A Donkey in a World of Horses

by VED MEHTA

I WAS in the States. In my imagination the land appeared as boundless, as infinite as the oceans themselves, and I longed for an impression, any impression, which in years to come I should be able to remember. At home one could hardly go half a mile straight—there were curves, turns, alleys, and back streets, and with the windows of the car rolled down, you could hear the rhythmic tread of a horse harnessed to a tonga, the occasional cracking of the whip of the tonga man as he tried to get his clients quickly to their destinations. There were the tinkling bells of the bicycles and the curses of the ever-present bicycle riders, who swore at the tonga men for blocking their way, and the sepoys, who cursed the bicycle men for cursing and blew whistles at the tonga men at every corner forgoing so fast. Yes, the streets in India were streets of unmistakable life, with colorful sounds and profane language, with bends and turns. But the street that I was now riding on seemed to stretch before me wide and straight.

I kept waiting for the driver to take a turn (I remember that when he finally did, it was a sharp right turn, and not the half bend to which I had been accustomed). “Where do you live, Mrs. DeFranco?” I said to my companion in the back seat. “On Broadway,” she said.

“Is Broadway a wide street?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh, it is the center of the universe.”

The center of the universe, that’s where I was, I thought - a center of the universe without the circumference which I’d always imagined the universe to have. In India the universe was an endless circle and here it was a horizontal line.

In India my life had been routine, a circle of routine from which there was no escape. It was like being on a merry-go-round, always in the midst of colorful things but nevertheless circumscribed by the monotonous movement of the merry-go-round. Being in America was like being on a swift train, and the life was full, indeed bursting, with incidents. It was too early to tell which of the two I preferred.

“How was your plane ride? Mrs. DeFranco asked. “It must have been very exciting indeed.”

I wondered what I could say. Could I tell what my father had said just before I boarded the plane?

“You will have to learn not to be so shy and sensitive,” he had said. “You’ll have to become thick-skinned.”

And my sister Umi had remarked in her usually light manner, “Daddyji, you certainly can’t expect him to be thick-skinned when he only weighs ninetypounds.”

“What do you mean?” I had retorted. “I’m almost five-five.”

Sister Nimi had tried to console me by saying, “He looks like a man. What are you saying, Umi?”

Sitting in the airplane, I had tried very hard to put this conversation from my mind. I said to myself that I was a man. After all, I was fifteen. That first night on the plane I slept a while, only to dream of a full-sized mirror. For the first time I was seeing my reflection in the mirror, and I was beating it, saying, “I am a man, not a boy, a man.”

I jolted awake, breathing hard. I supposed it was morning, although inside the plane it was hard to tell. I’d never been closeted like that before, and the senses of sound, smell, and even touch were dulled by the incessant roar of the machine, so that to a blind man night and day merged into one. I surmised it was morning, because shortly the air hostess gently tapped my shoulder and said, “Sir, care for some breakfast now?”

My first inclination was to say yes, because my stomach did feel empty, but in a moment I remembered that my father wasn’t there, and how would I eat breakfast? All my life I’d eaten with my hands. A spoon was the only implement I had ever used, and that very rarely.

“Not yet,” I said to the hostess, “but I should like some orange juice.”

“Please don’t go on a hunger strike, sir,” she said, “against our airline.”

“It’s not the airline,” I said, biting my tongue, “but there are some religious reasons.” And by this statement I knew I had raised myself in her estimation, for when we stopped in Brussels she had special flasks of orange juice ordered for me, and I had an ample supply to last me across the Atlantic. The more I thought about the predicament of the knife and fork, which the sensation of hunger never let me forget, and the more I reflected upon my puny size, the more gloomy I became. I despaired at how long I could keep up the pretense and my pride.

I was about to phrase a sentence including the words “pretense” and “pride” when Mrs. DeFranco gently pressed my hand and said, “Here we are, Ved. You and my husband can have great fun together. I know you will have a lot in common.” He was blind and I was blind.

