Lighting The Way
(The life story of Raju Dhanvate)
Perhaps it’s only fitting that my father used to break stones for a living. For the last 36 years, it almost feels like I’ve been metaphorically doing the same. Yet, that I am writing this is a testament to the fact that obstacles are meant to be overcome, and problems are meant to be solved. That is the purpose of their existence.
Born in a small village called Khurd Savli Vihir near the holy town of Shirdi, I arrived on the eve of India’s Independence Day in 1975 in to a family of a man, woman and their daughter. India might have been free for almost three decades by then, but my parents still lived a hand mouth existence. My father was a daily labourer and the family depended on those day wages to put food on their plates. I realize now it must have been incredibly hard for my parents to live like that, but the first six years of my life passed happily. I recall only happy memories from that time.
But time has a funny way of evening things out because in 1981, we lost my sister. She was eight years old. It was unfair and we hadn’t even fully come to terms with her passing when I was struck down with high fever and I lost my sight. We had no medical help and no real way of knowing what my parents might have done to prevent my condition. The irony is that the day I officially became visually impaired was Diwali.
At this point, my father perhaps decided he wanted a happier life and abandoned my mother and me. We know since that he married another woman and started another family. My mother though was undeterred. She had just lost a daughter, had a son who was blind and a husband who no longer wished to care for her, but she decided to never give up. That bold decision has today shaped me in a way even I don’t fully understand. For a single mother to bring up a blind son in Khurd Savli Vihir was unheard of. It just underlines the fact that my mother has uncommon courage.
It was her motivation that helped me come to terms with my blindness, with no thanks to the villagers. I don’t know what it is about human beings that make us want to make fun of those who are different or less fortunate, but I certainly know how it feels to be treated that way. My mother was broke and I was fatherless and blinded but that didn’t stop the children in my village from throwing stones at me. Adults would launch verbal barbs at me often blaming me for my father’s departure. I’m not sure still which of the two hurt me more.
I suppose only to feel normal, I told my mother I wanted to go to school just like the other children. She wanted me to have an education, but was unsure about how we could afford it. My grandmother was unsure that the school would accept a blind boy. Either way, it meant that I had to stay at home.
That reality changed with a macabre twist. My mother’s brother was, like my father, a daily labourer. He worked at a construction site, loading and unloading bricks and mud. He was a victim of an unfortunate accident that led to his left hand being amputated. And strangely that was how fate offered me a helping hand.
One of the patients sharing the hospital ward with my uncle started talking to my relatives and me, and made the elders realize the importance of educating me. He was a man of more fortunate means and luckily for me, my family paid heed to his words. He even gave us an address to a school for the blind. A few months later, I had my wish and a new uniform. I was going to a school thanks to the kindness of a complete stranger. It was my first brush with the fact that the world isn’t completely cruel.
I thrived in my new school and until the seventh standard was one of the leading students of the school. In fact, by the eighth standard I was competing with normal students in elocution competitions and winning. It was in that year that National Award winning film director Rajdutt was at hand to give me an award for the ‘Best Student’. The man who made inspiring films like ‘Pudcha Paaol’ and ‘Shaapit’ left his indelible stamp on my life too. That was undoubtedly one of the first highlights of my short life.
June 1995 was the beginning of a new chapter. That was the year I matriculated from high school. With a hunger for more, I decided to move to the metropolis that is Mumbai. I sought admission in Ramnarain Ruia College. Any doubts whether I would survive its tumultuous pace and cutthroat competition were immediately laid to rest the day I was submitting my documents to the college. I was short by 300 Rupees in my application fee. A stranger simply offered me that money without breathing a word of giving it back. I was convinced I would be okay in the Maximum City.
My life passed uneventfully until it was time for me to appear for my twelfth board exams. My regular writer fell sick and the replacement was not allowed since he was deemed ‘non-regular’ and hence ineligible. English was the only paper which he was going to write, but the authorities simply stated he couldn’t even though he was from the eleventh standard. I lost a year thanks to an inexplicable rule. It was the first of many such instances.
