Early this week, a fellow poetry fan e-mailed me several of his favorite poems. Two of them have appeared in these pages. I liked several others very much. But this one, The Mind Tree bowled me over. I had not been aware of either the poem or the poet. But I haven't stopped thinking about either since I read the poem and learned about the poet on the Internet.

This is an extraordinary story, for Tito Mukhopadhyay is severely autistic. He is almost mute. He has little control over his body. He cannot see and hear at the same time. He flaps his arms and rocks back and forth. If it had not been for the courage, faith, and determination of his mother, he would have joined the ranks of thousands of other autistic children, thought to be too "retarded" by everyone involved in their lives to have any meaningful intellectual contact.

But his remarkable mother, Soma, gave up a career in chemistry to devote her life to teaching her son, even though doctors in India said he would never be able to learn. And for 10 years, living in small apartments in Mysore and Bangalore, India, she spent every waking hour talking and teaching, constantly prodding, determined to keep Tito stimulated. She read him to him day and night, although Tito wanted to hide in a corner and watch a ceiling fan. She took him for daily walks amid the colors, smells and sounds of local markets. She taught him to recognize letters and sounds on an alphabet board, choosing English over more difficult Indian dialects. Then she tied a pencil in his hand and showed him how to make each letter, often refusing to let him eat until he could do so.

She devised ways to get him to communicate, pointing to alphabets as he slowly formed sentences. Getting him to 'talk' by thumping him on the back and expelling air in the form of sound, holding his arm or shoulder so that he felt connected to his body. She taught him writing when he was six.

She made him walk a mile each day, all the while talking to him and explaining things on the way. She read to him stories and books - Aesop's fables, Thomas Hardy novels, and the complete works of Dickens and Shakespeare - and demanded that he write his own stories in return. And he did it. He wrote poetry and essays. And he has explained in his writings what it is like to be autistic. One website offered the following.

"When I was 4 or 5 years old," he wrote while living in India, "I hardly realized that I had a body except when I was hungry or when I realized that I was standing under the shower and my body got wet. I needed constant movement, which made me get the feeling of my body. The movement can be of a rotating type or just flapping of my hands. Every movement is a proof that I exist. I exist because I can move."

And this:

Tito says that people with autism, at least those who are like him, choose one sensory channel. He chose hearing. Most of the time, Tito attends to the sounds of language and to oral information, which may help explain his gift for poetry. Vision, Tito said, is painful. He scans the world with his peripheral vision and rarely looks directly at anything. "I can concentrate either at what I am seeing or what I am hearing or what I am smelling . . . It felt nothing unnatural to me until I realized that others could simultaneously see and hear and small"

Tito is an extraordinary person. And this is an extraordinary poem. I hope you enjoy it as much I have. You might want to type Tito's name into your Internet search engine. There's much more to this marvelous story of courage, love, and faith.