ABSTRACT
In 1959, Joginder Paul visited a blind home in Machakos, close to Nairobi. This had such a deep impact on him that it released, through his life, a deluge of stories and flash fiction that carried the concept of seeing and not seeing, of perception and imperception, of sight and blindness at their centre and years later culminated in the ingenious Nadeed (1983), a novel critically acclaimed by almost all the major critics in Urdu and which even today brings forth undiminished praise. In 2016, Nadeed was translated and published as Blind. Paul’s crafting of the novel is a story in itself. When he wrote the first draft of this novel, Paul realised that he had written ‘fiction.’ It read like a lie, and it did not feel authentic. He tore the draft to shreds and then went about trying to experience the state of blindness for several days, keeping his eyes shut, groping his way around, trying to feel the grain of what he wished to create. In the extract in this volume, Paul gives voice to an urgent concept of how those that cannot ‘see’ actually ‘see’ and understand much more deeply than others who have eyes. Indeed, it is their perceptive spirit as human beings that allows them to comprehend and wish to see different people as essentially one.
