Asia-Pacific
Rajarshri Mukhopadyay
Words Out of Silence
"Wish my legs were the wings of a bird and would fly me afar," writes Rajarshri Mukhopadyay, nicknamed Tito, in his book Beyond the Silence. Words are his security blanket, helping him to conquer the silence that surrounds him. Without his poetry, Tito would not be able to communicate with the world in which he so desperately wants to fly.
Tito is 11 years old, a classically autistic child with profound neurological disability. He started writing the book when he was eight years old, shortly after he was able to utter his first word. The book is about his life, his disability, the world around him that he grasps with unique tools, and the many burdens he has to overcome.
At the age of two and a half, his autism was first diagnosed. But the little boy was fascinated with the shape of letters and numbers, and he began to recognize them easily. Soma, his mother, found that her son had a prodigious memory. She started to tutor him with painstaking patience.
In less than three weeks, the little boy could count, add, read, and spell, by pointing to the board where Soma had drawn the letters of the English alphabet; if he wanted to say something, he pointed to the letters and spelled out the words. By age six, he could write by himself. By age eight, the little boy from Bangalore talked about death and spirits. He was torn “between two selves,” writes Sabita Radhakrishna in The Hindu of Madras.
“The two selves were isolated and two separate entities—but on the odd occasion they communicated.” And so the boy wrote his inner feelings: stories and poems, full of sadness and hope. The world saw him as a handicapped child; he saw the world as a challenge.
The BBC is airing Tito’s Story, a film about him, now that his book has been published by the British National Autistic Society and has received considerable attention. He found self-assurance and respect in his writing, which comes across with astonishing clarity.
Nevertheless, he lives in a “fragmented world, perceived through isolated sense organs,” writes Radha- krishna. But “when one considers the enormous pressure of his handicap and the intellectual battling with a disabled self, one grants anything to this child-man,” she adds. “And to his mother, who has dedicated her life to develop her son’s potential. It’s a miracle.”
