Yearn for a supportive woman...

A stammering student learns to love without hesitation.

A soft, weeping noise made Mariam curious. It was around eleven in the night and as the matron she decided to investigate the sound. It belonged to a thin, fragile boy of 14 whose forehead was burning with a fever. Mariam recognised him as the new, bright boarder who had found a place in this elite residential school in Dehradun purely by merit. The Class VIII student had stood first in the whole of UP to bag the honour. She handed the feverish Sachin Srivastava an aspirin and a cup of hot tea before putting the lad to bed.In many ways, Srivastava seemed to mystify Mariam.



She had heard that this frail boy, who had never picked up a pair of boxing gloves before, had put up a great fight against the school's best boxer. This courage was a strange contrast to his hesitant self in class. For a Hindi-medium-schooled, middle class boy, the high-profile institute with its unfamiliar medium of instruction must be intimidating, Mariam deduced. "His vulnerability appealed to me greatly, " says the 73-year-old in retrospect.What she didn't know was that Srivastava hesitated to speak for fear of being exposed as a stammerer. He soon realised though that unlike his other teachers, she never poked fun or "crinkled her face" when he stammered. In fact, in that otherwise hostile setup, Mariam was "nurturing, almost motherly", recalls 52-year-old Dr Srivastava, who has been living in with his teacher for almost 25 years now.


In his Dehradun apartment, Mariam plays wife, mother, homemaker and critic. They often laugh about their strange, complex love, not tarnished but complemented by all its mismatched details. . He was 14 and she 35, when they first met. She was a divorcee with a daughter from her first marriage, and he was a young, infatuated teenager who admired her because she was caring and "dressed neatly". Not only did they belong to different religions but also incompatible star signs. "He is a Cancerian while I am a Leo. According to astrology, we're not supposed to get along at all, " says Mariam. But love, for this duo, was chiefly a cerebral pre-occupation. Something that was cemented by the ritual of thinking, writing, reading, re-reading and letter-writing. After Srivastava passed out from school and went on to Allahabad medical college, he would write long letters in Mariam's mother tongue - English - to impress her. These weekly letters, Mariam knew, were the result of affection coupled with frequent glances at the Oxford dictionary. She would underline the difficult words sternly and send the copy back with a covering letter, but not before "weeping with love and affection" at the lengths Srivastava had gone to. But there was one letter she did not feel the need to correct. Once Srivastava passed out of college and started working with a malaria eradication scheme in Orissa, he wrote to Mariam who was teaching in a Gorakhpur residential school then, saying: "At last, I am in a position to offer you a home. " This simple statement not only confirmed his love for her but also equipped Mariam, who did not have a residence of her own till then, with a sense of security.


As a 20-year-old, Mariam, whose ancestors had been a part of the army and the Indian railways in pre-Independent India, had decided against going back with her family to England after Independence. First her mother left, then her father and later her elder brother too followed in the '60s. But Mariam, who loved India, was adamant about staying back and became a teacher. Today, she speaks fluent Hindi and regularly lapses into it while talking to her elder brother over the phone. When the couple started living together, there was heavy opposition from both sides of the family. "If someone was angry or upset, we never let it bother us, " says Mariam. In the last 30 years, Mariam has seen Srivastava blossom from a shy adolescent into an adventurous youngster and then, a calm middle-aged man. He seldom complains even when the daal she's cooked has no salt. "Why the devil didn't you tell me?" she fumes, but he merely shrugs. He also kept quiet about his stammer till two years ago. That confession, for Mariam, explained a lot of his hesitation. Today, she understands the challenges of stammerers like Srivastava. And he loves her for patiently holding on to the receiver while waiting for one of his stammering friends to say 'Hello'. She is also the reason why a Hindi-mediumschooled, middle class boy is capable of appreciating Mozart and talking about the depth in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. She was also the best critic. "Why do you always drop the indefinite articles?" she used to reprimand him then. But today, some more things have changed. The dictionary has been replaced by the computer and it is Mariam who has to seek his help with the machine. Arthritis and old age have ensured that she looks after two dogs at home while he tends to patients. They have both taken to spirtuality without being "moronic or pedantic" about it and revel in intellectual conversations. "It has always been mind over matter for us," says Mariam. Though they don't have biological children, they don't feel the vacuum. "Love is a wonderful achievement, " concludes Srivastava, without dropping the indefinite article.

PS: I read this story named "Fluent Love" and was touched by the "love" part of the love story.


So long .....