Eating in the dark

Shobhana Sachidanand dines at a restaurant without lights in Singapore

As much as signing up for dining in the dark experience seemed novel, walking into a dark room gave me goosebumps. All kinds of thoughts raced through my mind.

I thought I would be speaking the loudest in the room, screaming for help, and dropping things. Would I allow my taste, touch and smell to take over my sight? Would I step out with enhanced perception?

How do the visually impaired navigate in unknown spaces or even in their own homes? How do they trust people, sometimes complete strangers? And are they better at tasting ‘mystery menus’?

For a start, I never realised I had caramelised corn with raspberry vinaigrette and ciabatta bread as appetisers, and jackfruit risotto for the entree. I thought I had been served prawns and meat.

Ushered in by touch

When I stepped into this dine-in-the-dark restaurant in Singapore with six of my friends, we were told that Bernard, 52, a visually challenged waiter, would be our host. The moment Bernard held my hand, placed it on his shoulder, and told the others to form a chain, I was perhaps the only one who felt reassured. The others kept screaming through the dark corridor, telling me to slow down. That I was with Bernard perhaps made me feel confident and his deep baritone was mesmerising enough for me to follow him like he was the Pied Piper.

The walk to the dining area seemed endless as we thought we were winding through a dark hallway until we were escorted to our table. Bernard asked me to sit down first and then move three chairs to my left. My friends behind me followed the drill. It was only after we all sat down and did a roll call that I stretched out my hand to check how far my friend was seated. She wasn’t more than an arm’s length away. And mine wasn’t a long table for six but two!

Listening to water

Bernard instructed us not to touch anything. He later came back with bottles of water which he placed on each table and asked us to check if there was a glass on our right and whether the cutlery was in place. He instructed us on how we should grab the glass, and pour ourselves water by listening to the flow of the liquid into the glass. Thankfully, none of us dropped or spilled anything. He also asked us to insert our thumb into the glass and check the level of water. We skipped that due to hygiene concerns.

During our hour-long dinner, Bernard’s voice was all that we wanted to hear. He was joking that we had gone silent as we were scared of the dark. Right! We were merely checking in on one another or staring at the only infra-red light in the room (a CCTV camera) to ward off our fears. We also waited to hear the call signs (clicking of tongues) used by the waiters (all visually challenged) as a signal to communicate and not bump into each other in the passageway.

Problem talking

As the meal progressed, we found it hard to have a conversation. Does that mean that one needs eye contact to have a conversation? In the dark, speaking is fraught with uncertainty. How can you be sure those sitting at the table are really paying attention to your witty repartees if you can’t see them? I felt a strange sadness enveloping me as I couldn’t appreciate the ambience nor the way the food was laid out. Do these factors add to the enjoyment of a meal?

Menu amnesia

For us, food became secondary as we were consumed by the experience of the unknown. None of us could recall a single dish after the meal or even say that we enjoyed the meal as we were focused on processing what was happening all evening.
We were more perceptive about what we were tasting and the silence around us.

Subramani L describes the world of the visually impaired and critiques the trend of dark dining

The ophthalmologist’s office appeared like a mini garden the evening I entered it, dreading the prospect of the dilation drops piercing my eyes and leaving me with a splitting headache for three days.

As always, I admired the hanging pots with decorative plants, the open front yard, and the square sitting area with creamy-white walls. I had just turned 15 in 1988, struggling to wrap my head around trigonometry in Class 11 and had run into trouble making friends in a new school.

Little did I realise that a life-changing event awaited me that evening when I left the clinic with a diagnosis that I would go totally blind.

Three years later, my eyesight dipped below the legal threshold. I began college and it gave me little time to unlearn what I had learnt as a sighted person.

The sudden deprivation was medically attributed to a degenerative genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP), but explaining the trauma was not so easy.

The waking hours when consciousness sneaked back in were the craziest. My eyes searched for images in rapid blinks but were greeted by disturbing flashes. The disorientation was hard to put in words. I clammed up, trying to adjust to my blindness in my own terrified way.

Walking never felt so painful, especially since my shoulders were now hunched, and hands stretched to fend myself from crashing into something. My joints stiffened, anticipating a crash every time I moved. As one who knew that our society regards blindness as a social stigma (most of us have only seen blind people begging at the train stations), I felt embarrassed if someone held my hand. I told my mother and brothers not to hold my hand in public, which I guess was my own head-in-the-sand moment.

It took several months and a few hard nudges from my mother to accept the reality and hold the rubber handle of the long aluminum cane.

Dated concept

Given my past, I can totally relate to the sensory deprivation you feel when you enter a dining-in-the-dark restaurant. The managers tried to soften the blow by teaching sighted diners how to walk in by holding a blind guide’s shoulder, but the guests did not recover from the shock of not seeing.

“People entering the (dining-in-the-dark) restaurants naturally feel lost,” said Belgium-based Thomas Tajo, a researcher and totally blind activist who teaches echolocation, a technique to help the blind navigate with sound. “It is quite possible that the
experience could depress some,” he told me on a call.

