One day, running to open the door for the milkman, she accidently knocked down a glass of water that her father had left on the floor. ‘Are you blind?’ he shouted. ‘Clean up this mess.’ She did, while he fetched in the milk. There were big, jagged pieces of glass and many tiny splinters spread across the soaking floor. She picked them up one by one, peering to make sure that she didn’t miss any. Are you blind? Tears rose to her eyes and when she sobbed, they became red and itchy. Her head ached and she felt that her vision was even worse than before.

In the middle of the night she could not find the bathroom. Her knees knocked against the bed as she ran her palms along the wall. Wall and flat wall which should give way to a corner, a corridor and then the little toilet with a window and the grey necessary chink of starlight, but her fingers just found wall and more wall. Even the light switch, though she would get into trouble for waking her baby brother, seemed to have been swallowed up by flatness. Had blindness arrived? Was this what it was like? The pressure on her bladder and the need for help. She pressed her knees together and, just as she was about to wet her pants, cried out loud for her mother.

The next day she stayed home from school. She tied a hair ribbon around her eyes and started to write in her exercise book. She wrote, ‘I want to be a teacher when I grow up,’ and wondered if she had reached the edge of the page, if she needed now to move her hand back to the starting margin. There was no way of knowing. It made no difference if she looked down at the copybook or straight up, it was the same pressure of the ribbon on her closed eyes. She had to guess and keep on writing. When she lifted up the ribbon, she was surprised to see that her writing was no longer in straight lines; the words were no longer flat adjacent to each other. Instead they curved up and down, in the shape of hills. The words were clear but, without being able to see the margins or the ruled page, the sentences had strange circular shapes, cramped because she had been too cautious in her estimation of the margins. She covered her eyes again and groped her way around the house, practicing. She made her bed and helped her mother in the kitchen. At first her mother laughed but when Farida spilled the lentils on the floor, she shooed her out of the kitchen. ‘Can we get a dog?’ Farida asked.