blind. His pants were so big they were slipping off his hips, and every thirty seconds or so he clutched impatiently at their waistband and hitched them up. He had a large head and big ears that protruded from the margins of his face like opposing handles on a sugar bowl. His wide, rosy-cheeked face was roughly the shape of a pie plate. His skin was carnation pink and pretty as a girl’s. His one visible eye was glassed over with a film of unnatural glacial blue, and the other eye was rolled downward into its inner corner, which made him look as though he were trying to analyze the flare of his own nostril. Periodically Kyumi would flap his hands in the air in a rapid violent shaking fashion, as if trying to rid them of flames or caustic acid.1 He had been a student at BWB for the past four years.

  “Rose?” he said to me. “You are here?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Briefly Kyumi explained to the other students that I was an American girl who was not blind but wanted to learn Braille, and then, with no time to waste in further small talk, he got to work passing out pages of Braille. Kyumi moved with great purpose. He crossed to the far side of the table, put the page down, put his hand on Panden’s shoulder, ran his hand down the boy’s arm until he found the boy’s fingers, then planted the top of the boy’s index finger firmly on the Braille text in front of him. “Ka!” Kyumi cried, the first letter of the Tibetan alphabet.

  Panden bent over the table, his nose touching the page, and he minutely examined the tiny bumps of Braille with his fingertip. “Ka!” he said.

  Kyumi felt his way to the next boy and repeated the process. Eventually, all the heads in the room were bent low in concentration. Kyumi’s teaching style was both lordly and intimate. Like all the veteran students here, he could operate a Braille typewriter, a computer, could dress and wash himself, was learning to cook, and could speak English and Chinese in addition to his native Tibetan. Though his voice was high and loud, his English had a British diplomat’s precision and flourish. He spoke in a kind of shriek, wrapped his arms around students’ shoulders, pressed his forehead against theirs, and entreated them as if it were a matter of national importance to repeat after him. He moved from student to student, tsking and sighing and muttering as if overburdened with responsibility, yet it was clear he relished his status as one of the quickest students in the school and was deeply pleased to have been deemed capable of passing on his superior knowledge. Everything Kyumi did, he did vehemently, precisely, and with a hint of hauteur. I had seen him earlier using a Braille typewriter in one of the classrooms. He stabbed the keys in a punishing fashion, throwing his whole upper body into the effort, and after each strike of a key, he raised his hands theatrically high away from the machine, as if fearing the keys might strike him back. I had heard him speaking Chinese; he spoke it in a ringing voice and with an accent so perfect and grand he sounded like Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek roundly denouncing the Communists as he fled for Taiwan.

  The new students were getting the hang of the alphabet, sounding out the letters and smiling at their own fingers sliding over the pimpled pages before them. They sat with their heads bowed so low to the paper that they appeared to be listening to it. Ka, ka, ka, they said again and again.

  Kileh began speaking excitedly to Kyumi in Tibetan. There was a brief exchange between them, and when it was over, I asked Kyumi what the boy had said. Kyumi lifted his head at me abruptly, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  “Rose?” he said, stepping toward me with his hands raised. He reached for my forearm, held it in both of his hands, put his face near mine. “That boy has said he has already studied some small Tibetan alphabet in his village.”

  “A little bit of the alphabet, you mean?”

  “Yah, yah, yah, a little bit,” Kyumi said, waving his hand at me with a dismissive flourish to indicate that it was foolish to mince words over such a trifling matter. He told me it was his pleasure to help me, then paused a moment to rest a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “Rose?”

  “Yes, Kyumi.”

  “Can you listen now and learn while I teach these men and women?”

  I apologized for the interruption, promised it would not happen again. Kyumi wagged his head and said with a kind of noblesse oblige, “No problem, Rose. But…” And raising a correcting finger at me, he added with undisguised concern about my intellectual abilities, “Please try to listen and learn.”

  I promised him I would try, and we returned to our studies. Like the rest of the students, I shut my eyes and ran my fingers over my page of Braille and tried to make sense of it. The feel of the sharp little dots embossed on the page was pleasing to my fingertips, but the dots were so small and arranged in such seemingly complex ways that I could not imagine ever being able to differentiate one dot from the next or one letter from the next or even one line from the next. I did not try. I drew the palm of my hand flat across the page—it felt a little like the surface of a worn asphalt shingle. Penzo, the little boy sitting beside me, had rested his forehead on the edge of the table and was feeling his page with both hands, murm
uring into his lap the sounds of the Tibetan letters.

  The door swung open again, and Mingmar, a thin, mischievous girl of twelve, flew into the room chewing gum with the insouciant flair of a swindler. The sound of communal singing coming from a nearby classroom followed her in. She slammed the door shut and greeted her classmates by howling at the ancient ceiling, “Friends! Nice to meet you today!”

  Startled, the students lifted their heads and turned in the direction of the voice. Mingmar’s elbow happened to brush mine as she passed me, and a sudden shock of interest flashed across her face. Her hand reached out and gently touched my knee. Like all the children here, she had a tactile ability that was so acute she knew instantly, just from the feel of my trousers, that I was a stranger. She stilled her gum chewing, stepped closer, put her two small hands lightly on my forearm, and examined my cuff, my wrist, my fingers, my watch. Her eyes were two cheerful slits; her small mouth open with curiosity. I could see the gray lump of chewing gum perched on her tongue. After acquainting herself with every part of my person within reach, Mingmar held her face very close to mine and whispered softly, “Who are you?”

  I told her who I was. Her face ignited with pleasure. She leaned back on her heels and crossed her arms on her chest and said, “How do you do, Rose! Are you blind?”

  I told her that I was not blind.

  With palpable pride she responded, “I am yes blind! And you are lovely.”

  I asked her what made her think I was lovely.

  She said, “By voice I know!”

  Mingmar wore a jean outfit embroidered with daisies. She had a short, harum-scarum haircut. The hair seemed to be flying every which way, vying for space on her small head. Mingmar drew herself up suddenly, and I saw that she sensed that someone was sitting across from me. She stretched her hand tentatively across the table. It collided with the Monk’s elbow. At Mingmar’s touch, the Monk opened one eye. Exhaustion and depression seemed to prevent him from opening the other. He did not lift his head out of his slender hands.