Lekha and her lisp

Street art, St.Gilles, Brussels

 

As a young child I had a lisp. I couldn't enunciate the 'g' or the 'k' sounds. It used to sound all cute when I used to say dod for dog and dod for God. I used to pronounce my name Lekha as Letha and my sister whose name is Latha was also Letha to me. Cake was of course 'theth'. All this was considered normal since I was the baby of the family.In any case those days, our family had no money to consider a speech therapist. I don't even know if such a specialist existed in our area back then. One day, my oldest brother Raj who was 14 years older than me decided that it was time for me to stop talking like a baby. He didn't think the lisping would go away on its own and he knew it wouldn't stay cute for long.

That evening, he asked me to not go down to play with my friends. I wasn't so happy about it but he said he wanted to teach me something. He sat with me alone at home, away from distractions and worked with me to get rid of the lisp. He made me repeat the sounds after him and showed me where in my mouth I was to place my tongue to generate the right sounds. I don't know how he had it all figured out. He would have been barely out of his teenage years himself and had had absolutely no training of any kind in teaching or dealing with small children. But what mattered was that his method worked. When each of my family members trooped in that evening, I showed them with great pride that I could pronounce dog as dog and God as God. I spoke out my name clearly and correctly. 

Happily I was cured of those funny ways of speaking before anyone ever made fun of me for it thanks to the genius and foresight of my brother who was looking out for me. I'm pretty sure having a lisp and having to learn to speak French or Dutch as I did in later life would have definitely brought immense hurdles with it.