The Hindu Business Line : Celebrating Ali’s world Browser’s corner

It’s a book that is difficult to read… without choking. It is about immense pain and deep loss, but also about joy and celebration of life and the many gifts it brings. Ali’s story, told by his parents Badal and Swapna Mukhopadhyay in the book Ali’s World (Lustre Press, Roli Books), is an honest and sensitive portrayal of the time and effort it takes for special children to settle into a world that knows how to engage and reward o nly the mundane and the ordinary.

Ali was born eight months premature. His father recalls being shown the “bundle… with bright blue eyes. Lack of oxygen, they told me.” Later, when the exhausted man could get up and walk to the intensive care unit, he saw “a tiny little thing — red and wrinkled. Like a cut up chicken. He could not breathe properly. Could not suck.”

Foetal stress led to the premature delivery and lack of oxygen was the reason for the way the premature baby looked (“a tiny creature, with a big head and large bluish eyes”) and behaved. Swapna was trained by the hospital to take care of the child she named Arpan, an offering to God. Badal, forecasting that he would grow into a “big, strong and generous” person like the only man he had hero-worshipped at the graduate school in the US, called him ‘Ali’.

Ali soon transformed into a mischievous child, with an enormous appetite, devouring chocolates, rasgoola and laddoos. He began to show talent for painting at an early age… even at three, his report cards noted how he loved “to doodle on the floor with chalk”. As he grew up he travelled to several countries with his economist parents, and developed a flair for sports, particularly football. Luckily for him, both his parents and teachers recognised his talent in painting and encouraged him. But as he grew older, his inability “to settle down at school became pronounced. The dissonance with authority grew almost in proportion to his popularity among his friends.”

Thanks to a sensitive teacher, in middle school Ali’s problem linked to his premature birth was spotted. First his hearing was found to be deficient, and one morning Swapna woke up her husband, urging him to read an article on dyslexia she had found. Just as it said there, Ali too was confused between b and d, p and q, was unable to perform simple arithmetic calculations, etc. Dyslexia was not as well known then, as now, and the book talks about how the parents grappled with the anxieties and fears of bringing up a dyslexic child.

But they did not panic when they were told that after Class X, mathematics was a no-no for him; they encouraged his talent in art and he joined the Delhi College of Arts, where he fell “for the Bohemian style of DCA hook, line and sinker”.

In 1977, he met with a horrendous accident while travelling with his close friend Kaka in his car. He ended up with eight fractures and an injury to the front lobe of his brain. But he survived, recovered and began to paint at a furious pace; doing so in the hospital and home despite plates and a plaster on his right arm!

The rest of the book is all about Ali’s adventures, and contains photographs of an amazing range of sketches and paintings… in black and white and vivid colours, experimenting with various mediums and styles. In the last few months of his life, brought to an end so unexpectedly and cruelly, he painted at a feverish pitch and some of these are nothing short of spectacular, many of these untitled. It must have taken great courage for the authors to put together this book; it is one thing to share the work your child left behind with others through the medium of a book, but another altogether to delve deep into past wounds and hurtful memories in order to do so. But then, both the mother and the father must have gathered a lot of courage along the way.

Says Swapna: “As a child grows up, he learns automatically to protect himself from undue physical harm. Through the years that Ali was growing up, I would be paralysed with fear for him because he seemed to have no sense of fear that would, ordinarily, act as a deterrent to harming himself. I realised that he was not going to change: that it was me who would have to learn to live with it, and I did… to the best of my ability.”

The book, put together with help from Ali’s older brother Buju and numerous friends, has a spontaneous Foreword by Aamir Khan, director of Taare Zameen Par,a movie which deals with the world of a dyslexic child.

Ali’s parents share this book with “all those who, unknown to one another, have journeyed through the same private grief as we have, towards the same abode of tranquillity we all seek.”

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Celebrating Ali’s world Browser’s corner