“It has taken me a hell lot of courage to write this up, but this only means I have accepted my disability and I am in the process of healing myself. Welcome to the story of my life.

So, I have no idea how and when I got the problem since my parents seem to shy away from telling me but from what I know, all of a sudden, I developed froth one night and my father immediately rushed me to a doctor who lived in my apartment in Andheri and in a sleepy state, she gave me a wrong injection which did indeed stop my froth, but it led to an infection in my ears leading to full deaf-ness in my right ear and very low hearing in my left ear which we didn’t know at that time. There, I finally said it. After a while, we shifted to Hyderabad where I was admitted in a normal primary school. The teachers started to notice I could not respond properly, and my parents took me to an ENT doctor who diagnosed me with hearing impairment which would have been due to the wrong injection. My family doesn’t know this, but I still remember the day when my mom cried upon seeing my diagnosis and was scared out of her wits. I, being the two year old I was, couldn’t comprehend what was going on.

Forward to 1 year later, we shifted to Chennai which was to be our permanent residence. I was under the treatment of a ENT doctor based in Chennai. My parents started to search for primary schools for me, and finally when they found one, there’s your twist : They rejected me at first. Those days, they had this mindset that disabled people couldn’t be taught and were refusing me admission. Wonderful, isn’t it? I was being called as a disabled person now. After much persuasion and convincing, I was finally admitted there. Which was a relief for my parents, but it proved to be a total nightmare for me. People would throw stones at me, laugh at my hearing aids, throw water on them and ridicule at my speaking. For those of you who don’t know, hearing impairment affects the speech and hearing impaired people generally tend to be slower in learning. I endured every bit of their torture. We had a small playground which had a swing, and I would be thrown out of the swing on the ground. My head would bleed every single day, and tears would fall from my eyes. I was bullied even by the teachers. And I was only 4 years old. But I wouldn’t tell my parents about it because I didn’t want to burden them, because me being a disabled child had troubled them enough. This school had haunted me for life and has shaped the person I am today.

After my primary schooling got over, my parents finally decided to put me in Sankara school, Adyar where again, I was refused. Again my parents had to convince them and after passing the entrance test, the principal finally agreed to admit me. I felt disgusted and ashamed, that my parents had to plead to get me admitted when I literally wanted to commit suicide. How old was I, you ask? 9 years old. And I was already thinking about suicide. I still remember the first day I came to school, I was scared and trembling looking at the scars at my arms caused by my previous school students, and I wondered and wondered. Will they accept me for who I am? Will they also bully me and torture me endlessly? Will they give me a chance to prove myself? I couldn’t tremble away from the fact that I would again be bullied. My father came to drop me at the school and the moment I entered the classroom, I felt like a normal person. People looked at my hanging hearings aids like they were nothing at all and spoke to me as a normal person. Teachers would sympathise with my condition ( I don’t blame them ) and give me extra attention. And this was the stage where everything started to kick in.

I did not know my alphabets. I didn’t know how to spell or pronounce properly. Rather than sending me to a class for hearing impaired children, my mother, being a MA PHIL in english graduate herself, took it upon herself to teach me a word, day by day. And for that I’m forever thankful. My mother would get me books to read everyday and read words from the dictionary and make me spell. She was my knight in shining armour. I slowly learned to cope up with the others in my class, and performed academically better than them. At this stage, my mom engaged me in a lot of extra curricular activities which was my world of escape, and that’s where I fell in love with dance. Let me tell you a story : I cannot hear the music. Literally, cannot. I have to follow the vibrations on the stage and I would listen to the music over and over again before my performance and memorise its rhythm but it was never a big deal for me, I had fallen so much in love with dance to overlook my disability. I could feel dance.

Abacus was my next love. I went for every single national, international, regional competition that was ever held and won every one of them. After finishing the 10 levels of abacus mental arithmetic, I finally graduated. I cried for days at end because I was the first…