What's That Pig Outdoors? (27 page)

“It's a matter of jarring the memory. I was helped by the letters I'd saved and carbon copies of letters I'd written. I'd kept a journal in Arkansas. I'm something of a pack rat.” Mehta had thought
Sound-Shadows
would be a short book, he said, or just a chapter in another volume. But as he wrote, more and more memories surfaced, “and in the end it was a matter of cutting. I threw away lots and lots of material.”

One of the memories he kept was one of rejection. He had hoped to attend the famous Perkins Institution for the Blind in Massachusetts, but they turned down the Indian boy because they feared he would be a “cultural misfit.”

Arkansas, which trained blind youngsters in such things as basketweaving, was willing to give him a try. But would Mehta's life have been different if he had gone to the more sophisticated school?

“When I was in college we used to play a game,” he replied. “What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if Charles Martel had not
defeated the Muslims at Tours? If Napoleon had won, would all Englishmen be speaking French today? If Martel had lost, would all Europe be Muslim today?

“It's possible that given the sketchy education I had in India, I might have failed at Perkins. The truth of the matter is that in Arkansas, although the facilities and academic education were poor, I did learn something there that perhaps I wouldn't have learned so well at Perkins. That is mobility—getting around.”

And, he added, the rustic Arkansas school was a “great democratic society. When you're a foreigner with a sketchy knowledge of English, that helped me a lot. Here in the backwoods were decent, hard-working, giving people who took a chance on me. They had no idea what would be involved, and they did the best they could.

“My affection for the place doesn't cloud my judgment about its inadequacies, but if it weren't for Arkansas I might be sitting back in India without the education I subsequently received.”

If Mehta had remained in India, where education for the blind in those first years after independence was decidedly lacking, what would have happened?

He won't entertain the notion that he might have stayed. “There were practically no opportunities for the blind,” he said, “and my father [a high government health official] had been trying to get me out since I was seven. A head of steam had built up over the years. Sooner or later I would have got out. Whether I would have got out in time to get the education I had—I don't know. I think of education as a form of liberation of the spirit, just as I think of mobility in the same way. Maybe I would have felt that I was under a prison sentence. In India I felt as if I were in a cage. That's how I thought of blindness in those days.

“Being able to go to the West and be educated both here and in England freed my spirit, which makes the handicap under which I live much less cumbersome than it otherwise would have been. I think I was always outward bound, and if I were 15 today I would still be outward bound.”

Outward bound: That's a good metaphor for the life of a man who is no less remarkable for his attitude as well as his accomplishments. It sounds like the serenity that comes with looking back on a rich
and productive life, but it also may be the equanimity that comes from a mature acceptance of circumstance.

A few weeks before, I had overheard two people talking about me. One called me “the
Sun-Times'
deaf book editor.” That irked me, for deafness is not part of the way I define myself. Doesn't it also irritate Mehta when people call him “the blind
New Yorker
writer”?

“As I grow older it matters very little what people think or say,” he replied. “You can't change what people think of you. People are what they are.

“But a time comes when you're defined by what you've done. People don't consider that ‘the deaf Beethoven' wrote the Ninth Symphony or that ‘the blind Milton' wrote the later poems. It's a matter of what you achieve at the end of the road.”

Not long after writing this interview in 1985, I began to view myself in a different fashion. I was less judgmental about how the deaf looked to the hearing. And no longer did I worry so much about how other people felt about me; no longer did I bristle at their insistence on classifying me first as deaf and second as a journalist. I was no longer quite so hypersensitive about my speech, no longer so concerned about appearing stumbling, confused, and even retarded (as many hearing people unconsciously treat the deaf, even the deaf who are professional journalists). Ved Mehta was right. Let others believe what they chose. How I defined myself was more important. I was Henry Kisor, book editor and literary critic, husband and father, son and brother. “Deaf man” brought up the caboose of that train of self-characterization.

Ego-shoring recognition had begun to come my way, in the form of a clutch of plaques and awards from newspaper and literary groups, a few lines in
Who's Who in America
, and, one year, a nomination as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. The honor that meant the most to me, however, was an informal poll by the Northwestern University student newspaper that named me one of the most popular teachers on campus.

It had happened in 1982, when I had last stood at a lectern in musty old Fisk Hall, home of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, five years after beginning a moonlighting career there as an adjunct instructor. While we were still at the
Daily News
, a fellow
Panorama
staffer who taught Basic
Writing—the intensive course in journalistic composition required of all Medill freshmen—suggested that I might have something of value to pass on to students. That appealed to my own schoolmasterish instincts.

It shouldn't be difficult, he explained. Each section of Basic Writing was small, typically no more than a dozen students, so that the instructor could give each freshman a great deal of attention. It was not a lecture course in a cavernous hall but an evening laboratory in a small classroom, with a typewriter at each desk.

