Padded cells

25 March 2010
Things have been ticking along nicely, with Spring coming and visitors visiting, and plans afoot to go to the States next month without the kids. R is in his happy zone these days, although he was under the weather the other day with a cold, so I kept him home from school. D put him to bed at lunchtime. (I was in my office on the phone to someone while reinstalling software after an update to Windows 7). Then D came in to inform that my presence had been specifically requested by R, who had said quite clearly, “I want mummy.”

This is the first time he’s ever asked for me. In fact, one of the earliest warning signs that he might be on the spectrum was the fact that, no matter how distressed he was, he never called for either me or T by name, a skill E had picked up before she was even a year old. Instead, he’d just howl like a wounded lion cub. It’s a mark of how far we’ve come that now he’s asking for me by name.

This last week he’s resumed a rather irritating habit of getting up on top of his chest of drawers when he’s supposed to be sleeping to play with the light switch, tear stickers off the wall and for some inexplicable reason, take the tops of Vaseline jars and smear the stuff on the wall. Because he’s climbing while still in his Grobag, an impressive feat in itself, he has an unfortunate tendency to fall off the chest of drawers and then scream like it’s our fault. T and I haven’t moved the chest of drawers out because it somehow depresses us that this will mean the last bit of furniture in the room will be gone, and all that will be in there will be his mattress on the floor, like the cell in a lunatic asylum. Perhaps it’s better to let him keep falling off the bureau until he realizes it’s no fun, although I’m worried he’s going to eventually break a limb.

Thank god it’s physically impossible for him to open the window in his room more than five inches, otherwise it would be like the opening sequence of “Antichrist,” albeit without the shagging in the shower. Otherwise, he’s developing very nicely, almost making conversation now as he asks for things with the full monty, “I want…” construction with hardly any prompting at all. He also knows how to say, “My name is R…”, and I think he’s getting to grips with how pronouns can change according to who’s speaking. The other night after he got out of the bath, he was hiding in the towel and then revealing himself with a theatrical, “here I am!” every time.

E is doing great too. I took her to Tumble Tots yesterday and she walked along a one-inch wide balance beam like it was a tightrope, admittedly with handrails, but the Tumble Tot helper and I were gobsmacked. I think she may be the really coordinated, sporty one that T half-secretly hoped R would be. At last, the fact that she was tiny at birth and is still dinky for her size will pay off in career options.

Our autism festival was on pause for a while, but resumed a couple of nights ago with the Bollywood movie “My Name Is Khan,” one of the biggest foreign-language hits of the year in which Shahrukh Khan (like, I’m reliably informed, Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Brad Pitt all rolled into one in Hindi-cinema terms) plays an Indian Muslim guy named Rizwan Khan. Over the course of a brisk two and a half hours, Kahn, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, moves to the US, falls in love and marries a Hindi girl named Mandira (the actress is called just Kajol, like Cher or Madonna). He survives the anti-Muslim hostility post-9/11, but finds himself helpless when his stepson is murdered by racist bullies. Because he’s so literal-minded he takes grief-deranged Mandira at her word when she tells him to leave and not come back until he’s told the president that he’s not a terrorist. (She irrationally blames him for the kid’s death because he’d adopted him and so the kid, having been renamed Khan, had got more stick from schoolmates than he might have done if he’d stuck with calling himself Rathore, although I somehow doubt many racist bullies can distinguish that well between Indian surnames.)

So Khan goes on a cross-country journey with nothing but a backpack on a quest to tell the president, at the time George Bush, that his name is Khan and he’s not a terrorist. Think “Rain Man” meets “Forrest Gump,” but with South Asian accents. He meets po’ black folk in Georgia who accept him unconditionally, real Muslim terrorists (whom he reports to the FBI), and all kinds of other folk. There are other crimes and attempted murders, and generally enough action to fill your average daily soap opera for a year.

T and I were completely swept away with it all, even though the subtitles were hilariously badly translated, and somewhat infrequent to boot. (Sample: “When Zakir [Khan’s neurotyp brother] become 18. He went to america. He got scholarship at Michigan University. I felt very bad very bad when he was leaving. But I didn’t told him.”) In fact, the comedy of the terrible subtitles helped us get a little distance on the grand orchestral emotions on the display, and I might have wept all the way through it otherwise, especially in the last half hour which is sheer melodrama and all fab.

Once again, in a way like “Temple Grandin,” it’s a film about a character with autism but it isn’t only about autism. Khan’s condition creates and engine for the drama, but he’s misunderstood and suffers much more because he’s a Muslim rather than because he’s someone with ASC. The script sees nothing odd in the fact that this incredibly vibrant, beautiful woman should choose to marry this odd guy who shuffle walks, can’t make eye contact and has a violent phobia about the colour yellow. But Khan the actor has incandescent star quality. I can see why something like a quarter of the world’s population worship him like a god.

A friend of mine reviewed a few months ago and was telling me all about it and said he really wanted to know what I would make of Khan’s autism acting, like I’m some kind of expert or something now. The funny thing is, because, as far as I can work out, there’s such a huge range of behaviours associated with the conditions there can’t be one right way to “act autistic” on film, although I guess people who know a little bit about it will expect the actor to do a few key tics, like avoid eye contact, talk a little funny, walk on tippy-toes a bit. They’re like the universal signifiers, even though not everyone with ASC acts that way. It’s like in the old days when people played characters with Down’s (now there’s enough Down’s people around do the roles themselves) or mentally impairments used to talk funny-shouty and smile too much.