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tiffany

tiffany
brar , kerala

Tiffany Brar, with close-cropped hair, is dressed in a purple ankle-length kurta with three-fourth sleeves. It has blue piping at the sleeves, around the shoulders, and down the front opening. She stands holding her white cane on the road in front of a compound wall. Above her head to the right is a sign on the wall that says NO PARKING. Fixed to the top of the wall is a large signboard. Across the top portion of the board it says prominently, Jyotirgamaya Foundation, and the name is written in Braille below it. To the right of the name is the silhouette of a figure holding a cane, and to the left, a logo in the form of a stylized red eye above the word Jyotirgamaya. Across the bottom of the board it says Preparatory school and Training Center for Blind.
Tiffany is sitting at a table, eating from a steel plate on which there is fried rice, raita, and a boiled egg. Near the plate is a steel tumbler with a handle. Tiffany is smiling broadly. Sitting next to her is her longtime helper Vinita akka with long hair tied back with a clip. Her right arm, wearing a broad gold bangle, rests on the table. Her head is bent at the neck, her forehead rests on her left palm, and she is looking downwards and smiling. She wears dangling golden jimki earrings.
Four male students are sitting side by side in front of desktop computers. Tiffany stands in the middle, next to a young man in a red shirt who is looking at his computer screen with his fingers on the keyboard. She is bending forward with her hands on his keyboard and appears to be speaking to him.
The Jyotirgamaya team sits in a row on a marble step. From left to right: access technology trainer P. Balaraman, Tiffany, assistant coordinator Aruna PS and vocational trainer Mohini Mohan. Balaraman wears black pants and blue half-sleeved shirt. Aruna wears a red and green checked kameez and red churidar. Mohini wears a greyish violet kameez, white salwar and white dupatta.
Tiffany stands facing sideways, holding her cane, in front of a blue steel cupboard. To the left of the cupboard are three built-in shelves. The top of the cupboard and all three shelves are crowded with at least 30 gleaming trophies in various shapes and sizes and made of brass, wood, glass and other materials.
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“Society constantly interprets what we can do and what we can’t. This has to change”

When Tiffany Brar, holding her white cane, was waiting for a bus in Thiruvananthapuram, an elderly vegetable seller walked across to her and gave her Rs 10. Tiffany, a National Award-winning community service worker, tried to convince her that she was well off but the vendor refused to take back the note. She sought to gain divine blessings for having helped a poor, blind person!

The notion that persons with disabilities are helpless prevails even among the ‘educated’ classes. “People still ask me, can you take a bath and put on your clothes by yourself?” the 30-year-old says with a laugh. Random individuals ask her father why he hasn’t got her married. Friends wonder how he dares to leave her on her own when he travels abroad.

But Tiffany wasn’t always independent. Her parents were overprotective (her mother died when she was 12) and she hadn’t learnt self-care. Since her father was a military officer with postings across the country, she frequently changed schools and most of them were discriminatory. She is still deeply attached to ‘Vinita Akka’, a domestic helper at her high school hostel who taught her to handle her basic needs and later became “more like a mother”. But she needed an escort wherever she went, right until the age of 18 when she used a mobility aid for the first time.

The white cane liberated her. She tapped her way across the city, used public transport, acquired English and B.Ed degrees, started working, began to fight for disability rights, and went paragliding and skydiving. In 2012 she set up the Jyotirgamaya Foundation which runs a residential centre that trains the blind in mobility, yoga, life skills, computer skills and other crucial areas. It also engages with the rural blind community through a mobile school and conducts training camps in different parts of the state.

Having led a roving childhood, Tiffany speaks Malayalam, Nepali, Tamil and English besides her mother-tongue Hindi. She likes reading fiction, preferring tales of families told from a feminist perspective, such as Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. To empower others like her to live and earn independently is her mission. “Disability is possibility,” she sums up.


Photos:

Vicky Roy

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