The idea of my travelling all the way to Seattle to work with JoAn seemed bizarre to her, but eventually she accepted my offer. I fancied that even if I never ended up dating her, if she accepted my offer, then at least for a whole summer her voice would be in my ear and the breath of her presence would surround me and so, perhaps, soften the edge of my loneliness. The dreamer in me imagined that if she came to know it she might fall in love with me - stranger things were known to happen.
Then, one day, she told me that she needed a summer job to defray her college expenses, and I hit upon the plan of hiring her as my amanuensis for the coming summer and dictating to her my personal history. JoAn and I often had to read the same assigned texts I arranged for her to become one of my paid readers. But try as I might, I couldn’t get JoAn out of my head. Even on a Saturday night, the clientele of the Sugarbowl was like its name: plain and homey, lacking the dash and glamour of the car crowd. Run by a couple of prim spinsters, it was usually half-empty and didn’t have so much as a jukebox to liven it up. Those of us who didn’t have a car could make do with the few dour bluestockings who were willing to go to the Sugarbowl, a dumpy little café within walking distance of the college.
Ved celebrated writer the new yorker movie#
The closest movie theatre was too far to walk to, and drive-in movies and good restaurants were even further away, in Los Angeles. Above all, it seemed that at Pomona the only way a man could get a date was to have a car - ideally, a gleaming convertible with tail fins. I was the only Hindu there, and I was shy, studious, and unathletic, while the college ethos was essentially Christian, white, and outdoor Southern Californian (the beach, pep rallies, and football). But although we were both sophomores and had many classes together, there was as much chance of my dating her as of my being in the driver’s seat of a car and cruising down a freeway. And she had such a kind, bright voice that just to hear her greet me on a campus path thrilled me. Like other sought-after girls, she was pretty, fresh-faced, and outgoing, but she was also highly intelligent and serious - qualities she always hid because, in the fifties, young men considered smart girls threatening. At the Arkansas School, I had compressed my elementary and high-school education into three years, and there, as later at Pomona, felt cut off from everyone I knew and loved back in India, somewhat like a sailor sent out to sea.Īt Pomona, I thought that the ache of my loneliness might be assuaged if I could get JoAn, the campus belle, to go out with me. I had lost my sight just short of my fourth birthday as a result of meningitis, and had grown up in India mostly without formal education. But the wish to explain my life to JoAn and to arouse her interest and sympathy was urgent.įive years earlier, I had flown alone to America from India, the country of my birth, and entered the Arkansas School for the Blind to obtain the education that was unavailable to me - indeed to all the blind people - at home. I had not read deeply and didn’t know much about writing. At the time, I had been speaking English for only five years. Anyway, I felt I wasn’t missing much staying snug inside and working. That summer it seemed to rain every day, and situated as Seattle was on the Puget Sound, the fog seemed to roll in at any and all times of the day.
In 1954, when I was twenty and studying at Pomona College in Southern California, I took a train to Seattle, Washington, the hometown of my fellow student JoAn Johnstone, and got myself a one-room, efficiency apartment, and started dictating to her my life story for eight hours a day, six days a week, oblivious of the city life going on outside. (Amplified and Revised After Publication, 9/17/03)
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