My spoken word made my mother laugh, my written word made my father laugh

Father at home: 2022

One day when we were around 5 years old, a distant aunt entrusted with the task of providing some sort of lunch to me and my cousins asked me if I could eat with my hands. 

A quick series of images flashed by – first an image of eating with my feet, second an image of being given food that would have to fit on my palm. I replied no, I usually needed a plate. Whatever the content of the lunch would be, I was sure my small palms would not be up to the task. This was when the aunt started laughing, and at some later point of this story being relayed to other family members, it became clear to me that she had meant to ask if I could use my own hands to eat or if I needed someone to feed me. 

People often do not say what they mean and also often do not mean what they say. Even neurotypicals find it a problem, imagine the Sherlockian universe in which others have to forensically navigate conversations. 

It was my mother who found this funny; she said she loved calling home from work to pass on instructions because of how different my phone speech would be from others. It would be years before I realised, but I took things even more literally on the phone because I didn’t even have the facial cues to add to my evidence inventory. 

She found it funny how when she would ask me what I got to eat at my grandmother’s I would say it was white and round. What do you mean white and round, she would ask, what was the food called?! It is of course impossible to memorise every item of food devised by humankind, so I learnt to lead with the taste. It was sweet, white, and round – this drew grumbles but seemed like a much more acceptable answer. 

I have a similar strategy with describing clothes. ‘What do you mean she was wearing something fat?!’, I would hear. ‘What do you mean by the question anyway, it was covering the human being, what else you want to know?’ I would not reply. I lead with the colour of the clothes now, that seems like a similarly acceptable answer. Start asking me if it’s cotton or synthetic, or whatever other varieties there may be, and I may just look at you as if you’ve asked me to kill myself. What do you mean cotton or synthetic, which cotton shirt seems non-synthetic to you?! 

The relief that has come with awareness of neurodivergence is that these codes do actually mean things to a lot of people. The majority of humankind has somehow decided to agree on some absurd notions of how to describe food and clothes, among other things. A curiously high number of autistic people I have spoken to have mentioned the concept of telepathy being important to them, as it is for me – what if this longing for a telepathic power stems from not having access to these neurotypical codes? 

My mother would laugh at the raps I used to memorise which mineral would have to be marked on the map in Ratnagiri and which in Mumbah City. She would have preferred other ways of memorising such things, but once she figured out the raps worked, she laughed. I would love it when she laughed, it was relief. Momentary. But precious. But giving a peek into my mind came with costs. There was a whole episode where I had to come up with names which apparently students had for teachers – the bargain I managed was that I would have to come up with one every day. Was I protecting my friends from the charge of not having an inner world like mine? It is hard to say, what I articulated to myself was that I had to make my mother laugh. Then, for a moment, there would be peace. 

My father would not laugh at the differences in my speech, but he was a quiet man anyway. Except for his booming laugh, which would so loud that if we were ever lost we would know where to find our parents. We once discussed how far his laugh could be heard. On a quiet day, if it was not hilly, or windy, we decided it could reach two kilometres. This would be when we were around 10 years old and with an imperfect grasp of how long a kilometre is. There was no doubt about the decibel level of the laugh though, I fear the birds in Lolegaon still speak of the thunder that struck them one winter a few generations ago when we went holidaying there. 

He was the biggest fan of my writing. I would have had no idea that I wrote humour had it not been for his reactions on reading my stories. His eyes would become violent with laughter as he keeled back, and sometimes he would get into such laughing fits that he would not be able to make any sound between his roars for a good few seconds. Perhaps they were not as funny as all that, the humour possibly resonated with him like only an autistic writer’s craft can with their own autistic fathers. 

In the last few years when we lived as a family, my father began talking to himself so much that it almost became a problem. The usual social rehearsals, the ones we had always known he did because of his intelligence, the ones I have amply inherited – but they just became louder than earlier, more frequent than earlier. He knew it too, I once heard him going out into the balcony to have one such session. The same balcony that would be my safe space earlier. In her own last years, that balcony became my dog’s favourite spot. A tiny corner of the house. But safe. Sunny. Precious. 

I was told there was this film called ‘Rain Man’ which I was too young to watch, which had affected my father strangely. There are certain people who have high intelligence but behave in ways that are stupid, my mother explained to me, and that for some reason this was important to my father. This seemed neither questionable nor interesting to me. When the same thing happened a few years later with another book I was ‘too young’ to read, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, that did not invite any interest either, but the pattern became obvious. 

Anyway, what I came to write was that my spoken word used to make my mother laugh, and my written word used to make my autistic father laugh.