Here was a boy growing up in Punjab during the fall of the Raj and the Partition , a boy who had been blinded by meningitis at the age of 3 , roller-skating through the back streets of Lahore as Sikhs slaughtered Hindus and Hindus slaughtered Muslims and civilization was collapsing and then , decades later , having made his way from India to an Arkansas school for the blind to Balliol College , Oxford , to The New Yorker , re-creating the whole thing in Proustian detail and better-than-Proustian prose ...
The boy narrowly escaped blindness after suffering meningitis .