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I only learnt how to use an ATM card two months ago — and after years of ducking the issue — was surprised that it was not as hard as I had imagined it to be.

I can stare for hours at a TV screen showing a game of sports — and not understand a whit of what is happening.I have a very hard time recounting the plots of movies I have seen or stories I have read in books.

Numbers, however important and of whatever denomination, disappear instantly into a space I call the Bermuda Triangle of my brain.

I am severely techno-challenged and I can follow only the very basic of actions that require me to switch gadgets and appliances on or off.

Of course, I can’t park a car or drive in reverse gear. Consequently I only drive to places which offer valet parking.

When letters pertaining to finance and related matters are received, my best response to them is to try and avoid opening them for as long as possible —sometimes months.

I can’t read maps or technical manuals. In fact, the toughest thing about having a baby for me was trying to assemble all those complicated accessories like prams and baby mobiles. I still haven’t managed to figure them out and my son is now six-feet tall.

I can’t stitch, cook or operate household appliances like irons and washing machines. Left to my own devices I would subsist on cheese and nuts all day. I would also wear clothes that didn’t need ironing — or mending — like track suits.

Packing for trips is my biggest fear: Whatever I do, however much time I spend on folding and refolding clothes, they always manage to overwhelm every suitcase I have possessed, regardless of the size.

Not only can I not recount stories or plots, but I can’t make them up either, which makes me a very boring person on the whole.

Late in my thirties I learnt to swim, barely. And drive, very slowly. Cycling is my next frontier.

Oh yes, also I somehow and with great regularity manage to lose every CD and DVD that I cherish.

I could go on, but reading this list you might think that most of my handicaps are to do with class, gender, age or personality quirks. Not true. Talking to Sonya Philips, an educator of children with learning difficulties , I realised that most of the things I find difficult to do are well-known symptoms of a host of hitherto unrecognised and unacknowledged maladies.

The reason they have been accepted by those around me, and myself, is because until quite recently they had not been researched.

“For example the reason why you find it so difficult to pack,” Sonya told me when I met her in Delhi recently for dinner, “is because your brain doesn’t possess a filing system — like most people’s. So, to help you, an external system like a bag with many compartments would be necessary. Anything that imposes filing from the outside.”

Hearing that my quirks had medical and diagnostic recognition has not depressed me, but actually has buoyed my mood.

At least, I know now that my eccentricities have a scientific explanation!

s_malavika@dnaindia.net