QAF Narrative No. 48

Unconditional Love

This issue is dedicated to every child who sees, feels, and experiences the world differently.

No one knew why the woman in the elevator pulled her child closer when she saw the boy.

He hadn’t touched him.

He hadn’t spoken to him.

But when the boy entered, her hand moved toward her son. She pulled him closer, as if the small distance between them mattered.

That part was easy to understand.

She loved him.

What was harder to understand was why her love needed more distance from the other boy.

Maybe she was afraid of him.

Maybe she didn’t understand him.

For a long time, perhaps the boy didn’t understand her either.

Then a man named Jawaid Danish decided to tell his story.

Perhaps the boy, too, was trying to understand why.

To understand why Jawaid chose to tell the boy’s story, we first need to understand the storyteller.

Jawaid grew up with stories long before he became a storyteller. His grandfather told them at night, almost like lullabies. Sometimes his grandfather forgot, but the children reminded him.

“What about today’s story?”

Perhaps Jawaid never stopped asking that question.

He was raised in Calcutta, surrounded by theatre, music and performance. As a schoolboy, he performed comic sketches. He learned that a person could stand in front of strangers, become someone else for a few minutes, and make them laugh.

Then his father died.

He was only forty-nine.

For a while, the theatre stopped.

Years later, Jawaid began again. But something had changed. The stories became more serious.

At twenty-one, he left India and travelled through Europe and America. Eventually, in 1980, he came to Toronto.

Here, he did something strange.

He listened.

For almost ten years.

He listened to immigrants trying to build new lives. People from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere arrived carrying languages, memories and invisible pieces of places they had left behind.

Jawaid called himself a sponge.

He absorbed their stories.

Then he put them onstage.

Later, he became interested in what happened after the immigrant had supposedly succeeded.

A house.

Money.

Children who grew up and married.

Everything that was supposed to make a person happy.

And yet something could still be missing.

Jawaid understood that a person can look perfectly fine on the outside while carrying a world that others cannot see.

Perhaps that is why he noticed the boy.

Years later, he returned to Dastangoi, an old tradition of storytelling. He kept its theatrical form but filled it with modern immigrants and their problems.

Old stories learned to speak about new people.

And then, one day, his friends gave him a different challenge.

Write about this boy.

The boy was turning three.

The boy was autistic.

At first, Jawaid wrote the story from the boy’s mother's perspective. Later, TEDx asked him to tell it differently. He became the father.

Onstage, there was no child beside him.

But Jawaid kept turning toward the empty space.

He spoke to the boy.

He reassured him.

He spoke to the audience.

Then back to the boy.

People cried.

Jawaid cried too.

Some people became so convinced by his performance that they thought the boy was really his son.

He wasn’t.

It raises a strange question about stories.

How can someone cry for a child who isn’t even on the stage, then step into an elevator and pull their own child away from someone like him?

Jawaid wondered about things like that too.

He began researching autism. He read. He visited organizations. Once, he travelled to an autism centre in Oshawa.

The map told him he was in the right place.

But he couldn’t find it.

The centre was upstairs in a small plaza, so Jawaid began asking the people working downstairs.

Do you know where the autism centre is?

No.

He asked another store.

No.

Finally, a woman at a pizza shop remembered seeing parents taking children upstairs.

That was how he found it.

There were children upstairs.

There were people downstairs.

Only a staircase separated them.

And still, one world knew almost nothing about the other.

Maybe the whole world is a little like that plaza.

Maybe we live one floor apart.

Perhaps love can become like that plaza too.

We care deeply about the child upstairs when the child is ours, while knowing almost nothing about the child behind the next door.

But if love stops at the edge of our own family, what are we supposed to call the thing that crosses it?

Jawaid believes stories can help us climb the stairs.

He doesn’t believe they can undo what has happened. A story cannot erase pain. It cannot make autism disappear. It cannot force a stranger to understand another human being.

But he uses a word for what art can give us.

Sakina.

Peace.

Not the kind that arrives suddenly. Something quieter.

He compares stories to the old Sufi tradition. A story is almost like a dose. You receive it, carry it with you, and, slowly, it changes the way you see.

Jawaid says storytelling changed him too.

He jokes that he is a Scorpio. Life made some of his words bitter. His father’s death and other tragedies left their marks.

But stories tamed his scorpion.

Perhaps all this time, it seemed Jawaid had told that boy’s story because there was something about him that needed explaining.

Even something that needed changing.

But maybe this is what Jawaid has been trying to tell us.

Love was never meant to know where one family ends and another begins.

If a mother can look at her child and see a life worth protecting, perhaps she can look at another child and see the same thing.

Maybe unconditional love begins when the word “my” disappears from “my child.”

And this is where I can no longer tell this story in the third person.

Because I remember the elevator.

I remember the woman’s hand moving toward her child.

I understand now why she held him close.

She loved him.

I only wish, for one moment, her love had been wide enough to reach me too.

Jawaid told my story.

And he told it for her.

My name is Razi.

I am the boy Jawaid talks to when he turns toward the empty space onstage.

I am autistic.

And perhaps this story was never about why I am different.

Maybe it was about why, when the elevator doors opened, someone thought we needed to stand farther apart.

YF, August 21, 2026

Note 1 — After reading the first draft of this narrative, Jawaid Danish suggested adding a final thought to further emphasize the message at the heart of his original story: that children with autism, like all children, need unconditional love, support, understanding, and empathy. He expressed the hope that people like the woman in the elevator might learn to look beyond difference, and that a child with special needs, once kept at a distance, might one day become a deeply loved friend or neighbour.

Jawaid’s original story about Razi has been translated into 19 languages and published in anthology form.

Note 2 — Today’s narrative was shaped through a thoughtful and inspiring conversation with Jawaid Danish, whose reflections on storytelling, migration, autism, and the healing power of art provided the foundation for this story. I am deeply grateful to him for generously sharing his experiences, memories, and insights with QAF Narrative.