When Mugdha Kalra walked into a school admission interview in 2013 with her four-and-a-half-year-old son, she thought it would be a routine conversation about his future. Instead, she walked out in silence — shaken, confused, and barely able to drive herself back home.

That day, a counsellor gently suggested something she had never considered before: that her son, Madhav, might be autistic. “I was not ready for it,” Mugdha recalls. “I left without saying a word to the counsellor, shaking in disbelief.”

At the time, Madhav hadn’t yet developed language skills. He struggled to sit still and couldn’t maintain eye contact.

For Mugdha, a journalist by profession, life changed course overnight. She soon took a sabbatical from work to care for her son and dive into understanding Autism.

‘A mother is always blamed’

Her journey through the initial fog of uncertainty and grief brought her closer to other mothers, many of whom were quietly bearing similar struggles. “They were asked if they did something wrong during their pregnancies or if they had been absentee mothers. In the Indian context, the mother is almost always blamed. This leaves her feeling guilty. But over the years, I developed a thick skin. I had to,” she says.

Mugdha focused all her energy on helping Madhav thrive. Sharing her parenting methods, she explains, “Autism is an invisible disability.

© The Better India