Sound-Shadows of the New World

In 1949, the fifteen year-old Ved Mehta, who had been totally blind since the age of four, left his native India and travelled alone to Little Rock to attend the Arkansas School for the Blind. For the next three years, he lived and studied with about a hundred blind and partially sighted boys and girls at the school. There he ran afoul of an Evangelical Baptist piano teacher who believed him to be damned because he was a Hindu, and a physical education instructor who maintained that only combative blind people could survive in the sighted world. Girls were also a big problem; like his new friends, he wanted to have dates and “go steady,” but he had been brought up in a country where romantic love was virtually unknown and marriages were arranged.

Still, the years in Arkansas were a time of education and liberation for Ved. He learned how to get around Little Rock byhimself, perceiving objects and terrain by means of “sound-shadows.” Eventually, he taught himself how to travel around the country. By adapting and persevering, he slowly came to be accepted in the New World. He worked for a summer at an ice cream plant alongside sighted workers. He swam and played chess at the local Boys’ Club. His fellow students elected him president of the student senate. An American girl fell in love with him. During all this time, he struggled with depression and home sickness, and when things became too much for him he withdrew into an old broom closet, the only quiet place in the boys’ dormitory, where he read adventure novels, tape-recorded classical music off the air, listened to news broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow, and made entries in his journal.

Writing now, more than thirty years later, about his adolescent yearnings and humiliations, Ved Mehta reconstructs his past in a prose that is intimate, sometimes comic, sometimes sensuous, and always lucid. The result is a compelling narrative that reveals the internal universe of a blind boy-man and also maps out for us the textures, smells, and sounds experienced by a mid-century immigrant.