The room was full of the restless energy of a school day. Chairs were moving, students were talking to each other and there was the usual curiosity about what was going to happen next.
Then a few white handkerchiefs appeared.
Some students were asked to tie them over their eyes. Once the cloth was in place and the light disappeared, they were given a very ordinary instruction.
Open your bag and find your Hindi notebook.
It sounded simple enough. They knew exactly what they were looking for. They had brought the notebook to school themselves. It was somewhere inside their own bag. Yet suddenly, finding it became difficult. Hands moved through notebooks and books, zips were opened and closed, and some students began asking their friends for help. When we asked them why they were unable to find something that was right there in their own bags, the answer was simple.
They could not see.
A few students were then asked to come forward with their eyes still covered. This was only a short walk across a familiar classroom, but without sight they became hesitant. Some waited for a friend to help them before taking the first few steps. Once they reached the front, they were asked how they had felt.
They spoke about hesitation, uncertainty and the strange feeling of depending on someone else for something they normally did without thinking.
It was only a small exercise. After a few minutes, the handkerchiefs could be removed and the students could return to the world they knew.
The exercise was part of a two-day eye-donation workshop. The discussions were about eye donation, but they also gave us an opportunity to talk about blindness and what it meant to live in a world designed largely around sight.
On the final day, when the workshop was almost over, the school’s coordinator came to us and introduced us to a girl who was totally blind.
She had been there all along.
Nobody had mentioned her during the previous two days.
She did not say much. She appeared mayus, withdrawn and almost frightened, with very little confidence. Even when we tried to speak with her, she seemed reluctant to engage.
The moment was difficult to forget.
For two days, we had been asking sighted children to close their eyes and imagine what it might feel like not to see. And there was a girl in the same school who did not have to imagine it. She lived with that reality every day.
That meeting made us look differently at the problem we had already been facing.
We were trying to find blind people in the community. We had expected that they would be difficult to reach because they were scattered across different places. But perhaps the problem was not always that they were far away.
Sometimes they were already there.
We simply did not know where to find them.
There was no complete directory that we could open and consult. No reliable list of blind people living in the city. We spoke to organisations, schools and individuals and asked people to connect us with anyone they knew who was blind. We even placed advertisements in newspapers with a simple request: if you know someone who is blind, connect them with us.
Some of the people we eventually came across helped us understand why this search was so difficult.
There were two blind brothers who ran shops. They were working, earning and managing their businesses, but they did not want people to know that they were blind.
Their concern was practical. They worried that if customers or other people knew they could not see, some might take advantage of them, mislead them or cheat them. Keeping their blindness private was, in their view, a way of protecting their business and themselves.
That was another surprise. We were looking for blind people so that we could connect with them, while some blind people were deliberately making sure that others did not know they were blind.
There were also people who simply had no connection with any organisation working with visually impaired people. They lived with their families, worked where they could and went about their lives without appearing on anyone’s list. Sometimes our own programmes became an unexpected way of finding them. A conversation about eye donation could lead to a blind child, a family or someone who had been living quietly in the community.
Slowly, the picture began to change.
Blind people were not necessarily absent from society. They were often simply unseen.
A blind child could be sitting in an ordinary classroom without anyone mentioning her. Two blind brothers could be running shops while keeping their blindness private. Other blind people could be living and working in the community without ever coming into contact with an organisation.
The challenge was not simply to find where blindness existed. It was to find the person behind it.
And perhaps that was the lesson from that classroom.
For the students, the handkerchiefs came off. They opened their eyes and returned to the world they knew.
For the girl we met that day, there was no handkerchief to remove at the end of the exercise.
She had been living with that reality every day.
And we had been looking for blind people without knowing that, in that classroom, we had already found one.