Jagdish Chander adapts to life at SU as a blind student

By: Darryl Slater

Posted: 11/7/02

He leads you through the red door labeled “Laundry Room” and down the narrow stairway. He trails you, gently gripping your jacket.

“Left,” he says as you walk down the dimly lit basement hallway. Dusty pipes snake across the ceiling. They all lead to the door with the half peeled-off, black-and-gold “03” label.

He opens the door and lets you in. There’s a nearly bare mattress lying in the living room. No TV. No couch. No lights.

“It’s a little messy,” he’d warned you earlier, “not because I’m blind, just because I’m a messy person.”

***

The phone rings.

Jagdish Chander’s ears perk as he feels his way toward his roommate’s door. His roommate, Mohan Katna, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, rolls over and picks up the receiver. He chats for a moment and looks at Chander.

“Go back to sleep,” Chander tells him, and you wonder for a moment before shaking your head.

He sits you down, and over the next hour-and-a-half, the surprise fades.

Chander, 34 — one of just two completely blind students at Syracuse University, according to the Office of Disability Services — tells you about his 27 years in darkness and how he’s come to accept it as part of his life. He tells you how, in his native India, he’s doubly stigmatized — blind, they might accept, but divorced? Never. He tells you how he arrived here at SU last August to earn a disabilities studies graduate degree. How he’s dealt with the red tape. How he’s finally started to effect some change by lobbying for a beeping device on a crosswalk near campus.

And he answers that burning question: How in the world did he know his roommate was asleep?

“He always keeps the phone in his room when he sleeps,” Chander says with a laugh, and you can’t help but shake your head again.

***

It sounds like gibberish.

Chander’s checking his e-mail, and his JAWS program he received as a gift is reading it to him faster than the Micro Machines guy. The speakers spit out the sentences at 500 words a minute.

He’s sitting in a white plastic lawn chair. To his left lies his mattress — no bed, no box spring — covered with a thin blanket. In the corner, three suitcases are draped with clothes and towels.

The room smells like the coffee he’s sipping from the white mug that sits on a paper towel atop his desk.

As Chander taps the keyboard, you decide to test him.

“How can you understand what the program is saying?” you ask.

“It didn’t happen in a day,” he says. “When I first started using the program, I was at 50 words a minute. But now, when I skim, I go at about 700 words a minute.”

You still don’t believe him and ask him to summarize the e-mail he just heard.

He correctly tells you it was a useless forward from a listserv that told him to visit a Web site where he could find a creepy Halloween picture.

“It tells you that if you look hard enough,” Chander says, “you can see a Civil War ghost in the picture.”

That he can’t is sadly ironic.

***

Chander hates pity.

He doesn’t need help but kindly thanks people for it anyway.

After all, he’d sat shotgun and directed you here from the Center on Human Policy’s offices near Marshall Street, where he works as a graduate assistant. By Chander’s estimate, his four-room apartment in the Vincent Apartment complex — off Comstock Avenue, past Manley Field House — is a mile and a half from main campus.

That’s about a 40-minute walk, and Chander should know, because he walked it almost every night until last week, when it started getting cold.

“People ask, ‘How the hell do you make that walk?’ ” he says.

For the first couple of weeks when Chander arrived here last year, his mobility instructor, Mike Dylan, showed him around. Chander lived on Ackerman Avenue then and had to relearn part of his walk this year.

Chander says the sidewalks on Comstock Avenue are smooth, which make for an easy trek to campus.

He’s familiar enough with his house and his office at the Center on Human Policy that he doesn’t need to use his wooden walking cane there.

“Now, he goes to the bank by himself,” says Debbie Simms, a secretary in the Center on Human Policy.

But Chander still needs some help.

“We help him with copying files from folder to folder on his computer,” Katna, his roommate, says. “We don’t allow him to cook. He washes dishes. But he doesn’t want to be idle.”

Chander’s had to make some other adjustments since coming to SU. In February, the Office of Disability Services did not give him his books, which are digitized into his computer so he can skim through them at 700 words a minute, on time.

The ODS told Chander they were backed up with updating the software.

