The Stammer That Disappears When I Read Poems
My tongue trips on hello but never on a stanza.
The hardest word I own is my own name. It starts with S, and S is the letter that hates me, so for most of my childhood I introduced myself the way a man defuses a bomb: slowly, sweating, with everyone watching.
"S-s-s-sameer," I would say, and watch the other person's face do the thing. You know the thing. The small flinch, then the too-kind smile, then the helpful finishing of my sentences for the rest of the conversation, as if my words were groceries they were carrying for an old man.
Roll call was a daily execution with advance notice. I knew exactly how many names stood between me and "Sameer Salvi," a name my parents chose apparently as a dare, two S's, no mercy. I would sit through eleven names rehearsing one word. Present. Present... Pre-sent. You cannot imagine how many private syllable negotiations fit into the ninety seconds before a teacher looks up and waits.
The school sent me to a speech therapist when I was nine. Mrs. D'Costa, a patient woman with a metronome and a bowl of extra-strong mints. She taught me techniques with names like "easy onset" and "light contact," which sound like yoga for the mouth and partly are.
Some of it helped. None of it fixed.
She told my mother the truth early, and I overheard it through a door: this is not a habit, it is wiring, and the goal is not to erase it but to live loudly anyway.
Nine-year-old me heard "cannot be fixed" and skipped the rest of the sentence. That skipped half took me twenty years to hear properly.
The accident
Class 7, second period, English. Our teacher, Mr. Abraham, had a system of humiliations he genuinely believed was education: stand and read aloud, row by row. When my turn came, the passage was a poem. Wordsworth. Daffodils, of all the harmless things.
I stood up already drowning, picked the first word off the page, and jumped.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud."
Clean. All of it, clean.
Four stanzas, not one repetition, not one block, not one silent gap where a consonant sat refusing to leave the house. I read the whole poem in somebody else's beautiful voice, except the somebody else was me.
I sat down and stared at my desk while the class carried on, entirely unaware that a miracle had just occurred between the window and the second row.
Nobody had told me this is a known thing. Stammers ride on the mechanics of ordinary speech, its rushed decisions, its self-surveillance. Give the voice a rhythm to hold, a metre, a shape that already knows where it is going, and for many of us the block simply does not board the train. Singers know it. Actors know it. A boy in a Nagpur classroom found it out by accident, holding a photocopied Wordsworth like a plank in the sea.
I went home and tested it in secret, the way you test a superpower. Load-shedding hit our lane at eight, as it did every evening, so my laboratory was the dining room by candlelight, everyone else on the balcony waiting out the heat.
I read aloud to the flame. Tagore in translation. Film lyrics. The two poems in my sister's textbook. Fluent, fluent... fluent. The candle flickered when I hit the plosives, my one-person audience, the only listener I ever had who reacted to my voice without pity.
To this day I write and rehearse by a lit candle when I can. People assume it is aesthetic... It is gratitude.
The border
Understand what this did to the map of my life. There was a country where I stammered, and it contained everything: shops, phone calls, viva exams, girls, my own name. And there was a tiny fluent island called Poetry, and I ruled it. So I did what any refugee does. I moved.
I memorised poems the way other boys memorised cricket statistics. I volunteered, actually volunteered, for every elocution competition, and teachers who had watched me strangle on "present" for years stood at the back of assembly halls with their mouths slightly open. I learned everything I could about metre and breath, and later, as an adult, took a proper course through an online academy for writers, because I figured if verse was going to be my working voice, I owed it craftsmanship.
Poems were not a hobby. Poems were infrastructure.
But here is the dishonest part, and this essay is worthless if I skip it: I was not performing poetry because I was brave. I was performing poetry because it was the one stage where I did not have to be.
The island was also a hiding place.
The border got tested in front of forty strangers, at an open mic in a Pune cafe, three years ago. I was twenty-six. I had entered a piece into a monthly poetry contest that spring, made the shortlist, and the small courage from that had walked me up to the mic. I recited my poem, four minutes, flawless, the old magic holding like it always held. Applause. And then the host, a friendly man with no idea what he was doing to me, leaned into the second mic and asked, "So Sameer, what inspired this one?"
No metre. No memorised path... just conversation, in front of forty faces.
"My g-g-g," I said. And stopped. The block sat down in my throat with its luggage. The silence in that cafe had texture. Three seconds is a geological era when it is happening inside your mouth.
I had two options and I had rehearsed neither. Flee back into a poem, quote something, be fluent and fake. Or stay in my own broken voice and finish the sentence at whatever speed it demanded.
"My g-grandfather," I said, finally, and then, because the truth had started, it kept going. "And you have all just heard the other thing that inspired it. I s-stammer. Poems are the only place I don't. That is why I write them."
I have had applause for performances. I had never before had applause for a sentence with a hole in it.
It was louder.
A stammer is not a broken voice. It is a voice that refuses to be rushed, in a world that has forgotten how to wait.
What I know now
Mrs. D'Costa's full sentence, the one I skipped at nine, was this: the goal is to live loudly anyway. Not fluently... Loudly. I used to think poetry cured me for four minutes at a time. I now think it did something better: it kept my voice in circulation during the years I would otherwise have gone silent, like a friend keeping your job open until you were ready to come back and take it.
These days I read everything I write aloud, stanza or grocery list, and I let whatever happens happen. Some evenings, everything flows. Some evenings, my own name still takes three attempts, and I make the third attempt without apologising. If you want to know what slow, unglamorous repair sounds like, it sounds like that. It took me a long time and a lot of reading in the direction of healing to stop calling my mouth the enemy.
The candle is on my desk as I finish writing this. Power cuts are rarer now, but I lit it anyway, old ritual, oldest listener.
S-s-sameer, I tell it.
The flame flickers, and waits, and lets me get there.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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