With a quick motion, she tucked my hand under her arm and led me to the apartment building. As we climbed the four flights of stairs up to the apartment, I wondered what a woman in India would have done to lead a blind man. She probably would have cringed at such an immediate contact of flesh with a strange man, even as my hand was instinctively pulling away from Mrs. DeFranco’s arm. But this thought did not prevent me from thinking that America did not hold blind men at arm’s lengt h.

2

HAD a bomb exploded in that quiet apartment, I could not have been more surprised than I was when Mr. DeFranco exchanged a loud kiss with his wife upon our entrance. I wondered if my mother would have permitted me to spend my first days in America with the DeFrancos, had she known that my hosts kissed in public.

I was already afraid of Mr. DeFranco. His handshake was firm and masculine, his voice unmistakably that of a trained musician, and the casual way he took my shoulder and led me to the living room revealed a confidence which I had never known among the blind in India.

“You were delayed so long that I started preparing your dinner,” he said.

“Oh, you cook?” I asked, unable to contain the astonishment I felt.

“Sometimes,”he remarked casually, “I help Muriel.” He started apologizing for not coming to the airport. “Your arrival time coincided with the lesson of one of my pupils.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said.

“Besides,” he continued, “I knew you wouldn’t mind being greeted first by a charming lady.”

Mrs. DeFranco asked from the kitchen if I ate meat.

“I do,” I said. I had been about to say no, for I did not welcome the ordeal of cutting it, but my hunger got the best of my shame.

She sighed with relief. “John and I have been playing guessing games about it.”

“I promised my mother I would gain some weight, and my father that I would eat any and everything in America. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

Then Mrs. DeFranco served the dinner, and while she was filling our glasses she casually remarked, “The peas are at twelve o’clock, the meat balls at six, and spaghetti is in the middle.”

“Do you understand that code?” asked Mr. DeFranco.

“No,” I said.

“We use the clock dial to locate the food on the plate.”

I was glad that meat balls did not need to be cut, and during Mrs. DeFranco’s trips to the kitchen I took my largest bites of spaghetti and tried to retrieve the stubborn peas, which kept sliding off the plate.

My fast, which had lasted the forty-eight hours from India to America, had left me weak and dizzy, but the frequent runs to the kitchen by Mrs. DeFranco finally permitted me to fill myself comfortably, so that I was ready after dinner to explore the lives of my new acquaintances. Once we had finished our apple pie and settled into easy chairs, I asked Mr. DeFranco if he would tell me about himself.

“My life,” he began, “is simple and rather unromantic.”

“Oh,” I persisted, “you are being modest.”

“No,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. “I spent twelve years at Perkins Institution for the Blind. I entered when I was six, left when I was eighteen. After some college work I came to New York, started giving music lessons and appearing on radio now and then to sing, married Muriel, and here I am. But tell me about yourself.”

While I was silently wondering whether my hosts would be interested in the Panditji who gave me music lessons, the division between India and Pakistan, or the philosophical Ram Saran’s comment on Partition — “It was all in the cards” — Mrs. DeFranco asked if I would mind very much if she finished the dishes.

“Not at all,” I said. “I am rather tired now, but perhaps someday we can have a long talk about my past in India.”

“Soon, I hope,” she said. And then in a moment from the kitchen I could hear the plates clattering as Mrs. DcFranco washed them swiftly.

No matter how tired I felt, I knew I could not go to sleep until I had the answer to one more question from Mr. DcFranco. “How did you happen to get married like this?” I asked bluntly.

“What do you mean?” he said laughingly.

“I mean how did it come about? How did you meet her?”

“Very simple,” he said. “When I came to New York, she was living in the same apartment house that I was. We met at the door coming and going, I asked her out one night and we came to know each other better, and there you are.”

“Just like that ?” I asked, for my curiosity was barely whetted.

“Of course,” he said.

“Incredible,” I could not resist adding.

3

ONLY a week before coming to the States I had sat with my father in New Delhi and we had talked about marriage. His manner was candid, his tone serious and compassionate.

“You are old enough so that whether you want it or not, you will think about marriage. You will, of course, not get married for some years, but you will start thinking about it.”

“ I won’t,” I said determinedly.

