Mondays usually start out with a low grade sense of urgency
that characterizes the average school day:
“Get off your bicycle and change!”
“Where’s the hair brush?”
“You can’t have more breakfast because you don’t have the
time!”
“Is lunch packed?”
Midway through this mad rush a couple of weeks ago, I happened to
look at Damini’s school diary and saw that she had study leave for two days!
You would think that she would leap with joy at this unexpected reprieve. Instead
we had a protest.
Predictability is Damini’s
security blanket in dealing with life as dictated by people with the usual 46
chromosomes. It manifests itself in three ways: routine, rituals and constant
reassurance.
You won’t find Damini complaining
about drudgery. She loves her daily routine which is more or less: wake up [always
around 6.00 a.m.], hug and kiss her humans and dogs, cycle with head phones on,
eat fruit, cycle some more or play the drums, change for school, take her daily
supplements, brush her hair, eat breakfast, brush teeth, go to school, return,
have a snack and daily supplements, cycle around the yard, go out cycling with Das
followed by a game of hockey or football, hang around a bit doing nothing much,
bathe and change, eat dinner, watch a movie, have supplements, brush teeth ,
off to bed.
Naturally, sudden, unannounced
changes are mostly unwelcome, unless it is a treat, like a movie or eating out.
Switching things around even a little bit, say, have breakfast and then change or bathe after dinner almost never works.
The same goes for the weekly routine. She is yet to get her
head around a routine on the scale of a month or a year [aside from her
birthday of course]. God help us when she does. So vacations therefore find Damini
at bit of a loss.
We all have some ritualistic
indulgence or the other. But no one revels in them as much as Damini does in
hers. It manifests in a manner of ways:
When she leaves to go to school, it’s important that I say “Do
good work”.
Every Saturday morning, she goes to a local restaurant to
buy breakfast for all of us. The name of the weekly event is “Two Plates” [I
don’t even remember how it came to be named as such]. What’s more, she buys
herself the same breakfast of idli vada
every single time, and has done so for the last 4 years.
Just before bathing, she has to act out a sequence of hide
and seek with her father.
She turns the bed down precisely in the same way every night
before she goes to sleep.
She calls her grandparents every day and asks them what the
day’s menu consists of.
Specific people are greeted in particular ways: our neighbor
Eddy for instance, instead of a typical “Hi, hello” is hailed with “idli vada”.
When we visit certain friends, she expects to get the same
meal she ate there the last time, and she takes along the same set of movies
she watched there previously.
When Vijayta is in town, we have to play ‘Oranges and Lemons’,
‘Teesket and Tasket’, and Hide and Seek…all in that order and with all the
lights in the house turned off.
It’s a fairly long, cumulative list. Some of these rituals
go way back to when she was 5 years old.
Damini seeks constant reassurance
that things will remain the same every day by reiterating to me the sequence of
events for the next day. She also needs to know exactly what the menu for the
next day is [this leaves me with no choice but to plan ahead]. If any activity
or holiday is planned with her knowledge, she asks me at least ten times a day
if it’s still on the agenda. For instance, we will all be going to Boston for Vijayta’s
graduation in May. I am asked “are we going to Boston in May?” on an hourly
basis. The current obsession is- if the school will reopen on the 11th.
This obsession with routine has its advantages: we have
managed to integrate many habits into it that are ultimately advantageous. Damini
isn’t very fond of fruit, but a year ago we started keeping a bowl of oranges
for her on the table in the mornings. It would be consumed, after some protest
of course. It was almost always oranges. A couple of weeks down the line, I
forgot to keep any for her and she came up to me and asked me for fruit. It had
become a part of the routine. We then started varying the fruit we gave her. She
would eat it even if the fruit wasn’t something she liked much. The compulsion
to adhere to the routine was stronger than her dislike for Papayas.
Weekends invariably find Damini a little aimless and lost. I
started setting out some work for her to do, usually some kind of a puzzle. Now
she does it voluntarily. Of course, before she starts, she chooses from a pack
of playing cards the 2, 4 and 7 of clubs and sets them out in front of her.
I would give anything for some kind of an explanation.