The fear that one could spill water over the table or let the sauce drip on a white shirt could be anxiety-inducing for some. “I don’t know if that would be the best frame of mind to enjoy the dining experience,” he said. “I’d much rather prefer an environment where there’s a sensory balance, such as dimmed light and accessible layout for everyone to handle glasses and cutlery without anxiety.”

Thomas believes dining in the dark is a 20th century idea that needs to change. “People who see us work in darkness probably go back with the thought that we work better only in such uncommon work environments, which is far from the reality,” he says. On the contrary, he explains, we should come up with “ideas that don’t insist on discomfort to be empathetic.”

Going by my own experience of working in a newsroom and that of many who get easily assimilated in tech companies, it is fairly obvious that the blind do not need too many changes in mainstream workplace. It took several weeks for me to acclimatise with the newsroom, but once I became familiar, I had no difficulties in navigating the space both in a physical sense and in accessing internal systems.

Home alone

I grew up in Chennai and moved to Bengaluru for work. As I settled down in my job, I had opportunities to live alone, something I enjoyed a great deal. Like all mothers, mine was worried about me being alone in a new city, but she had to leave home to attend to pressing family requirements.

I promised her I would not enter the kitchen but did it anyway because Swiggy and Zomato were at least five years in the future, and it was cumbersome to call my auto driver friend Ramu to fetch me something as small as a glass of coffee. Watching the milk boil needed attention and pouring the steamy liquid into a glass required Zen-like concentration.

It would usually take time to learn where things were, be it sugar for coffee or pepper powder for soup, but a bit of searching (combined with smelling and tasting ingredients) would yield the desired result. When I had difficulty locating the ingredients, I would make a mental note and buy it when I shop with Ramu.

Ramu had been my Man Friday those days when he would ferry me to the nearest Nilgiris or neighbourhood grocer to pick things I like to cook. Among the things I tried making was toasted butter garlic bread, which wasn’t Pizza Hut-standard, but definitely edible. I used regular ladles, spoons, and holders. With a bit of imagination, I would figure out the edges of pans and tawas (griddle). Yes, I did burn my fingers but the little tricks I had in finding the centre of the tawa or edge of the milk boiler mostly worked.

Being alone would also mean lunch with friends, at least once a month. Geetha, Justin and Rajdeep, three of my closest blind friends, would go to a restaurant closer to my workplace. We would ask the waiter to read the menu and give details of the dishes we liked.

Most restaurant waiters are helpful to blind diners. They make us touch the position of the dishes on the plate and stay consistent in serving them. For instance, if they serve a specific subzi at the right corner, they serve it there the next time too.

That apart, the restaurant managers also allow waiters to guide us outside the restaurant to the waiting auto or car and most go out of their way to ensure we are safe.

By the way, Bengaluru has footed dining-in-the-dark restaurants on and off. My friend and car rally driver Srikarunya opened one near Jeevan Bhima Nagar in 2006. “It was received well but I couldn’t continue because for some reason, blind people didn’t see it as a work option,” he said.

Tech intervention

I might have felt excited about dark dining before the turn of the century because assistive technology was still nascent, not to mention expensive.

My first brush with the screen reader was at the residence of a blind friend, who had spent a fortune to buy it. A mixture of amazement and jealousy filled me as I observed him operate the text-to-speech engine. “It’s all for the rich. Not for us,” I remember a fellow blind student saying. In a few years, personal computers became common and, more importantly, I could afford one.

In 2003, a friend working with National Association for the Blind (Karnataka) handed me a CD with the demo version of a popular screen reader that I installed. It was instantly liberating. I no longer needed to call my brother or sister to spell check documents. I could email articles, do my own googling and access digital documents. It empowered me enough to find a job with this newspaper.

From that point on, technology evolved quickly to alter my experience to the extent that I no longer consider being alone a disadvantage. Google Maps was heaven-sent, especially when I had to verify if the auto driver was taking unnecessary detours. Apps like Seeing AI and EnVision (which recently became free on iOS) describe everything.

The other morning, I was wheeling my suitcase at the Bengaluru Cantonment station to locate my coach. My fellow passengers were not so keen to help. So I opened my iPhone, pointed in the general direction of the display board with coach numbers and told my distant helper to look it up for me — An app called BEMy Eyes allows sighted volunteers to look through the phone cameras of the blind real-time and locate objects or read the text for them.

Technology isn’t perfect but it is definitely more reliable than before. And I feel the playing ground is getting even for the blind and the seeing world. I share Thomas’s scepticism over dining in the dark. After all, when a blind and sighted kid could play Dice World together, why should we put ourselves in a dark alley to feel for the blind?

How to assist blind diners

Use the clock method to describe the food on their plate or the position of the glass of water. For instance, if a curry is served at the uppermost center of their plate, say
12 o’clock. If the glass of water is placed on the upper left side, say 11 o’clock. Assist them only if they would like.

The concept of dark dining

* Concepts like ‘role reversal’ or ‘tolerance for the other’ have been around for long. They coalesced into an experience-based concept in 1988 with the premiere of ‘Dialogue in The Dark’ in Frankfurt. Dining in the dark is an offshoot.

* Most dark restaurants employ blind waiters. Only the waiters are visually challenged, not the chef and assisting staff.

* The waiters often tell you to eat clockwise to ensure the right sequence of consuming the food. A single set menu (boneless)is offered.