When One Door Closes

What can a young woman do when she wants a family, a job, an office with indoor plants and lunch on the beach with chilled beer and prawn fried rice all at one and the same time??!

First written with friends in the Ochre Sky community. Art by

Noirtanki

, a writer, editor and artist with a special interest in pop culture through the lens of neurodiversity and the female gaze. Her work focuses on curating human interest stories, micro memoir and social commentary.

Mumbai 1997. I am standing at the window in the living room and looking out. There is a large blue and pink Volvo bus parked across the street. Big and luxurious, with an AC smell. I see a bunch of young backpackers get on the bus and away it sails out of my sight. I have no idea where it is headed, but immediately I think: Goa!! The land of fun and sand and palm trees, chilled beer, prawn fried rice and long afternoons on the beach with not a care in the world. One day, I will go too, I promise myself. In a Volvo bus to Goa. When my baby comes and I don’t feel sick every morning and often throughout the day. I will find a job, too! I will have an office desk with a small potted plant on it. A soft board with post-its reminding me of important meetings to attend. I promise myself all these things. The software industry is booming. I am sure I will find a job once my baby grows up a bit.

But when my baby comes, she turns my world upside-down, topsy-turvy and totally disarrayed. She is no longer inside me, but she fits me perfectly from the outside as well. We are so deeply connected that we still feel like one person. I scoop her up in one arm and sometimes, when she feels threatened (a loud sound, a stranger), she tries to climb me up like a tree - like a little baby monkey. She learns to walk, and we go for walks every evening, just the two of us. When I do get to take that Volvo bus ride, it is to Pune where my parents are, and she comes along with me. She eats Lays chips with tomato sauce and messes up the seat-covers.

The job is harder to get. The dream office with the potted plant is proving to be much harder to realize. The software industry booms along without me in it. I am forgetting my coding skills. I take a number of job interviews, but they all regret to say…. Perhaps I am just not good enough. Perhaps they are looking for people with a background in technology and not Psychology, like me! Perhaps they do not want to employ a mother with a small child to look after, who can only work part-time.

One night, I am mindlessly surfing television channels while everyone else is asleep. My eyes fall on a big, black book lying on the bottom rack of the bookshelf, part of it poking out because it is so big. I pull it out and the embossed, gold letters on the cover glint mockingly back at me in the lamplight. It is my project report for my Master’s Degree in Computer Management. I flip through the pages. I remember typing all of it at an NIIT Cyberdrome in Pune, where you could use computers for a fee. They played soft instrumental music on a loop and let you work undisturbed. I tear out a single page first. Then I tear out as many pages as I can pull together, until the covers have nothing left in between. Not satisfied with this level of destruction, I pick up the pages again, and tear each one in half. I try pulling the thick, black covers apart, but they do not yield. I sit on the floor under the lamp in the corner of the living room and continue with my mission of destruction. I stuff the torn pages and the unyielding covers into a big garbage bag. Then suddenly, I pull a few half-pages back out of the bag for a final look. Half of a flow chart, a bit of programming code designed to communicate with a mammoth database management software called Oracle. The program was written to command the computer to execute a complex bunch of instructions to print some documents for the accounts department of a large manufacturing company.

The next morning, I ask myself – do I regret it? No! Unsure of my own response, I ask myself again – do I regret it? And the same answer comes back to me even as I brush away a tear or two – No. Because deep in my heart, I know that if one door has closed, the universe will open another for me someday, somewhere. And slowly, I turn back to my first career choice – working with children with special needs. What I had always wanted to do with my life before I fell for the charms of the software industry – money, an AC office, out-station training programs where the company paid for your flight and your hotel room…

I start by volunteering at a Special School. Just a couple of weekday mornings. When I walk inside the gates, there are two yellow school buses in the drive. Some children are slowly making their way in, each step a struggle. Some are sitting in their wheelchairs, patiently waiting to be wheeled in. Some mornings, I wait with them a while. Sometimes, a child is drooling, and I wipe his mouth with a handkerchief pinned to his shirt front because he can't do it himself. Sometimes, I rescue something that has fallen from a child's lose grasp: a water-bottle or a single rose for their favourite teacher. In return, they smile at me. Their smiles are so contagious, they make me want to laugh out loud. I smile back at them. My heart is full and there is a spring in my step. I have come home, and I never want to leave again.

My first ward is Muthoo. At fourteen or fifteen years, he does not speak any words. He is tall and big - taller than me. He likes to rock himself to-and-fro as he sits cross-legged on the floor or even in a chair. When I am introduced to him, he does not show much of a reaction. But for one very fleeting moment, a fraction of a second, his eyes meet mine. I am told Muthoo likes to draw. He draws on A4 sheets. He likes to draw horses. Muthoo and I set out on a project to learn to draw on the computer. He sits at the computer desk with the palm of his right hand completely covering the mouse, gently manipulating it to create images on the screen. As he works, he hums the same tune again and again, and rocks his body back and forth slightly in his chair. Sometimes, he rocks harder and the back of the chair moves with him. Creak back, creak forward. Creak back, creak forward. Sometimes, he slaps his left thigh with his left hand. One Two Three Four Stop. It is four slaps each time. One Two Three Four Stop.

One day when I come in, Muthoo is not in the classroom where I find him every day. He is not in the computer room. He is not in the assembly hall where the other children are engaged in their morning yoga session. I find him in the garden behind the school building. He is sitting cross-legged on the grass, arms wrapped around his body, rocking himself back and forth, crying. I wait a little distance away and let him cry. After a while he gets up. He has stopped crying. He walks past me, and I follow. Then we sit together in silence and draw horse figures on the computer.

I still don’t know what made Muthoo cry that day. But I know now that Muthoo, if evaluated using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, may have met the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder, requiring very substantial support for social communication and restricted, repetitive behaviours. In English, that means that Muthoo may have had Autism, and needed love, acceptance, understanding and support (just like every other child in the world). But I didn’t know this then – all those years ago when I had a friend called Muthoo who loved to draw horses. It didn’t matter - he was just Muthoo. Sent to me by the universe to show me another path to follow.