“Don’t be shy—it is biological. I want to talk with you about this now, as I don’t know how long you will be away from home, or when I will see you again. You think you might marry a Westerner ? ”

“Of course not!” I said emphatically, overcoming the initial shock of the question.

“I have seen a lot of Anglo-Indians,” he continued, the pace of his speech increasing, “AngloIndians who are fathered by some nameless Englishman and have for their mother some poor Indian. You know what their condition is like?”

But he did not pause for an answer.

“They are ashamed of their mothers because they are black women. These exalted Anglo-Indian children consider themselves white, and superior to their Indian mothers. They have the audacity to speak of England as home. They speak of a country they will never see as their home. Home, indeed!” he said contemptuously.

“The truth is they have no home, no land they can call their own, no father who will own them and no mother whom they will respect. I—I would remain a bachelor, before I would father such a lot.” He added reflectively, “In India, at least.

“It hurts me to say this,” he continued, with his voice returning to its normal pitch, “because the irony is that I believe in one world, and I have never believed in the pseudo science of superiority of nationalities and races.”

There was a calm, a fertile moment of communication which I did not choose to break with any response.

“Marriage,” he began again, “is, I believe, crucial to a full and rich life, and perhaps even more so in your case. I can never hope to marry you in India well. I am going to be cruel and realistic. To marry you in India would be like trying to marry your sister without her face. I bring this terrifying image to mind because I want you to understand fully how important people think eyes are in any kind of sexual relationship. Men and women fall in love and make love with their eyes. Again, the irony is that I don’t believe that blindness cripples a man sexually, and I think there exists no psychological evidence for it, but you don’t read psychological textbooks to people when you are asking them to give their girl in marriage.

“Oh, you could get married in India all right, but not well, not happily, because the kind of girl you would want could not be found here. Once you have seen a Western marriage, you will want a life companion equal to yourself.

“India is a harsh land. Marriage here is like a business transaction and people weigh and measure their liabilities and assets carefully. In the States, no doubt your blindness would make marriage difficult, though I believe not impossible, because there values are different and marriage is made by the two people involved without the agency of parents. But all this you will find out only by living there.

“One more thing I would have you remember. In the melting pot of America, the problem of the Anglo-Indian does not exist, but here it does. At the same time your duty and service will never cease calling you back to India, where your roots lie deep.”

The lonely image of my sister without her face was with me during the dinner and while Mr. DeFranco and I sat in the easy chairs.

“There must be more,”I stupidly insisted. Mr. DeFranco laughed and said, “There is really nothing more. Except,” he added, “ours is one of those stories where they lived happily ever after.”

Mrs. DeFranco came in from the kitchen and said to her husband, “Perhaps, dear, you could show him the apartment and the bath while I make his bed on the studio couch.”

So Mr. DeEranco took me around his two-room apartment with the adjoining kitchen and bath, casually putting my hand over the screen separating the living room from their bedroom, over the double bed, his writing desk, the radio-phonograph combination in the living room, and then the bathtub and the refrigerator. The apartment seemed to me small, in fact crowded, with barely enough space between the dining-room table and the radiophonograph to allow one to pass through to the kitchen.

Mr. DeFranco said, however, “It is a very comfortable apartment for both of us and we are very happy in it.”

My small studio-couch bed was made, and after saying good night to my hosts I climbed into it. I’m not going to think about anything, I thought; nothing, not even the empty, hollow feeling.

4

I PASSED my first two weeks in the United States in New York riding subways up and down Manhattan, getting used to their sounds—a more all-encompassing noise than any I had ever encountered in the confusion of shouts and vehicles in India - and going on rapidly climbing elevators to the tops of huge buildings, including the Empire State. The DeFrancos and I even managed to take in a trip to odoriferous Coney Island, which could hardly be called a pageant in the mela fashion, although it did have boisterous sounds which seemed new and unique to an ear unaccustomed to the rumble of dangerous American gadgets, the clamor around the hot-dog stands, and even the American laugh.

