The little girl

I once saw a pair of eyes – listless, faraway eyes that stared into infinity. I had never before seen ones that were so cold. They belonged to a little girl who otherwise looked like any nine-year-old, except that she was not.
I saw her dance and her movements, although a tad awkward, seemed pretty ordinary. And then I tried speaking to her. She did answer me, but only as if she were rattling off a lesson learnt by rote. The stony eyes lit up slightly at the mention of a teacher, apparently a favourite. But then, it was perhaps not as much from love as from habit, which is how most of her acts were.
The teacher said it was almost like the girl sat in a glass room, all by herself. It was her world, where she couldn’t let others in even if she wished to. “This is characteristic of most autistics,” the teacher pointed out.
I asked her to identify colours, she did. I asked her to read, she did that too. But I asked her what colour the tree was, she stared at me blankly. She probably hadn’t ever been taught about it that way. And then she turned away from me and continued with her act of staring into nowhere. I thought I was an intruder into her perfectly guarded world.
I came home that day and tried writing the story. It took me a long time because there was so much that I wanted to say, but did not find the right words. Then in the end, I wrote the story. Not because I wanted the world to know about scores of people like the little girl, but because I wanted myself to count to my blessings.

Here’s the link for the story-
http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=221824