There is no pity. There is no helplessness.

Her characters need no mercy. The focus is on hope.

"People told me it is a dry subject," says Das. "That it is not glamourous. But I really liked the subject from the depths of my heart. I wanted to know how these people live and what they want. I found that they are as normal as we are."

It took seven years for her to compile these photographs. For that, she went to blind schools in Ahmedabad, Faridabad and Delhi.

She stayed with the blind. She attended their marriages.

She travelled with them on a mountaineering expedition to Nepal. She even intruded in their personal lives.

"My objective was to show that they behave as normally as we do in our personal lives," she said. "However, in most of the pictures, they were aware that I was photographing them."

She points out to a photograph of a village shopkeeper couple. Both of them smilingly shy away from the camera even though they cannot see it.

The photographs are all in black and white and printed manually.

Life, for Das too, has not been easy.

As a woman in a male-dominated profession, she has struggled to make a mark for herself. Born and brought up in a conservative family in Kolkata, life has always been a challenge for her.