By Natanielle Thangamany
Summer 2014 Kaplan Award Winner
We had rules for eating at the dining table that made eating a chore for me. Besides the usual ‘no elbows on the dining table’, there was the dreaded ‘finish everything on your plate or you cannot leave the table’. Also known as ‘hell’ for the picky eater that I was. It sucked having a dietician for a mother if you were a selective eater. She always had every food group at every meal, and we had to finish our two servings of fruits and vegetables. At. Every. Meal. Oh, the horror for my pre-pubescent self.
Thankfully, I knew how to work my way around this autocratic system. My parents would go to extremes to enforce the ‘finish everything’ rule upon me and my three siblings. They would check the bin to see what we had thrown away if they did not have the chance to check our plates before we put them in the sink. I had formed my own clever little system of spitting the stems of vegetables or breads with strange fruits in them—basically anything I did not want to eat—into tissue and wrapping it up before throwing it into the bin. Just by looking, you couldn’t tell there was half-chewed bits of unloved home-cooked nourishment in there. My mother would never dip her fingers and sift through the disgusting refuse to expose the habits of the deviant that I was, I figured.
As the Lord Almighty would have had it, I could not always get away with this system, no matter how brilliant I was. Caught last at the dinner table, I was not going to be fooled by the faked nonchalance of my father as he watched soccer; he had hawk-eyes at the back of his head. My foe this time around was a piece of chicken wing that was not picked clean from the bones, particularly the ends. I hated the ends. And I wanted out from that table. So I silently slipped the wing under the seat cover of the chair next to me, intending to throw it down the rubbish chute when my parents were at work the following morning. I waltzed off to the sink after passing the plate test with my father.
Of course a week later, my mother decides to sit in that chair, which by the way, no one ever sits at, but of course my mother would have a naughty radar informing her which one of us was up to no good and needed to be disciplined. She lifts up her seat cover to take her place and lo and behold, that evil piece of chicken wing festering under a pile of maggots that I had forgotten to eliminate!
“Agh!” she cries, “Who did this?!” I mimic her initial reactions and heroically pick up the wing, maggots and all, and whisk it away to the bin, grabbing the insecticide and theatrically spraying the inside of the bin like a conductor leading an orchestra while stuffing my face into the inside of my elbow. Thinking I have put on a good show, I walk back to the dining table with as much of a disgusted look as my eight-year-old self can muster. Who could suspect me now that I have saved the day?
All five pairs of eyes look at me suspiciously as I return to my seat. My father poses a question to the table, a judge to the jury. His deep booming voice always deterred my friends from making phone calls to me so they would not risk speaking to him.
“Who put that there?”
“Hmph. The first one to defend is the one who did it,” my mother mutters towards her side. I hate when she does this, the whole speaking-to-nobody-but-making-sure-everybody-hears habit of outing someone. I want to strangle her.
“Ee yucks! Yah! Who did that? Ew so gross. So disgusting. Yucky yucky! Luckily I threw it away!” I pipe up, making a show of shuddering my shoulders and looking at everyone else condescendingly as though each one was a prime suspect. My brother, only six at this time, looks back at me clueless and Natasha, my eldest sister, meets my eye steadily. She knows it was me because I had told her myself the day I did it, chuffed with pride for having gotten away with my deed. That only left me with one other person to pin it on. My second eldest sister, only a year older than me—Natalya.
“Taly! Was it you? My goodness that was so gross! Don’t do that again okay?! What a fright to see that! You scared all of us! Poor Ma had to find it!” I continue my soliloquy to fill the awkward silence, anything to occupy the minds of my prosecutors and suggest that it was someone else who was the culprit of this mischief.
Natalya, looking like a deer caught in headlights, stammers incoherently as I obnoxiously continue a narrative around what supposedly happened with her as the protagonist.