I reappeared for the HSC Board exams the next year, and passed and immediately enrolled for my Bachelors of Arts. I thought I would finally gain acceptance in every way possible. I had just crossed another obstacle but several were just about to come up in my way. I needed an income given my circumstances and those of my aging mother, and so I trained myself as a telephone operator. I believed that I could make it if I could get a job with the Reserve Bank of India. However, my application was rejected without giving me a valid reason. Determined to find out why I had been turned down this way, I went to New Delhi in late 1999, and met with the Social Justice Minister Maneka Gandhi. Thankfully, she intervened on my behalf. She was told that since I was from the Open category and the seat was meant for a blind student of the reserved category, I was ineligible. A seat that was created to help the less fortunate would lie vacant for several years because they couldn’t find a reserved blind student who also wanted to be a telephone operator. There couldn’t have been a harsh way to stack up the odds against me.
A few petitions later, the Finance Minister at the time, Yeshwant Sinha then stepped in and ruled that an Open category position be created for candidates like me. As a fate would have it, I could never benefit from that rule change. By the time Mr Sinha created the extra position, I had passed my second year of Bachelor of Arts. I applied as soon as the position was created but the moment I did, I was rejected. Again. This time the reason was that I was over-qualified. The irony still doesn’t escape me. I’d help create a vacancy that now someone else would fill.
So, I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in May 2001 and I didn’t exactly have the job offers rolling in. To make ends meet, I sold toys on the local trains, and to keep myself from going insane, I worked with social welfare institutions, especially ones that benefited the blind community. It was one of the toughest phases of my life, but I can now look back at it with pride. It made me a much stronger person.
My mother believed that our fate, hers and mine, would change if I got married. I tried rather hard to disabuse her of this notion. I’d forgotten, there’s a reason why my mother was able to bring me up on her own. She’s incredibly stubborn. So, she won. On the 1st of May 2004, I married the woman who I believed truly cared for me. But before long, it was time for me to start caring for her. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour. I was gutted. I was about to just plain give up when my friend from college and a girl I consider my sister, Aarti Bhosle, came to my rescue. In college, she helped me with filling up forms and reading out notes. Now a few years later, she was helping pay for my wife’s surgery. My wife’s health improved quickly and my belief in the goodness in people did too.
I don’t think life is meant to be simple for some people. The punches kept rolling in mine. My mother had a paralysis stroke just a few months after my wife’s surgery. So, here I was jobless, with the responsibility of caring for two women I truly care for, facing rising medical billing and inflating prices. Once again, I stood on the edge.
Even though hope was always just out of reach, I decided to apply to the State Bank of Hyderabad for a Clerk’s position. This time though, I had tugged on the right straw. I got through the written exam, and passed the interview. In October of 2011, I was told I would be employed as a Clerk at the State Bank of Hyderabad. It’s been a few months, but I still get goosebumps thinking of what might have happened otherwise. And then I feel that perhaps, this is a way of a superior power letting me know that I haven’t been abandoned completely.
I’ve decided that I would like to help people in the same way that strangers and friends have helped me. I want to use my experience to let people that they’re not alone, that there is hope, that life isn’t just about the struggle, that belief and faith are incredibly under-rated. I would someday like to work with an organization where I’m helping visually impaired youth less fortunate than me prepare for the world outside. If I can make sure just one of them has a smoother ride than mine, I think I’d have done my job in a system that’s so heavily stacked against the less fortunate likes of us.
It’s easy to become philosophical about life after the roads I’ve walked and the bumps I’ve stumbled in to. The thing about those bumps though, is that I’ve always managed to get up after the fall, dust myself and walk on. I try though to keep my head about me, and not worry about the things I can’t control. After all the things I’ve experienced, I would like to say that it’s not impossible to overcome a challenge if you want something bad enough. I might be blind, but I see the good in people. And there is a lot of good. It’s this goodness that gives me the strength to keep going. It’s been a long fight but I know I have a long way still to go. I’m ready for what life throws at me next, just as long as it makes me stronger. I started by talking about breaking stones, and I hope to be able to say one day, that of all the stones I’ve encountered in my path, I’ve been able to ground them to dust.
Written (in Braille) by:
Raju D. Dhanvate
State Bank of Hyderabad
CBD Belapur
Navi Mumbai
