Parents of special needs children in India tend not to talk about them in public. They avoid taking them to parks and restaurants, fearing stares. They keep their daily battles and emotional agonies private.
But one of India's most well-known public figures, Arun Shourie, has never wanted to keep his son Aditya, born with cerebral palsy, hidden. Aditya is 35. He cannot walk or stand. He can only see from the left side of his eyes. He cannot use his right arm or hand. Speech is syllable by halting syllable. Yet Shourie and his wife Anita have travelled all over India with Aditya and take him to restaurants all the time in New Delhi, where they live, because eating out is one of Aditya's great loves.
'Thirty years ago, people averted their eyes. Now he is welcomed in restaurants. Such children have become more visible in recent years,' says Shourie in the study of his West End home in New Delhi.
Shourie has never shied from speaking about his son. But in his intimate and moving account of looking after his son, Does He Know a Mother's Heart? (published by Harper Collins), he reveals a side to himself that not many Indians are familiar with - a tender, devoted, and infinitely gentle father who has thought deeply about his son's suffering.
In fact, a large chunk of the book is devoted to a meditation on whether major religions can offer an explanation as to why innocents suffer, hence the sub-title: How Suffering Refutes Religions. The answer is no. The only explanation for these things, according to Shourie, is 'time and chance'.
This aspect of Shourie - the intellectual - is familiar to Indians. He has written 26 books and countless columns on politics, religion and society. Economist, politician, cabinet minister, and a crusading newspaper editor, this softly spoken, slightly built man of great erudition, is known for his outspoken and often controversial opinions.
But it has come as a shock to many readers that, in addition to the anguish of Aditya's condition, Shourie suffered a second terrible blow when Anita developed Parkinson's disease 22 years ago, aged 42.