The turnstiles and the escalators, the counters at the drugstores — which at home were called chemist shops not to mention the dime stores, all seemed like so many exhibits. None of these, however, made as much of an impression on me as did the grocery store, with its rubber-wheeled carts, and counters instead of baskets, with no argumentative vegetable vendors, and with drowsy music instead of the hum of scores of hagglers in the bazaars. When I was not examining these wonderful exhibits I was learning American nomenclature for vegetables and other necessities. Words like “cookies,” “candy,” and “cans” supplanted “biscuits,” “sweets,” and “tins” in my vocabulary. The DeFrancos also introduced me to a new drink, Coca-Cola, and taught me how to play cribbage. Whenever we could find a fourth in the evenings we played bridge.

Thus the two weeks passed, until the time came for the DeFrancos to leave for their summer holidays in Maine. I went on to Arkansas, where I had been invited by the director, Mr. Woolly, to attend the Arkansas School for the Blind.

After the initial few weeks of school, when everything seemed gloomy and I still brooded a great deal about having left home, things started to get easier. I stopped going to the elementary-grade arithmetic class, and with a little coaching from our high school math teacher now and then, I could keep up with my own class quite handsomely. Whereas before I had spent hours on homework, I could now finish it all in thirty or forty minutes. Often, however, the program for “social adjustment” got more attention than our academic education. We met in classes, sometimes twice, sometimes four times a week, to learn about social graces and adjustment to a sighted society, which, at least at our school for the blind, would not have been represented at all, were it not for some of our seeing teachers.

Mr. Chiles, almost totally blind himself, introducing one of the social-adjustment classes, had remarked, “To be blind is an uphill struggle. You’ve got to sell yourself to every seeing man. You’ve got to show him that you can do things that he thinks you can’t possibly do.”

It was true enough — if you were a donkey in a world of horses, you had to justify your worth and existence to the horses. You had, somehow, to prove to them that you could carry as much weight as they could, and if you couldn’t move as fast, you at least were willing to work harder and put in longer hours.

“Anything you do wrong in the world of the seeing,” Mr. Chiles had said, “like dressing untidily or putting your elbows on the table while eating, even if half the sighted world themselves commit these sins, people around you will chalk up to your blindness. They’ll call you poor wretches, feel sorry for you, and they will commit the worst sin of all by excusing it because you’re blind.”

So we were marshaled in groups and marched into classes where we were given good common-sense lessons — that you had to introduce young to old, rather than vice versa, that it was good to avoid wearing brown and blue together, even if you did not know what browner blue signified, and that if you could not eat an orange half with a spoon, it was better not to eat oranges at all. At the same time, we were told that, no matter how independent blind people became, they must always accept help from the sighted graciously, recognizing that the feeling for helping the blind was the result of a generous impulse.

The more serious side of the social-adjustment program was concerned with facial vision and the teaching of “mobility.” One day early in spring, all the totally blind students were herded into the gymnasium and asked to run through an obstacle course. Plastic and wooden slabs of all sizes and weights were suspended from the ceiling around the gymnasium. Some of them hung as low as the waist; others barely came down to the forehead. These slabs were rotated at varying speeds, and the blind were asked to walk through the labyrinth at as great a speed as possible without bumping into the obstacles. The purpose of keeping the slabs moving was to prevent the students from getting accustomed to their position and to force them to strain every perceptory ability to sense the presence of the obstacles. The thinner the slab and the higher its position, the harder it was to feel or hear it; that is to say, to sense the pressure of the object against the skin — a pressure felt by the myriad of pores above, below, and next to our cars. Some of the slabs were of an even fainter mass than the slimmest solitary lamppost on a street corner. This obstacle course helped gauge how well an individual could distinguish one shadow-mass from another and, having located the one closest to him, circumvent it without running into yet another. Here was where the wheat was separated from the chaff.

A person who has knocked about fearlessly — and it is a help if he was blinded in his childhood - will do much better in this test of facial vision than an individual who either lost his sight late in life or has been restrained from developing the full range of his coördinated senses. Having, of course, during my childhood, jumped from banister to banister, from roof to roof, and ridden my bicycle through unfamiliar places crowded with unlocated objects - and that, too, at a fast rate of speed — for me, going through this obstacle course was child’s play. The gymnasium was kept quiet so that the blind people could hear the obstacles, although I could not help feeling that I could have run through the labyrinth with a jet buzzing overhead. When someone cracked his head against one of the slabs, and the others discovered who had done it, they would laugh mercilessly, until, of course, they themselves ran smack into one.

