Do fairies exist?

*I wrote this piece for The Academy(Newsletter of Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussourie) in October 2011.

There was a light drizzle in the morning, the mist lazily flirted with the distant hills of Mussoorie. A visit to the National Institute of Visually Handicapped(NIVH) was scheduled for the day. Though I was excited about the trip, the romantic inside me was yearning to spend a quite day in the hills. With the hope that there would be many more such days in the coming days, I got into the bus that would take us to Dehradun. As the bus negotiated the hairpin bends, we started crooning to Old Hindi songs.In about an hour, we reached our destination- National Institute for the Visually Handicapped(NIVH), Dehradun- a sprawling campus with an air of Ruskin Bond's Dehradun of the 1960s.

We were then taken to the famous school for the blind that is part of NIVH. I went into the sports room that was in the ground floor. There was one carrom board in the middle of the room. The board had many more holes than four, the players played in turns, cheering each other with some time lag. It took me some time to understand that carrom board for the blind is quite a different game. 

At one corner of the room sat a girl in grey uniform. She must be around 10 years old, I thought to myself. As I watched her,she moved the index finger of her right hand over rounded undulations over a large white sheet. She was reading something, her lips moved sometimes and were pursed in another moment, she giggled in between and sometimes she sighed as her index finger moved in unfailing straight lines. She turned pages like a professional, her index finger immediately went into the left top corner of a new page and moved to the right like clockwork.

I said "Namaste, I am Anirudh. I am an IAS…training in Mussorie. May I know your name?".

Her finger stopped moving, she didn't look up to me. She replied confidently, "Hello. I am Swati Singh. I am in Class 6." I could see a smile at the corner of her lips.

"What is that you are reading?", I asked in a friendly tone.

"A story", she replied very matter-of-factly.

"Can you please read it out to me?", I asked,

She then let her index finger do the reading. She started reading out at an amazing speed, she was very. She read out this story about a little boy and girl who go out on an excursion to somewhere. She giggled in between when the boy in the story tried helping the girl in the story but ended up falling on his back. She giggled whenever the girl in the story outsmarted the boy.

I listened to her for a long time. She was amazingly fluent. Her index finger was better than a set of eyes. She read like she had written the story herself, modulating for different chracters and moods in the story.

I interrupted her and asked her if she liked reading stories. She replied in the affirmative. She said, "I like stories in which animals speak." She spoke with great energy about the stories she read.

"So you must also write stories.", I asked, sensing how she had a ready facility with words.

She paused for a second and replied in glee, "Yes, I do write stories."

"Can you tell me a story you've written?", I asked.

She told me a story about a helpless sparrow and a rowdy crow and how a fairy rescued the sparrow from the nastiness of the crow. 

I wondered about the metaphorical significance of the sparrow, the crow and the fairy. Does Swati see herself as a little sparrow? What does a sparrow mean to her? Who is the crow and who is her fairy?

I asked her if there were fairies in her stories always. She replied that she loved storied with fairies.

"So you believe in fairies?” the rationalist inside me had to ask.

"Yes.", she said with a pause.

"Do you think they exist?” I asked in a shaky voice, half-hoping she replied in the affirmative and irrationally hoping that they really existed.

"Yes, I want to believe in fairies. They must exist". She said this with pregnant pauses, pauses that caused a great emotional chaos inside me. I hoped she believed in them like every child of her age would.

"Yes, they..” I paused to gather my emotions. 

Where is the fairy that will protect little Swati from our insensitivity? Where is the fairy that will give Swati the strength to bear with the world that is blind to many like her?

"...they do exist. They must exist". I managed to finish. 

The visit to National Institute of Visually Handicapped was the first time in my 25 years of existence that I had come so close to understand the visually challenged. I was astounded and ashamed about how little I knew about them. I was told in the institute's library that all the students listen to the audio books regularly. The library, they said, was a very active place (unlike the IAS Academy's library). I had, like many amongst us would, seen the disabled as one-dimensional objects of sympathy. I was horribly mistaken. Who isn't disabled in this world? Who is perfect? If there was anything that was handicapped, it was all my lack of understanding the visually challenged. If visually challenged Ankur Garg of Class 8 could read Premchand's Godaan, how can he be called handicapped?

The visit brought home one point very clearly, one should not confuse vision for eyesight, as Justice Altamas Kabir had told visually challenged Rajesh Kumar Gupta(read more) who is an alumni of NIVH and is my classmate now at LBSNAA.