“Ohhhh…you probably did not want to eat the ends right? And you did not want to eat anymore and leave the table right? You were scared right? I seeeee…I get it….It’s okay! Don’t do it again!” I rub her back comfortingly and smile at her as though I was the Angel of Forgiveness, benevolent and generous towards everyone’s transgression.
“Um…oh. Yes okay. I’m sorry,” Natalya pouts as she looks down on her plate. “I won’t do it again. Sorry.” Meanwhile, I feel my mother boring her eyes into the side of my head.
It certainly was not the first time I had blamed her for something that I had done, and growing up this was often what I did. Her unsuspecting nature and gullibility made her an easy target for me. Being a year apart also meant we were a grade apart, and my father, a proponent of tough love who turned his nose up at any form of mollycoddling, had put his foot down in enrolling Natalya into mainstream school instead of a school for children with special needs. This meant that she would be around children and when she entered secondary school, hormonal teenagers who had little to no knowledge of autism. I often saw her during her recess time in the canteen, in the corner eating out of her lunchbox by herself because she had no friends. No one wanted to be friends with the girl who laughed excessively at things no one laughed at, who talked to herself with her imaginary friends, who pulled up her socks to her knees when everyone else was following the ankle socks trend. No one wanted to be friends with the target of bullies who splashed water onto her backpack as she waddled past them, making her worksheets and textbooks inside all wet. Who violently bumped into her as they waited for her to turn corners along the corridors or when she reached the top of the stairs. Who called her names from “smelly” to “retard” to being the brunt of jokes by mimicking her confused and dazed facial expressions. No one was her friend, not even me. She would call out my name and her face would light up with her animated toothy grin whenever she saw me at school, and wave frantically in my direction. I always pretended not to see especially if I was with my friends; once I turned around to see if she was still looking at me, and of course she was. Staring right at me, her grin replaced with her mouth agape, her waving arms defeated by the slouch of her shoulders, waiting for the acknowledgement she never got from me.
She had this habit of saving food in her lunchbox for me even though we never had the same recess session and would try to give them to me, which I now realized was her way of showing me that she could still look out for me and be the older sister despite her mental and social disability. But at that time, seeing her run up to me was a nuisance and embarrassment. It was not cool to eat out of lunchboxes. I always told her harshly to go away.
“I am not my sister’s keeper!” I remember yelling at my mom one day when she told me the only way I could go to my friend’s birthday was if I brought Natalya with me. “Just because she does not have any friends of her own doesn’t mean I should share mine!”
I awake to the vibrations of my phone as it lit up with Whatsapp notifications. At 3am in the morning. That could only mean some ill-informed buffoon in Singapore has forgotten the 15-hour time difference between us and decided that their pressing issues needed my dire attention. Groggily, I reached by my pillow and through the leftover veneer of dreams unremembered I scroll through the messages sent by Natalya.
I smile inwardly at her well-wishes, replying her messages as I fall back to sleep with thoughts of a time where I would have just said thank you and brushed it off. I always marvel at how cognizant she is of her condition relative to other people with autism. I think of the countless times I came home from school to see her crying in her bed because of the crap she endured during school, my mother helpless in trying to answer her questions of ‘why can’t I be normal’ through her gasping sobs. When we were younger, I utilized her photographic memory as the TV guide and made fun of her art, only to feel my heart bursting with pride when she sent me pictures of her graduation with a degree in Motion Arts and Animation. It wasn’t a cakewalk growing up with her, but seeing her defy her harshest critics (the bullies and “experts” who thought that because her autism wasn’t Aspergers, she would only go to vocational school), seeing her go about her daily activities with utmost genuineness, and most significantly, being the recipient of the kindest, biggest and most forgiving heart has made me realize this—when it comes to being schooled on how to treat people, there has been no better teacher for me than Natalya. I guess my 13 year old bratty self was right in an odd sense; I am not my sister’s keeper. She didn’t need me to watch over her, “baby” her and police her actions. I am my sister’s sister, and that was all she ever needed and wanted me to be.