5

AFTER we had spent three or four class sessions running through this obstacle course, we were given a theoretical briefing on the importance of facial vision — that the blind ought to put the same emphasis on it as the sighted do on seeing, and that the way to develop it was through abandonment of fear and through complete relaxation. We were also briefed on a few stock secrets of the trade, such as that the head should always be held high in order to walk a straight line more easily, that some found that a hardly perceptible arching of the back helped to minimize any injuries frontally received, and that compass directions — determined sometimes by the sun against the check—were better than remembering lefts and rights. In time, one would get the knack of such things as going into unfamiliar stores and finding the right counter or finding an elevator in a strange building.

We were also advised that in crossing streets it was safer to walk with the traffic rather than to follow pedestrians, as they might be crossing against the light. In crossing streets without lights, safety depended entirely upon the ingenuity of the blind individual in gauging the distance of the cars correctly, although it was helpful in crossing wider streets to take them in parts or in halves. Above all, one must never get panicky and run across a street.

Each instructor then was assigned two or three students, and with cane in hand, bus token in pocket, we separated for downtown. My instructor gave me a list of trifling, if not embarrassing, things to purchase from scattered counters in a Rexall drugstore, and then asked me to meet him at the coffee shop of a department store for a milk shake, the treat being dependent upon my success in making the purchases. I was specifically told not to ask for help, and even if it were voluntarily offered, I should try to decline, provided I could do so gracefully. I did not know whether the instructor would keep his watchful eye on me, but whether he did or not, it was important to me that I should do well on this first day of independence.

I started out by tapping the cane in front of each foot before taking a step, as I had been taught. This was supposed to ward off tripping over a curb, dropping into a manhole, or some other such obstacle, inclining or declining. I found that the noise of the cane made me very self-conscious and was quite distracting, so I flung it into the gutter at the end of the driveway in front of the school, and having made a mental note of the spot so that I might pick up the cane on my return, I started walking rapidly toward the bus stop, with my hands thrust into my pockets. Rather than wait at the nearest bus stop, I decided I would walk three or four blocks to the next one. Just to test my facial vision, I counted the lampposts and tried to guess the distance from which I first perceived them.

The sun was out in its full noon glory, although there was just the right proportion of breeze, making the heat not severe but pleasant. In fact, the breeze was so gentle that it disturbed my facial vision not at all, and I could even perceive the curves and slight upgrades on the street, though that street was totally unfamiliar to me. However, when I unexpectedly stepped off a curb, that fraction of a second between the curb and the street was so frightening I almost wished I had my cane back — that cane which my instructor called the third leg of a blind man. I found, though, that soon my foot started registering a slight indentation before the end of the sidewalk, and that was clue enough. To my left, on the street, there was a steady stream of cars going both ways at, I guessed, about forty miles an hour. There were sounds of Ford motors, Chevrolets, and I even remember hearing a few Buick engines. Walking on that street, I felt as confident and happy as I imagined a driver would feel with a ton of machine at the command of his feet. Then I heard the clanging vibration of the electric wire just above the traffic. My instructor had told me to listen for it as a sign of the approaching trackless trolley. Then, almost a block behind me, I distinguished the sound of the trolley motor from the rest of the traffic. The bus stop was still a block and a half ahead of me and I knew I had to catch that trolley, because it would be twenty minutes before the next one. With the ever-increasing sound of the trolley motor in my ears, I started running as fast as I could to the bus stop. I wished there were the shadow of a wall or a fence, o my right, to run by. As it was, there was empty space to my right and the hindering noise of the traffic to my left, a narrow sidewalk with a string of lampposts, and heaven knew what other hazards. I skirted one lamppost by a hair’s breadth, and another actually caught my shoulder, but not my head.

When I got to the next intersection, the trolley was almost abreast. If I waited to listen for the sound of the traffic, I could not possibly make it, so I dashed across the street, thinking of what I had repeated to my mother a long time ago.