The notion of teaching was so appealing that it temporarily buried my old phobia against speaking out in a group of strangers. I didn't think of it at all until half an hour before the first class was to begin. Then my heart started to pound, bullets of sweat sprang from my forehead, and my mouth dried into a desert. Hands shaking, coffee slopping from my cup, I stood before the freshmen and began in a high, quavering voice.

That evening luck smiled upon me. The members of the section were among the best and brightest in their class, curious and expectant young people who seemed to assume that the man with the strange speech must have something of value to impart to them—otherwise he would not be standing before them. As I realized they understood what I said, my intestinal butterflies fluttered down and folded their wings.

Soon I happened upon the best strategy for teaching the class. Though it wasn't a lecture program but a hands-on course, Basic Writing required fifteen minutes or so of preliminary remarks that included an explanation of the objectives of the evening's lesson and quotations from samples of writing, good and bad. At the best of times I'm not able to sustain enough precision in my speech, especially in extended talks, for unfamiliar listeners to understand more than 90 percent of it.

To my rescue came the electronic copier. Before each class I prepared a typed essay containing the evening's remarks, lesson objectives, and samples and ran off enough copies so that each student could have one. As I read from the remarks, the students would follow me with their copies. Often many of them would listen intently to my talk, referring to their copies only when a bungled phrase or sentence confused them. I exacted a quid pro quo from my students: if I took the trouble to give them copies of my remarks, they were responsible for taking the contents to heart.

I also tried hard to write as exhaustive a critique as I could of each student's work, in part because I never could get a lively class discussion going, for reasons I'm not quite certain about. Possibly the students felt I couldn't follow the bouncing ball of classroom conversation and therefore were disinclined to volley it back and forth. Maybe I simply couldn't light their fires, although they did give me their undivided attention whenever I spoke. In any event, I figured I would make up for this lack with a handwritten, sometimes typed, personal analysis and mini-lecture clipped to each story each student handed in, praising and cajoling where I could, trying to whet their enthusiasm for the hard work of writing well. It was time-consuming, but the technique seemed as efficient as that of any other instructor. In the end the experience was so satisfying that teaching is now part of my dream for the future: to spend the last decade or so of my career at a university somewhere in the Rocky Mountains that Debby and I love.

I left Medill for one simple reason: part-time salaries were tiny. Inflation was rampant at the time, Colin was just four years away from college, and I had begun another moonlighting career, as a columnist on personal computers. It was more lucrative than teaching.

During the summer of 1982 I bought an Osborne 1, a sewing-machinesized portable that was the first affordable personal computer for many Americans. I wanted to do some freelance writing at home, and the swift and efficient word-processing system at the paper had spoiled me forever for typewriters. Like so many writers who discovered the personal computer at that time, I fell head over heels in love with the technology and even became messianic about it.

I persuaded my superiors at the
Sun-Times
that this machine would save our declining civilization and that it was their duty to allow me to bring the Word to the needy masses. They thought the proposal noble, but worth just $100 a week. Still, it was a beginning. Within a year I had syndicated the column to half a dozen other newspapers from Seattle and Los Angeles to Orlando, Florida. Colin's college fund soon grew healthy.

Of course, much of the great personal computer “revolution” was poorly disguised public relations hype, and I am afraid that in my unblinking enthusiasm I contributed a good deal to the fervent drivel
written about it. But after the mid-1980s, when the industry matured, the journalists who covered it became more healthily skeptical about its potential, and I was no different. The column ended not long after the bloom wore off the “revolution,” but I still occasionally write about the technology for computer magazines and for the
Sun-Times's
book section, where from time to time a new item of word-processing software or hardware seems useful enough to merit a column on “Computing for Writers.” Amid all the fluff and nonsense, however, the coming of the personal computer truly revolutionized my life as a deaf person, not just as a writer. It enabled me to reach out to hearing people in ways I had never dreamed of.

10

If one must be hearing-impaired, one couldn't choose a better time and place than the last two decades of the twentieth century in the United States. Thanks to a broad awakening of public consciousness about the rights and potentials of handicapped people, it's
easier
to be hearingimpaired today than at any other time in history. Not that deafness will ever be a convenience, but things could be much worse.

Two thousand years ago the Romans gave full rights only to the deaf who could either speak or read and write. The great majority—those who were deaf, speechless, and illiterate—had few privileges. That half loaf did result in the success of some deaf people, such as Quintus Pedius, whom Pliny considered one of the most eminent painters of Rome. (Quintus was the grandson of the consul of the same name who was co-heir to the will of Julius Caesar. Then, as now, coming from the right family never hurt anyone.)

All the deaf lost their rights during the Dark Ages, when the Church forbade them to receive communion because they could not confess their sins. Only in the fifteenth century, after the German scientist Agricola had discovered and celebrated a deaf and speechless man who had learned to read and write, did Europeans again accept the idea that those who could not speak or hear could be elevated to literacy. During the next century the Benedictine monk Pablo Ponce de Léon claimed success in teaching deaf Spanish aristocrats to speak, read, and write. There is considerable evidence that he did so by first teaching the children to write—an idea that would have pleased Doris Mirrielees immensely.