Aqilah Teo - Ordinary Stories in an Extraordinary World

My brother Jan had not come with a manual.

My memories of the events surrounding his birth are somewhat fuzzy today, but I recall my parents had not said to me, Congratulations, youve a new baby brother. Weve got a manual too, so well figure out how to operate him soon enough.

I had lived as an only child for the first six years of my life, and did not fully understand the concept of a baby brother.

My parents seemed to be very busy and I knew that something important was going to happen. I knew what babies looked like, and someone had probably told me that we would have one in the house soon.

What is this new thing that is coming? I had wondered. Is it for me? Does it run on batteries? Will it make a noise if I poke at it?

Beyond that, however, it was all vague bits of uninteresting information as I went about my own daily business.

Then, one day, the new arrival came home. I resented the intrusion of this new member of the family, this reddish wailing thing wrapped in a large white napkin. I might have preferred a hotdog; it would have looked almost the same and posed a much lesser threat.

Nonetheless I soon grew fond of him in a shallow, childish way. He was cute, and fun to poke at and play with. But when it came to important matters such as who got to lie next to my mother at bedtime, I turned into a monster of a jealous sibling. Indeed, I would push him away and throw great tantrums until my mother handed him over to the domestic help to rock him to sleep.

Jan soon grew to be a round, healthy, happy toddler and no one suspected anything different. He first sat up at six months. His first words were mam mam and meow at around the same time. He stopped saying anything else after that.

At one year and two months, Jan took his first steps. When he was two and a half years old, still not another word had come out of his mouth. The grown-ups suspected he was either a slow developer, or had tongue tie. Tongue tie happens when the membrane under the tongue is unusually short. It pulls at the tongue, which then cannot move as freely. People with tongue tie have trouble speaking.

Little Jan was brought to see the general practitioner. The doctor said Jans tongue was perfectly fine. It could be autism.

At the time, my mother had no idea what autism was or what the word meant, but she knew something was not right. She excused herself from the doctors office, went outside and began to weep. Now this really was something, because my mother is not a weepy sort of person.

My parents called doctors, and they called other doctors. My brother was carted all over the place like a wrongly-addressed parcel.

One Dr K B Phua, a gifted and respected paediatrician, arranged for speech therapy sessions for my brother. The therapists said that Jan was ego-centric, but they were not able to properly categorise him as autistic. In fact, he did not seem to really fit in any profile at all.

When Jan was three, the speech therapists contacted Balestier Special School. They arranged for assessments and ran him through a gauntlet of tests with cameras and videos and machinery. Jan was also brought to see Dr Vera Bernard-Opitz at the National University of Singapore. But he simply did not fit into any of their programmes. They kindly advised us to bring him home. Knowing my brothers bossiness, he might have been trying to run a few programmes of his own over there.