“ Death comes only once,” I had said.

“ But,”she had said, “ what if you lose a leg?”

That had been frightening, all right.

“After that I wouldn’t want to live. I don’t mind being blind, but a wheel chair . . .”

Maybe if I had a white cane in my hand, I wouldn’t have to worry as much about the traffic, and the bus driver would know I was blind and would wait for me. But it is better this way, I thought.

Just when I perceived the looming shadow of the bench at the bus stop, about ten or fifteen feet away from me, the trolley passed me. If only someone is waiting there, I wished, so that the trolley will at least stop. But no one was, and I missed it.

With a discouraged heart I slowly walked up to the bench, out of breath, and sa down. It would be twenty minutes more, twenty whole long minutes, and maybe I wouldn’t get my milk shake after all. I took out my Braille watch and kept my fingers fixed on the hands, and I heard car after car pass by. I felt as envious of the drivers inside as a man standing in a rainstorm trying to thumb a ride, although I myself had no intention of flagging down a car.

At last there was another trolley. I heard its door open a few feet ahead of me. Walking parallel to the shadow of the trolley, I felt the gap of the door and climbed the three steps, slightly nervous, wondering if I could drop my coins in the box without having to be shown. I found the box, and the driver must have thought I could see some, because he did not say anything about a vacant seat. The trolley was moving already. I walked down the aisle, feeling the vague shadows of the people, hearing the crackling sounds of packages or newspapers, until I felt the shadow of an empty seat and sat down.

I did not pay any attention to the half bends of the trolley. My instructor had told me, “Just look for the second right-angle turn, where the trolley goes from Markham to Main Street.” It was such an obvious turn that I could not miss it. We were going south now (I always oriented myself with the direction of one street), and the Rexall drugstore was on Fifth Street. My instructor had said, “Don’t bank on the bus halting at every bus or light stop. Try to get used to the distance of a block, and that way you can’t go wrong.”

I got off on Fifth all right, and crossing Main, I went into the Rexall drugstore. Since it was my first time, I asked the man in the front where I could pick up some shoelaces.

“Straight to the back,” he said, “and the second counter to the right.”

6

AFTER five minutes I had bought all that my instructor had asked for, and I started walking rapidly a block up to the department store, dodging the window shoppers by using facial vision to keep a proper distance between the windows and myself, and the luncheon crowd by a watchful car. By counting the gaps in the sustained shadow of the windows, I knew how many stores there were on that block. Next time I came to town, I would get the various stores located by keeping track of how many doors up they were from the street corner. It was as simple as that.

My instructor had said that there were a number of ways of telling when you got to the street corner. It could be done by the noise of the traffic, the draft of air, or the receding shadow of the windows. At last I was at the double doors of the department store. I went in and started walking back toward the elevator, listening for the sound of its door. Inside the elevator, I found my instructor.

As soon as we sat down in the restaurant, he said laughingly, “You shouldn’t have asked that man for the shoelace counter.”

“And how was I to know where to find it?” I retorted. “ By the smell of it ?”

“ You gave me the slip,”he said, “ that is, until I saw you running, from inside the trolley that you missed. But I picked you up again at the drugstore.”So he had watched me!

“The first thing,” he was saying admonishingly. “is that you’ve got to admit to yourself that you are blind and that there are certain things you just can’t do, like throw ing away your cane and crossing streets without listening for traffic.”

He was right, of course. I wouldn’t make a habit of crossing streets that way, but the cane — that was another matter. I had never hooked a cane in front of my bicycle when I rode it, so I did not see why I had to carry one when walking, if I did not mind taking the chance of falling into a manhole.

“You’ll carry that cane,” my instructor said threateningly. “If not, you won’t be allowed to leave campus.”

“ Yes, sir,” I replied.

The milk shake was there now, and putting the straw between my teeth, I let it drain down my throat. It was cool and delicious, and I forgot about the cane. All of a sudden I felt weak — weak and empty. “It must have been tougher than I admitted,” I said.

