When no one believes your story!

There are three stories that we tell. The first, the story we tell ourselves. The second, the story we tell others. The third, the story others tell about us.

There was a time I stammered. Only in school. Or maybe, it was more evident in school. At home, everyone remembers a phase where I would burst out saying “aami, aami, aami”, meaning “me / I” and left searching for the next set of words.

It started after third grade. In hindsight, I think I carried the trauma and shock of my first teacher’s slap on the first day of class 3. Things went downhill from that moment on. Grades 3-5 were some of my lowest. I have so many stories from that phase. I don’t quite remember the exact day when it all started. All I remember is how stammering became the BIG problem in school.

Every time I tried speaking in front of my class, it turned out to be a messy affair! My knees trembled. My legs were wobbly. I would begin to sweat and my breathing got heavy. I would gulp to find a drink in my mouth, but the taps had run dry inside. My vision started to blur. I had bravely decided to not wear my glasses in school. Now I couldn’t add shame to the moment and take them out. I could read. I knew the words. I knew what they sounded liked. But the words refused to roll out of my tongue.

I held the English textbook tightly. “The….the…the…the old wo-wo-woman walk - walk-ed out of her home w-wi-with a bro-oo-mm…” The entire class erupted in peals of laughter.

“Do you have two tongues in your mouth, Rituparna?” Asked the teacher crossly.

Did I?

I twitched my jaw, searched for the invisible tongue in my mouth. It seemed to have a mind of its own. Something strange had set in. I felt something warm growing inside my belly. I wanted to use the toilet. Number 1? Number 2? Or maybe both of them together! And then I felt it climbing up my body. Oh no! This was vomit! I could feel the eyes of the class turned towards me. The teacher’s eyes felt like twin headlights. I sensed something move inside my mouth. There! The invisible second tongue had wrapped my tongue again.

“N-n-n-o M-mi-sss. Sss-oorrry Miss,” I looked down at the book reading between the lines.

I missed her turn that day. It was to be the first of many such turns.

When reading became a weakness, writing slowly grew to my new strength. What I couldn’t say in words, I tried to write in her notebooks. The answers. The definitions. The spellings. The essays. Everything was neatly written. I am not sure if it was my strength. All I remember is that words didn’t need a tongue, a voice or a mouth to be shared. Even when I couldn’t speak through my lips, the words on paper showed I was worthy.

I felt a strange kind of solace in words. Numbers scared me too. They paralysed my body, my brain, my hand and fingers. At the same time I was struggling to speak up in class, my story with math was spiralling down. Add to that the first brush with social isolation. If you are not smart in class, then no one thinks highly of you anyway. If you are unable to speak fluently in class, you land up as the quietest in there. You avoid to situations where you want to speak or be heard.

School life is full of such tumbles. There is always something that takes away your confidence. Your sense of self. You begin to wonder why are you struggling. If I looked around myself, I saw others struggle too. Someone had a tougher time with grades. All of them. Their behaviour was a worry. Sometimes their absenteeism. Or lack of talent, initiative or intent in anything. Some had problems at home. Of course, at grade 3, I didn’t know them yet. There is something universal about childhood bruises. Some of them are so severe that your body and mind carry the scars in adulthood. Luckily, I recovered from most of them. Now that I write it here, I realise I make it sound like one of those heart tug stories that you read on humans / people of this land. What is childhood without a few tumbles anyway, right?

While still in primary school, the main school building looked so far away. In reality, it was really a couple of buildings away. Our teachers always reminded us that we needed to be smart to go into the higher grades. I knew girls who ‘failed’ grades. I didn’t want to be like them. I imagined being stuck in grade 5 forever! I needed to focus on math and speaking up. I put a mental post-it in my head.

One day, the teacher walked into the class to announce, “Next week, we will have selections for the Elocution competition. Pick a poem, learn it well and be prepared to narrate it in class.”

Oh no!! This was the annual stammering fest. I knew I had no chance in this one. I had scrambled out of the prelims in the previous grade.

Did everyone have to participate?

“Everyone has to participate,” continued the teacher, “You will be marked and graded based on your elocution skills. The best ones would be selected for the finals.”

There is no getting away. I knew I had to endure this one with chin up.

Back in the day, elocution competitions were pretty predictable. There would be a couple of girls rattling off the well-rehearsed lines of Macavity Cat, or Tyger-Tyger. How could I even have a chance, I wondered?

I felt my tongue wrapping up inside my mouth. I picked a poem but didn’t have the courage to even try.  I began, but my recitation didn’t begin. There were some laughs. Someone giggles. There was a yawn and the teacher’s nod of the head. I was promptly graded, perhaps a D and made to sit down soon.

That year, the annual elocution competition passed in a blur. I was upset. I felt sad. I was disappointed. I felt alone. I felt unseen.

After that slap from my maths teacher, I told my fragile 9 year old brain, ‘What happens in school, stays in school.’ I couldn’t open up about my stammering to anyone outside it. It wasn’t something that was communicated back to my parents. Growing meant, I had learnt to internalise some of my personal challenges. Alone. I am sure if I had opened up about it to my parents, they would have helped me resolve the demons in my mouth. This was a school thing. I kept it that way.

