35) The Stuttering Girl

As I recollect my childhood days, it only holds painful memories. By the time I reached first standard, I was mocked to no end. I had a pronounced stutter and it would take ages for the words to come out as ‘air’ was only thing that came out as I gasped for words.

My parents were poor and were at a loss as to how to remedy this. Relatives alarmed my mother with tales of how difficult it is to marry off such girls.

I was bright in studies and that helped win some sympathy from the teachers but otherwise the other girls had a miming competition in a bid to outdo me in stutter. It’s a cruel world and I realized it early!!!

By the IV standard, these daily jibes were affecting me so badly that my studies started to go downhill. I remember good old Ratna madam, my class teacher as she summoned my parents and said,” My brother is a speech therapist from US and he is here for a month. Why not seek his counsel and I’ll also put in a word”.

He diagnosized me and asked me come to the house for a month of therapy sessions that consisted for lip movements and sound generation. We progressed and even today I don’t forget his advice,” first conquer your fears and don’t get unduly nervous in getting the words out. Even if you slip up once or twice, let that not bug you in the flow”.

God, I practiced and hard. Those were days of the Asian Games in 1982 and television permeated just about everywhere. I would try to lip sync with the Doordarshan newsreaders and my favourites were Neethi Ravindran and Ramu Damodaran. I would practice reading the newspaper aloud in front of the mirror. I would go to the terrace and read the class lessons loud to the crows and pigeons. God, all I wanted in life was to accepted by others and join them at play.

Six months of such painstaking efforts bore fruit and I could almost speak like a normal person with only a word or so going askew. I soon made a word list of all the difficult words and practiced harder. Now, I was ready.
In my VI standard, I won a debate and that started my redemption into the mainstream. Since then, no one has ridiculed me and that was a huge relief. In my VIII, I was appointed the monitor and other girls were busy borrowing my notebooks and inviting me to their birthday parties!!!

The battle for the “stutter” was won and this taught me a wonderful lesson for life: I can face up to any odds and come up trumps. I stood third in the university in graduation. My dream in life is do my masters in Harvard in Arts and those preparation entitled greater rigour. I had to write all those essays and my scores in SAT and TOFEL to merit an interview call.

I was asked, “What is the biggest challenge of your life?” I told them about this ‘stuttering’ problem and how I overcame that.

I thought they were pleased to hear that even as I await their decision. As for me, I work in ABN AMRO and things have never been better.