We were assigned to do posting in Autism care centre this week. It was far from our hospital and I was happy to do so, both excited to go out of the hospital for a few days and also learn new things about the Autism Centre.
We went there, and then we were trying to understand how the centre works and then we met a really good person, she was a mother of a child. And we wanted to learn about her experience.
She started with her son’s story. She was originally from India, where she gave birth to a really cute baby. She was so happy with the child.
She still remembers the afternoon with the monkey.
Her son was barely a year old, round-cheeked and steady on her hip, holding a biscuit in his small fist. A monkey dropped from the compound wall, snatched it clean out of his hand, and was gone before she could shout. Most children would have screamed. He just watched it leave. Calm. Unblinking.
She laughed and told her husband that night. Our son is fearless. He will be a brave man.
She was a mother looking for signs of greatness in ordinary things. She did not yet know she was watching something else entirely.
By the time he was two, she noticed he watched the same cartoon on repeat. Not once, not twice, but for hours, always the same episode, until she could recite every sound herself. When she changed the channel he cried the way children cry when something precious is taken, not something trivial. He wanted the same brand of biscuit every single time. Not similar. The exact same.
He was not yet talking the way the neighbor’s children were talking.
She mentioned it to her mother-in-law. The old woman waved a hand.
Boys are slow. He’ll catch up.
Then, more quietly: You ate too much honey in the pregnancy. That’s what it is.
She carried that sentence inside her for years. She turned it over in the dark when she could not sleep. She stopped wanting another child. Not because she did not want one, but because she was afraid of what she might do wrong again. The fear was that specific, that cruel. She did not tell anyone. Mothers in her family did not say such things out loud.
They moved to Nepal when he was five. A new country, a new school, a new chance, she told herself.
The schools did not keep him. He changed three in two years. Not because he was dangerous, not because he was bad, but because he was overwhelming in ways that the teachers had no language for. He moved differently. He responded differently. He needed something the classrooms were not built to give.
The dental visit was the one that finally broke something open.
She had taken him to KCH for a routine extraction. He would not sit still. He could not. The sound of the instruments, the brightness of the light, the stranger’s hands near his face, all of it arriving at once, too loud, too close. He was inconsolable in the way that is beyond crying. The doctors were kind but uncertain. They wondered if maybe he also could not hear well. They referred her to TUTH.
The hearing test also failed. Not because his ears were broken, but because the environment was impossible for him. And there, quietly, someone said the word autism for the first time.
She had not heard it before. It did not sound like an answer. It sounded like the beginning of something longer.
She was right.
The next three years were a pilgrimage. Clinics in Kathmandu. Doctors in India. Forms filled out in waiting rooms. The same history given again and again to strangers who wrote things down and looked serious and sent her somewhere else. She grew fluent in the language of referrals.
He was eight when they finally gave her a name to put on the paper. Autism spectrum disorder.
She did not cry when she heard it. She had spent those three years grieving things she could not yet name. By the time the diagnosis arrived she was past grief and into something harder and more useful: the determination to understand.
There was no hospital or center that would cater to these babies. No internet where she could even learn about this new term called ‘autism’.
She went to India for training. During the training, she learned what her son’s nervous system was doing, why the monkey had not frightened him, why the biscuit had to be the same biscuit, why loud rooms felt to him the way standing inside a bell feels during a strike. She came back different.
And then she did something that still moves everyone who hears about it. She felt that what she had went through, no other parents would have to go through again and wanted to impart her trainings to others and help other children with autism.
She joined ACNS, the place where her son would receive his therapies, as a staff member. Not to spy. Not to manage him from the inside. But because she understood that the most useful thing she could do with her knowledge was to be close to where the work was happening, so she could understand it, support it, and carry it home with her each evening.
Mother and son, arriving together every morning.
He is eighteen now.
He cannot stand loud sounds. A pressure cooker, a crowd, a motorcycle passing too close, these still reach him differently than they reach the rest of us. When something overwhelms him he gets angry first, which is the only language his body knows for this is too much. He is working on it. So is she.
But he does his own laundry. He helps in the kitchen. He is in vocational training, learning something with his hands that might one day become work, become income, become a life that is his own.
The day we visited, he was sitting at a table doing exactly that. Focused. Careful.
His mother was nearby, as she always has been. Not hovering. Just present.
She has never stopped blaming herself for the honey. Even now, knowing what she knows, even with fifteen years of evidence that it was never the honey, some part of her still carries that sentence her mother-in-law said. That is the quiet cruelty of early shame. It does not leave clean.
But she also knows this: she is the reason he has therapies. She is the reason he was not lost in a system that did not know what to do with him. She crossed a country, changed careers, and rebuilt her understanding of what a mother is supposed to be, all for a boy who once watched a monkey walk away with his biscuit and felt nothing but curiosity.
Fearless, she had called him.
She was not wrong. She just did not know yet that the bravery would turn out to be hers.
I was moved. Being a doctor, I have seen autistic children, but I had never imagined what goes through these parents’ minds. I gained a completely new perspective on these children, which made me more empathetic. And also, mothers are true goddesses.