Deaf in DC: A Memoir

1. The Story So Far . . .

1 1 The Story So Far . . . AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN WHEN I WAS ATTENDING SIXTH grade and living in Gagret, a small village in northern India, I was stricken with mumps and typhoid and became deaf overnight. I thought I had died and gone to hell. I had never met a deaf person in my short life and not being able to hear made me feel less than human. The school I was attending seemed to agree with me on this demotion and discharged me. The idea of a deaf person attending school just did not enter in anyone’s mind. That included me. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one in my family and circle of acquaintances knew about schools for the deaf. So there I was—a young deaf boy with no future and less hope. That was in 1952. The idea of spending the whole life as a behra (Urdu equivalent of “dummy”) for the rest of life didn’t seem very palatable. My father, whom we all called Babuji, listened to all kind of “expert” advice and decided that deafness was a sickness since it was tied to typhoid and mumps. Like other sicknesses, it should be able to be cured. He tried all kind of remedies—regular Western doctors, ayurvedic (traditional Indian) medicine, hakeems practicing Greek medicine and, most of all, faith healers of all varieties. All of them gave me drugs in various shapes, sizes, and colors as well as cure-all ashes blessed by “holy men” that are found in every village. Needless to say, none of these worked, and, as I write this book about sixty years later, I am still deaf. Seeing that no cures were working and I couldn’t go to school, Babuji suggested that I should start working on our farm along with the servants . No one in our family had ever worked on the farm. We were landlords. My deafness had helped me win this “privilege.” I started out as a cattle herder that required me to drive cattle a few miles away to one or the other pastures and watch over them all day long. I also had to cut grass, milk water buffaloes, and cows; collect and carry cow dung; and 2 d e a f i n d c carry water from the well for the family. Later, I was promoted to plowing the fields behind a pair of oxen and weeding and reaping wheat, corn, rice, and sugarcane. My nine years working on the farm were pure hell. I hated every minute of it but managed to survive by my being a hopeless and unashamed optimist. I kept hoping that I would start my journey to become a successful person. What “success” entailed was never clear to me. However, none of this stopped my education. My parents encouraged me to study on my own. Each year, as my elder brother Sham, who was a year ahead of me in school, moved on to the next class, I inherited his used textbooks. I spent every free minute with these textbooks. Reading came naturally to me and my problem was being unable to stop reading. I would finish the textbooks assigned for the whole year in a week. History and other subjects that depended on reading were also a cinch. For mathematics, I had to depend on sporadic tutoring by my brothers Sham and Narain. The big problem was learning English. In India at that time, instruction in English began during the fifth grade. I had the fortune of learning the alphabet and some basic English sentences such as “Mohan puts on a shirt.” However, I wanted to learn English and learn it well as it was the ticket to big things. I wrote down each grammatical construction that I could think of in Hindi and had Narain, my eldest brother, write down English equivalents . These were simple sentences like “I go,” “I am going,” “I have been going,” and so forth. I started to make English sentences using Hindi language as a base. I would look at whatever I saw and try to describe it in English in my head. “That ox blue is” and correct it to “that ox is blue” after consulting my chart. This helped me get a good grasp of English grammar. Reading English books (mostly cowboy novels) using a dogeared dictionary helped me build vocabulary. I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in several months. All of these haphazard...