It is a well-known precept that all good fiction is about change. What makes From the Eye of my Mind such an interesting read is that its narrator is an 18-year-old high functioning autistic girl, hence not a person particularly enthusiastic to change. T.G.C. Prasad writes the resulting tension with skill; he offers a glimpse into the workings of an uncommonly rare mind and tells a story that might have succumbed to sentimentality in the hands of a less sensitive writer.
When LIC manager Gopalakrishnan’s wife decides that it is time to find a bride for their son Ananth, it spells confusion for their daughter Mallika who revels in the rituals of schedule and familiarity. “No strangers in the house”, she pronounces firmly when the discussion about her brother Ananth’s wedding arises. Naturally, it is not going to be that simple. For starters, Ananth has no intention of marrying the girl his mother has picked, dismissing her as a “1950’s model”.
The beauty of T.G.C. Prasad’s story lies in its ordinariness. It includes all the minutiae that make the family ecosystem tick: the big decision about when to buy a new car, the occasional treat of a restaurant meal and social visits. Even the prose is largely unremarkable which serves to offset Mallika’s distinctive observations on the social comedy she sees around her. Prasad steers clear of explanations that might reduce Mallika to a person with a “condition”. Instead he lets her voice do the talking to reveal a girl who lives by her own rules, is often content to be “in (her) mind” and cannot abide the intrusiveness of people. A vivid picture emerges of Mallika as a much-loved daughter, conscientious student, indulged sister and eccentric friend. That she is also autistic merely adds a filter to an otherwise engaging narrative about growing up within a tightly knit family. The clarifications that do come are built into the narrative. It takes the visit of an Irish researcher to the St. Mary’s School for Special Children to reveal the fact that Mallika is a “high functioning autistic… thinks in pictures, shapes, and colours, and remembers most of what she reads”. She is “very good at logic, but misses the context often”. The challenge is in her “social skills”. By then much of this is already apparent.
Mallika’s social world is necessarily narrow but Prasad makes this constraint an asset developing his story in the tradition of the comedy of manners. Besides the teacher at her school, and the domestic helper Subbu, Mallika talks only to Swati. Swati is a cerebral palsy wheelchair-bound girl whose sensible advice has little or no effect on Mallika and the repartee between them makes for much wry comedy. “‘What’s up?’ Swati asked. I looked around. Tied to a pole was a flag fluttering in the wind. ‘Flag’, I said. She smiled. I asked her, ‘Do you know how many stars the Polish flag has?’… ‘I give up.’ ‘It doesn’t have any stars’, I said and smiled. Swati laughed and said, ‘Stupid intelligent question’. I giggled. I like asking Swati questions for which she doesn’t have answers.”
It is this lightness that keeps the novel from settling into sentimentality. Mallika’s voice is often inadvertently ironic. While the rest of the family is in a state of near-panic over the imminent visit with potential in-laws, Mallika is merely inconvenienced. “I know what social visits are. One family goes to meet the other. They talk for hours. They eat together. Then they talk again and say goodbye and come back home… I am uncomfortable with these visits because I am expected to participate in the conversation. So before every social visit, I think of stories to talk about. I now had to prepare again.” The novel is littered with factoids varying in subject and size from a one-paragraph summary of the career of Audrey Hepburn to a one-line fact that an elephant is the only animal in the world that cannot jump. Mallika employs these factoids in ordinary conversation with little regard to its emotional tone.
In this narrative about a highly logical person who cannot understand social context, Prasad’s novel emphasises the delicate interactions that define relationships and people. It isn’t roses and rainbows to raise a special child in a world that is quick to condemn with a hurtful label. When asked by her doting father if she will miss her parents when they are gone, Mallika wonders, “…what is the point of missing you when you are not here to do things for me?” Since the heroine cannot be drawn in the ordinary world, people around her take the leap into her world, which renders the narrative more magical than the plotline would suggest. “I stopped in front of a large banyan tree on the road and said, ‘I am Mallika.’ Pa looked at the tree and said, ‘I am Gopalakrishna LIC Policy Manager.’”
Mallika’s largely stoic parents are beautifully rendered without being turned into either saints or sinners. There is the undertow of the tragic in Mallika’s blunt and unanswered questions. “When is my wedding?” There is also depiction of the bittersweet pain that comes with caring for a child that cannot acknowledge the love with empathy. Prasad gets his fictional world pitch-perfect in this sublime story of a family going about the ordinary business of living with an extraordinary individual.