Holiday Archive: With the Down Syndrome

Location: In the room with a roommate
Mood-of-the-day: "This 'ere space ain't big enough fer de two ef us..."

It's Wednesday on my second week of school holidays. At this moment in writing, my aunt is at her cellphone again, talking to my grandfather or other family members. When I said my aunt in my room, I meant Cik Jah, the one with Down syndrome. Yeah, she's back, had been here since last Friday or so.

Had anybody out there have family members with disabilities? Your aunts and uncles all in good health and form? Lucky you guys. Down syndrome is when a baby is born with an extra chromosome and everything biological gets weird. But enough science (I'm not fit for science at 9.30am), Cik Jah had been Down all her life. Although I had her as an aunt all my life, I'm never completely comfortable around her.

To describe her physically, she's about 4 ft, and with a face shape that has a permanent frown on her mouth and eyes. Her limbs, hands and feet are extra large, even in the old black and white photographs. She's in her fat fifties with a few hairs and hardly any neck and at this age, she's losing her teeth. In a nutshell, she looked like she was pushed down from growing tall and instead everything grew everywhere else.

But what is also a Down syndrome person is the oversized tongue and learning disability. When Cik Jah talks, she sounds like she has tissues in her mouth. Only my mom understands what she's talking, being her sister after all. I think my own sis could understand Cik Jah too sometimes. My dad always left Cik Jah's needs to my mom. But me as the roommate, we sort of stayed on different sides of the room and pretended that the other doesn't exist.

Please don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Cik Jah, but I don't always prefer her around. She's very nosy for one thing, taking my hairbrush, T-shirts, cell phone, books (god forbid!) and put it in the last place I would find it, like downstairs toilet or storeroom drawer or even her own clothes bag. I kept my PC off at all the times when I'm not using it, due to a previous negligence that wiped out an entire persona of Diablo 2.

I've been living my own private space since my last roommate found someone to get married to, and I loved it. Suddenly having to share it with an oversized five-year-old is not feeling like sharing, but like losing half of the freedom you've had. She's scared of the dark and I like complete blackout before I sleep. She easily gets hot at temperatures when I'm freezing. She looks into everything that isn't locked, hidden, or nailed shut.

Back as a kid, I had always been scared of her, seeing that she looked like a bulldog and could never give a real smile. Though when she did smile, showing whatever's left of her teeth, I had run away screaming because I thought she was going to eat me. She can be very stubborn and at meals, she eats until she gets to-the-toilet sick so we all had to baby-sit and make sure she stopped eating when she supposed to.

But there are times when she's so very much human and child-like, despite (or maybe because of) the flashy coloured bouquet baju kurungs, waddling duck-walk and her toy cell phone that she talks to. She would sing alone or play a broken tune on her harmonica, or grab an unused guitar and play something out of Scary Idol.

Most of all, she talks to her toy cell phone and would call up various family members. I know it's a toy because she never recharges it and (when I understood her) ask as if everybody's there in one place, ready to speak to her even at 9.50am on a Wednesday. Right now, Cik Jah is chatting happily to her own mother, my grandmother, who had passed away years ago.

Signed: *Ophie, still looking for one of her T-shirts...