The dark light

Narinder Jit Kaur

MOST of us must have read EV Lucas’s essay School for Sympathy in which he talks about Miss Beam’s School where students had to take an exercise of going through a blind day, lame day, dumb day or deaf day, the objective being to make the children have a firsthand experience about the life of physically challenged people, their special physical, psychological and emotional needs; and to generate empathy and a sense of special responsibility towards them.

The essay helped me in understanding them, but there is one incident in my life that made me comprehend it more closely.

In the early 1980s I was teaching in Ludhiana and staying in the college hostel. There was a visually challenged girl in the hostel. A sober, friendly girl with a strong hearing ability, she could recognise people from their voice, even from a distance. When I was later transferred to Amritsar, she came there to participate in a group song competition (about two years later). I went back-stage to meet her, took her hands in mine while her friends looked at me with surprise, and said, ‘Hello! How are you?’ She waited for a moment and then beamed, ‘Oh! Narinder ma’am!’ She surprised not only me, but all those standing there.

Back in Ludhiana, she approached me to help her with studies. She wanted me to explain poems to her as she recorded my voice on a tape-recorder. I agreed to it and fixed a time after dinner, with special permission of the hostel warden. She came to my room with her tape-recorder. I explained the poems in a slow, strong voice to make it easy for her to understand. Suddenly, the room plunged into darkness due to a power cut. ‘Oh, no!’ I blurted out. 

‘What happened, Madam?’

My world came to a standstill. The realisation came to me with a rude thud. Not that I didn’t know about it, but it hit me hard. While we people feel suffocated and irritable when power goes off even for a few minutes, here was a person (and there are millions others) from whose life ‘light’ has gone forever. While we open our eyes to the bright sunlight every morning; for these people, it is always dark. Their endless nights never turn to day.

This was my ‘blind day’ in Miss Beam’s School. All I could meekly say was, ‘Nothing, the light’s gone off.’

‘Oh…!’ Her tone was calm, casual and matter of fact. It made me feel awkward to have expressed my disgust at the power cut. She was mentally better equipped to adjust to the darkness. I felt more visually impaired.