For days now, the small house in Naidkhai village has barely had a quiet moment. Neighbours keep dropping in. Relatives travel down from nearby districts. Children peek through the doorway. There is no wedding, no festival. The visitors have come to meet Irfan Ahmad Lone, the 30-year-old son of a casual labourer who has just done what no one from Bandipora district has ever done before.

He has cleared the UPSC Civil Services Examination, securing an All India Rank of 957 in the 2025 batch. And he has done it without being able to see the question paper.

To understand what that rank really means, you have to go back to a summer afternoon in 1999, when Irfan was four years old and still chasing his friends through the lanes of his village in north Kashmir.

"I come from a humble background. My father is a casual labourer in the irrigation department. Initially, I was a normal boy without any disabilities," Irfan says.

Then came the syringe. He was playing outside his home when it slipped and pierced his eye. The vision in that eye was gone almost instantly. The family rushed him from one hospital to another, hoping something could be saved. A few years later, while he was in school, a pencil took the second eye too.

"I was studying in a local school when I lost my second eye accidentally while playing with a pencil," he says.

The boy who used to run through the village lanes was now learning to find his way around his own home in the dark.

18 surgeries & a lifetime of sacrifice 

His father, Bashir Ahmad Lone, refused to accept it. A casual labourer earning a small monthly wage, he began selling whatever the family had — patches of land, household assets, anything that could be turned into hospital fees.

"My father tried very hard and sold all his assets, land, and property in order to safeguard my vision," Irfan says. "Even though his income was very small, my father took me to........

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