Recently, I happened to be in Banashankari, Bengaluru, attempting to locate an address. I stopped every passer-by for guidance, receiving responses ranging from sheer indifference to curt shrugs. While I stood there wondering why people couldn’t make even the feeblest attempt to help others, a gentle and soothing voice from behind caught my attention.
I turned around to face a gentleman wearing dark sunglasses, holding a white stick in his hand. With a friendly smile, he asked me which cross I was looking for. It didn’t take me long to realise that he was totally blind. To my astonishment, he gave accurate directions to the address, indicating certain conspicuous landmarks.
Thanking him profusely, I could not help asking him how he could know all these details. “Well, I live in this locality, and I can ‘see’ things without my eyes,” he replied in jest, his face radiating enormous confidence. Too overwhelmed to react, I offered to drop him off at his residence, which he politely declined, mentioning that he had to visit his sick friend nearby.
As I stood there watching him walk away with ease, using his stick like an electronic sensor, my mind raced back nearly 40 years to when, as a SAIL executive on official tour, I stayed at the company guest house in Kolkata. As I was returning in the evening after the day’s work, I noticed the watchman of the guest house imploring every passer-by to fill out a certain urgent message in Bengali in the money order form he was sending to his ailing mother in Kharagpur.
Not a single person so much as looked at him, and everyone seemed to be hurrying away like mechanised toys engrossed in their own business. The moment he saw me, he came running, hopefully, to me with his request. I shrank inside as I saw his expression of deep disappointment and disbelief when I admitted that I did not know a single letter of the Bengali alphabet.
As I reproached myself for my inability to help this poor, illiterate chap, I saw the gardener of the guest house, who had been silently watching all this, coming towards us. He had lost both his hands in a work accident, and our company had employed him on compassionate grounds to water the garden here, which he was carrying out efficiently with his legs.
He asked the watchman to tell him the message and, squatting on the floor of the verandah, asked for the form and the pen to be placed by his side.
With incredible ease, he held the pen between the two toes of his right foot and completed the message in neat ‘foot-writing’! Then, without waiting for a word of thanks from the grateful watchman, he quietly went back to his work as I stood riveted watching this amazing and ennobling spectacle!
These are the little miracles of nature, I thought, that beautify human lives.
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