One afternoon, our domestic help had just finished frying a fish for lunch. She placed it on a plate next to the kitchen stove and went away for a few minutes, only to come back and find the plate empty. My brother loves a good cooked fish, so we thought that little Jan had snuck the fish someplace in the house to snack on it. The girl fried another fish, then finished preparing the rest of lunch.
It was only that evening when we discovered the whereabouts of the missing fish. We found it swimming, as it were, alongside the goldfish in the pond in our balcony.
I am not sure if that fish had flown before ending up in the pond – one could just imagine it whizzing through the air, launched by a small hand.
For another of Jan’s specialities is his good aim, a talent which he displayed from a young age. One of my fondest memories happened when I was about seven and the little fellow about a year old. I had been dozing on a mattress in the living room in the afternoon. The tot had been in his playpen, right at the head of the mattress.
I remember having a dream in which I was playing in a garden, until I somehow fell down some stairs and bumped my head painfully a few times. Still dreaming, I began to grow distressed when the bumping would not stop.
I awoke, only to have the bumping and thudding against my skull continue. It took me a few seconds to realise that my sweet baby brother, using those small cardboard books my parents were always buying him, had been cheerfully using my head for target practice. Even as I looked up at his angelic little face, a book on teddy bears hit me squarely between the eyes.
One possible explanation for this charming awakening is that he might have been trying to get my attention. I used to dive into his playpen and we would have pillow-and-blanket-andteddy bear fights. And so, fed up with this silly sister who would not wake up, the little scholar had turned to his books.
The 9th Step
My brother hates cats.
He likes cartoon ones, such as Garfield and Doraemon, well enough. He just does not like the ones with real fur and spit.
It all started with a family trip to Malacca when he was about three years old. We had just finished lunch at a cluster of hawker stalls. My father had gone to pay for the food and as the rest of us were waiting by the roadside, I caught sight of Jan determinedly eyeing this brown-and-grey stray lying by the side of the road, nonchalantly washing its whiskers. Our domestic help, who was holding his hand, did not notice her charge’s new-found interest in the cat.
The cat was leisurely flicking its tail.
Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.
Before anyone could stop our little emperor, he had gleefully stomped on the cat’s tail as it landed with another soft thump on the ground.
Now, my mother used to buy Jan some really sturdy footwear – those Bubblegummer shoes with thick rubber soles. I had stubbed my toe on those things a few times. It had not been fun.
My brother had put enough zeal in his stomp for that cat to pass on the ensuing crook in its tail down generations of descendants.
With an enraged yowl, the affronted feline took a few hefty swipes at my brother’s shins, leaving long claw marks across them, before bolting. My brother yelled and the family hurried to tend to him. My mother, who had not witnessed the whole thing, blamed the cat.
From then on, Jan would never go near another cat again. It is said that autistic individuals may lack what is called “generalisation of learning”. It means they do not know how to apply what is learned in one situation to other similar circumstances. For example, an autistic child is taught not to scribble on a cupboard door. However he or she does not understand that they are not to scribble on any cupboard door, not just that particular one.
In this case, there was no worry about my brother lacking generalisation of learning; he got scratched by one cat, perfectly understood that he could very well be scratched by any other cat, and hence would never again be tempted to step on any cat’s tail.
I found out years later that I, at the time, probably had not explained clearly enough that Jan was the one who had first incurred the cat’s wrath. My mother had the notion that the cat had been depraved.
‘The poor thing,’ said my mother of Jan. ‘If I had been closer to that cat, I would have swiped at it with my bag before it ran away.’
‘Mummy,’ said I. ‘You do know that he started it.’
‘Eh?’
‘He stepped on the cat’s tail. Very heartily. With his Bubblegummer shoes on.’
There was a pause.
Then my mother said, ‘Oh, that would explain it then.’
The 10th Step
Jan used to have the fiercest tantrums when he was about four, right up till he was eight or so.
In that mood, he was like an unstoppable force of nature. If you tied a watering hose to him and let him loose, you could have watered an entire plantation in record time. One of the most trying aspects was his interest in little else but running around. Trying to calm him down or hold him back during a tantrum was akin to taming a squall.
I remember back when my mother was much stronger health wise, she would bring Jan to the market after seeing me off to school, as there was no one at home to mind him. Jan usually behaved himself fairly well when it came to these outings. He liked going out and riding the public transportation.
During one of these outings, an incident occurred that left an
