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EACH of us has a blind spot. Mr Nawaz Sharif’s is the House of Ibn Saud; in his eyes, it can do no wrong. The Pakistan Army’s blind spot is India; in its eyes, India can do no right. Imran Khan’s blind spot is the Election Commission; it does not act swiftly enough. Asif Zardari’s blind spot is wealth; he can never have enough. The Punjab Police’s blind spot is the blind.
On March 2, a contingent of the Punjab Police, deployed outside the Punjab Assembly building, manhandled a group of demonstrators who happened to be not only blind but right. They were agitating in support of their demands for regularisation of their services and implementation of 2pc job quota, a promise made to them by the Punjab government.
They could not have known that redress was not to be found in Faisal Square. The ‘deaf’ inside the assembly could not, would not hear the blind outside. The young jobless demonstrators were transported to the true crucible of power — Raiwind, where their grievances were resolved by Hamza Sharif, MNA and son of the Chief Minister Punjab Mr Shahbaz Sharif. Orders were issued. These have trickled down and now reached the sedimentary level of the Government Secondary Institute for the Blind, Sheranwala Gate, where former pupils can now be regularised as teachers.
The challenged do not live in a world of their own. They live in ours.
That institute is tucked away, hidden from sight, within Lahore’s old city. It was established well before 1947. The list on display of its headmasters records the names of Ram Pratap Singh (1943-44), Chobu Ram (1944-47), and then Mr Mohammad Ramzan (1947-53).
During Chobu Ram’s principal-ship, in early 1947, a young boy whose sight had been destroyed by an attack of cerebrospinal meningitis at the age of two and half was brought to the Institute (then known as The Emerson Institute) by his remorse-ridden father, Dr Amolak Ram Mehta. Dr Mehta was the assistant director of public health, Lahore, his son Ved Mehta.
Ved recalled his stay at the Emerson Institute in a moving memoir titled Face to Face (1957). He remembered his teacher the crude Mr Baqir, the vocational therapy of caning chairs, the imperfect attempts to learn Braille with calloused fingers, the leavening relief of music lessons, and the stench of “rotting vegetables and human filth” that pervaded then, as it does even now, the bazaar surrounding the Institute.
Ved Mehta left the Emerson Institute in 1947. Since then, after studying at the Arkansas School for the Blind, Balliol College Oxford, and obtaining a double BA and an MA from Harvard University, he worked as a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine from 1961 to 1994. He has authored over 25 books.
His Lahore alma mater still has only 50 pupils, still teaches caning chairs as a vocational skill, and still offers music as a distraction. Its concession to modernity is occasional access to computers which have sound-supported programmes. Ask the pupils what they want to be, and their replies vary from the predictable “teacher” to “caning chairs for a living”, to an unexpected “chief minister”!
Less than a mile away, across an arid desert of civic neglect, is an oasis of concern — the Thevenet Centre, run by the Jesus & Mary Convent for special children, built for those children whose abler siblings were enrolled at the main school. To watch these challenged children respond to the individual attention their teachers give them is to be reminded how lightless our blind spot has become towards those among us who are God’s chosen or just underprivileged. The Thevenet Centre manages 70 or so children. Its constraint is not pupils. More than 5,000 special children in Lahore alone need such attention. Its constraint is finding sufficient teachers who care enough for such children.
Being isolated does not insulate the handicapped from their surroundings. If anything, it accentuates their feeling of exclusion, their sense of deprivation. Our molehills become their mountains. The boys at the Sheranwala Institute, for example, once resented receiving only 18 puffs of the mosquito spray when they should have received the usual 22. They wanted the president of Pakistan to hear their appeal.
The challenged do not live in a world of their own. They live in ours. They want to continue doing so, but on their terms, and as the human equals they are in the sightless sight of God.
The Punjab Police can be forgiven for ignoring the fundamental rights of our visually impaired citizens. Constables memorise rules; they have no inclination to memorise the Pakistan Constitution. The blind can be forgiven for not having read the Constitution; it has never been printed in Braille. Perhaps that will be the first order an alumni from the Sheranwala Gate Institute will give when he becomes the chief minister.
The writer is an author and art historian.
Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2015
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