I didn’t stammer at home. I found it strange. So strange that I found myself talking to myself in school. ‘Don’t stammer now.’ Somehow, the school version of me was different. It had made up her mind to surrender to the fear.

Back in my room, I decided to confront her. The school version of me. I stepped up on the stool to look into the bamboo framed mirror on the wall. It was a few inches too high for me. The stool gave me the perfect height to look into my eyes. She looked the same. My home version in the mirror looked the same as the school version of me. Except, she wasn’t.

It’s the eyes that I am most worried about. The eyes that are on me when I stand up to speak. My teachers. And my peers. Those eyes that look at me even when I am not looking into them. I looked into my own eyes.

Looking back at that 9 year old version of me. I want to scoop her into my arms and tell her she would do fine. I must hold myself back. I want her to find her way to ‘fine’. That’s where magic happens.

Every afternoon, when Maa slept, when bhai bounced his ball on the wall, I stood up on the stool in my room. I stood before the mirror to look at myself in the mirror and read. Now there were no more eyes. No giggles. No shuffling. No sighs from the teacher. Nothing. Except my tiny voice reading to myself.

I still look at myself in the mirror. In my bedroom. In my bathroom. Sometimes in the elevator. I look at myself in the rear-view mirror, in full length glass windows, through the camera lens and the pictures that turn up after a show. On most days, I try to look at myself, through the eyes of that little girl on the stool. I look at myself with kindness. When everything else fails, I have to rely on my own flaws, my strength and my patience and work through it.

Next year, I climbed the class to grade 5. This was the senior year in primary school. One more year and I would move to the senior block in school.  There I’d would be among the youngest in middle school. Maybe that’s why, I decided to leave some demons behind.

My afternoon readings continued. Somewhere under my own kind and patient gaze, I think I unlocked a tiny door inside me. The door through which I discovered my voice. With every practice, I got better. I thought I did. I wouldn’t know until the elocution competition that year.

By the time the competition was announced, I was bursting with anticipation. I decided to visit the library to find the perfect piece. “Which poem will you tell?” A friend asked me. “Not a poem, I am looking for a story,” I replied.

The search continued across piles of Reader’s Digest. In those days, RD’s as they were called, were excellent books. There were poems, stories and travelogues to be found. Our librarian asked us to pick RD’s to read different kind of writings, so we could improve our English. Many pieces were too mature for an average 10 year old, however, there was always something special to be found between those yellow pages.

Few days of search and I found a perfect story. It was about two penpals, one, a young boy, a teenager and the other an old woman living in a retirement home. Separated by two continents and two generations, the penpals shared their life stories through their letters. The reader, or the listener wouldn’t know the age of the penpals until the end of the story. There was something very special about the story. It had a sense of mystery, intrigue and warmth. It had friendship, companionship and a deep sense of connection. No one had ever narrated a story like that. It was unlike anything anyone had ever attempted.

That year, the annual stammering fest took a new turn. I read, read and reread the story to myself so many times that the words made home inside my heart. I didn’t mug it, or learn it by rote like we did with the poems. I told the story as if I was the narrator, or the writer. Every word flowed just the way it should. I paused where I should. I took a breath where I should. At one point in the story when the young boy discovered that his penpal was not a teen like him, but an ageing woman, his voice trembled. I remembered to go slow here. I calmed my mind to speak slowly, so my two tongues (the real and the imaginary) didn’t intertwine again.

I went from one round, to another and then another, till I reached the final day. There I  stood before the entire primary school. Ahead of me were straight rows of girls in blue and white looking up at me with big eyes. Did they want to listen to me? What were they expecting from me?

None of it seemed to matter anymore.

I won the elocution cup that year. But that wasn’t what I remember this story for.

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A couple of years back, a publisher was putting together an anthology of real-lived stories for 10 year olds. He asked me to write one if I had something from my own childhood. Yes, I did! Many of them. This story was rejected. It wasn’t rejected because of my writing. Instead, it was rejected because the editor couldn’t imagine me doing it without an adult’s help!

“I think that you should consider someone pepping her up (a parent, a teacher) to identify and guide her to overcome this hurdle as a little girl staying at home at that age and in that era doing everything on her own has to be made really real in the written form,” he wrote to me.

I could see where was this coming from. No one wants to believe a 10 year old.

I was angry. As angry as a 10 year old would feel if you doubted her story.

As a child, I taught myself to swim too. And then, years later, as an adult, at the brink of an identity crises, I taught her to tell stories too. If you doubted the 10 year old me, you will doubt all my stories.

I tell stories for a living. This is the only truth I know.

There are three stories that we tell.

The first, the story we tell ourselves.

The second, the story we tell others.

The third, the story others tell about us.

The question, which one matters the most?

To me, it doesn’t matter anymore. None of it matters as a I write. Even if no one believes my story, I can live peacefully.

I know the truth. I have this story. And no one can take it away from me!