“It always is, the first day you are on the road by yourself,” the instructor agreed. After we had finished the milk shakes, he asked, “Can you find your way home? I have some other business in town.”

“ Yes,” I said.

We walked out of the department store together and then separated. I could have caught the bus on that corner, but I decided I would walk all the way down to Markham (or First) Street. I must have passed a nut shop on the way, because there was the smell of roasting peanuts. And from the next open door, a fresh smell of leather. Must be a shoe store, I thought, or maybe a luggage shop. Then there was a swinging door which creaked as it was opened and closed, letting out a burst of air which breathed of dime store. At Markham Street there were three or four buses standing. I knew which was a trolley because of the motor. A number of people were getting on it, and I got in line. I felt in my pocket and there were two bus tokens. I had been given one extra for the trip, just in case I lost one or took the wrong bus. They would be good for another trip downtown, I thought — that is, if I did not use one now. So I left the line, crossed Main Street, and started walking west on Markham. I could not think of walking home, because the distance was at least a couple of miles, and I did not know the way.

Halfway down the block I stepped off the curb and, standing about a foot away from it, tried to thumb a ride. The trolley whizzed past in front of me. Cars kept on passing me until finally a woman stopped.

“Are you going toward Stiff Station?” I asked.

“Going right there,”she said.

I climbed in, exhausted from my expedition.

7

WITH the setting in of the hot and humid summer, I realized how much I had been a victim of my school surroundings. Until the launching of the mobility program in late spring, I had been circumscribed in the building compounds like a prisoner whose every friend is a prison mate and whose every impression of the world outside is colored by day-today minute observations of the happenings within the walls. For me it was like watching life in the United States with a jaundiced ear. I learned among other things that to be blind was to be jobless, because employers did not like hiring blind people, especially for temporary work. But the tireless efforts of Mr. Woolly finally secured me a job working forty-eight hours a week for one hundred dollars a month at an ice-cream plant. Covering each day a distance of about four miles in trolleys and buses while going to and from work hammered home with full force the realization that the world outside by no means accepted the capabilities of the blind at face value, as we had been led to believe by the flawless understanding of the seeing members of our blind society.

I remember going out on crowded buses. To my chagrin, ladies would get up and offer, indeed force me into, their seats, and if I resisted, I ran the risk of having everyone in the bus share in the scene; it was awkward and unbearable when often two or three people tried to direct me to my seat, which I could have found quite well alone. On my first day the bus had been empty, and I had entered it without anyone’s taking notice of my blindness. But now, traveling at seven-thirty and five, the morning and evening rush hours, in packed buses with scarcely any room to stand, it was hard to move in the crowded aisle without bumping into people and making my blindness apparent.

But with growing experience in mobility, I learned how to relax and how to put people at ease, even if it were just a stranger in a bus. Whenever ladies did get up to offer me their seats, I made a joke of it and gently declined. I found a way of talking to waitresses in a low voice before they even said a word, which made them speak softly too, and I discovered a particular careless manner of crossing streets and of getting on and off buses which avoided incidents — incidents which had occurred so frequently in the earlier days of my travel. Occasionally people still shouted, “Watch out!" but if I was concentrating very hard, I never heard them.

With this new-found freedom of movement— freedom which had been denied me in India, even on a bicycle—there opened up yet another vista, which was as exhilarating to me as learning to read for the first time must be to an adult.

When I came home after putting in a long day at the ice-cream plant, phy sically I would be very tired, more fatigued than I ever got during the school year. To keep my mind alive, however, I always took time off from my sleep to listen to books on records. Even though I felt discouraged because the Library of Congress recorded so much light fiction, I found enough good books to add a new dimension to the ever-expanding horizon of my activities.

For the first time now, I received nov els of Fielding, Proust, Rolland, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. I read feverishly, sometimes staying awake the whole night, listening to the never-tiring voice of the actor Alexander Scourby on record after record. This way of reading was so entrancing that I hated to t urn sides or change records every fifteen minutes. The phonograph used to get hot and smell of burning rubber, but I read on and on into the night, certain that I could do my work at the ice-cream plant even if asleep.

(To be concluded)