Eventually, it became so bad that Chander could not prepare for a class presentation. He felt embarrassed.

“He doesn’t complain when he probably should,” said Steve Taylor, Chander’s professor in that class and director for the Center on Human Policy. “But he was extremely patient about (not getting the readings).”

When Chander’s classmates from three of his classes wrote letters of protest to the ODS and Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw, Chander received his books.

“That was an awful period in his life,” says Cyndy Colavita, the office coordinator at the Center on Human Policy. “Here’s the university offering disability services that it can’t provide.”

The ODS refused comment for the story, citing confidentiality reasons.

Colavita served as a liaison for Chander when he decided to come to SU last summer. Chander had visited the university in August 2000, when he was in the United States for a conference. At that time, he was in his eighth year as a tenured, political science professor at the University of New Delhi. (Chander earned his master’s degree in political science at that university in 1992).

When Chander arrived at SU last year, he immediately encountered red tape.

Chander had to cross the “T” intersection of Waverly and University avenues to get to the School of Education, where he had classes. That particular intersection, Chander says, is difficult to cross because of its shape.

So Chander, whom friends call “Jags,” asked the ODS to install a beeping crosswalk. The office told him that the city handled those matters, and Chander found himself too busy to wade through the bureaucracy.

Finally, after Chander turned the matter over to Dylan, the beeping crosswalk was installed last month. Chander says it sounds like a cuckoo clock.

“But the obstacles are 100 times greater in India,” Chander says. “That made me a survivor.”

***

Chander humors your Americanism and gives you a quick culture lesson.

“In India, blindness is a stigma,” he says. “When you have a stigma about anything, you try to pass for normal. People would kind of compliment me like, ‘You’re blind, but you don’t look like you’re blind.’

“I’m no longer ashamed of my blindness. I take it as a part of my individual identity.”

Chander got used to not relying on his walking cane in India and still doesn’t use it much at SU.

Once, back in India, someone asked Chander and his girlfriend, “How does he do it? Is he able to do it?”

He giggles as he recounts the incident.

“I don’t think eyes have anything to do with sex. Most people do it in the dark anyway.”

When Chander was 18, he realized that if he didn’t work hard, no one would take him seriously. He’d be nothing but a beggar, a lesion to his family.

Chander went blind when he was six-and-a-half years old from a defect in his optical nerve. The doctors called it optical atrophy.

He grew up in a remote village in the Indian state of Rajastan. His mother, Sundari Singh, was illiterate and died when Chander was 18. His father, Bala Singh, was a semi-literate security guard at a Delhi bank.

Chander taught himself English at age 17 and graduated second in his major at the University of New Delhi.

When he applied for merit-based housing at graduate school, he told an administrator his accomplishments.

“Now son,” the administrator responded. “When you say you graduated second in your class, you mean second among the blind students, right?”

“In India,” Chander says, “it was looked at like if you have eyes, you’re functional, but if you don’t, you’re a liability to someone.”

Chander’s life was further marginalized when he separated from his wife, Vandana, whom he had married in 1994.

Divorce is scorned in India, though it is becoming a growing trend among middle class people like Chander.

“I was considered to be a misfit,” he says.

Chander and his ex-wife have a 7-year-old daughter, Namita, whom Chander still talks with.

When asked if he misses his daughter, he bluntly says, “Not so much, I’ve learned to live without her.”

***

Chander still remembers his parents’ faces, the map of his village in India and the village mansion where his family lived ever since his grandfather was a feudal lord.

He remembers colors and the carvings on his front door and the huge iron gate in front of the mansion, so big that elephants used to stroll through it.

Now, Chander remembers how to feel his way up a staircase and how to pour himself coffee and how to show you out when you leave.

This time, he leads. Through the door, down the the dusty hallway, a quick right, up the stairs, outside. Take a left out of the parking lot, he tells you. Then your first right, another left and you’re back on Comstock.

As you walk away, he’s standing on his front stoop, smiling. And you think he might have been right when he’d told you, “Blindness is just a nuisance to me, a mere impairment. If I gained my eyes today, I don’t think it would change many things.”