A Cure For Stuttering

Mrs. Khanna ran into Mrs. Sorabji as the latter was stepping out of an exclusive shoe store at Nariman Point in Mumbai.

"Hi Yasmin," exclaimed Mrs. Khanna," haven't seen you in ages! How are you?"

"Very well, thank you. And you?"

"Oh, vadhiya ji vadhiya," said Preeti Khanna jovially, then her eyebrows knitted into a frown, "you are a clinical psychologist, right?"

"Yes, of course," said Yasmin Sorabji, wondering what was coming next from this ebullient Punjabi that she had known for years.

"Have you got some time to spare right now?"

"I start my evening counseling session at five. So I guess I have an hour or so to spare. What did you have in mind?"

"Not here. Let's go get a cold coffee at Firpo's and I will tell you. Come on, come on," said Preeti as she dragged her friend to Firpo's.

Yasmin Sorabji was an elegant, sophisticated person, someone you could easily mistake for an ultra rich socialite. In a way she was just that - she was married to an ultra rich businessman and really did not need to work at all. That she did so was because of a strong work ethic instilled in her by her father, who had been a Pediatrician. She was definitely not the kind of person you would even think of taking by the arm and bodily dragging off somewhere.

But Preeti Khanna had gone to the same school as her and was by nature the kind of person who could very easily be informal even with a queen.

"You remember Harbans Kaur?" said Preeti, once they had settled down with their cold coffees, "Oh, ho," when she encountered a blank look from Yasmin, "The one whose husband is general manager of Century Tyres, yaar."

Yasmin still had no idea.

"You were invited to their son's wedding two years ago but could not make it, because you had to rush your own son to the hospital." And he had to have his appendix removed, now Yasmin remembered! Her younger son had come home from college in the States and had promptly fallen ill.

"Aha, now you remember. Well it is about that son."

Yasmin waited, while Preeti looked at her with a meaningful expression on her face, "What?" She said in exasperation as Preeti appeared determined not to let the moment fade.

Finally, dramatically, in a whisper," His marriage crumbled."

"Well that is sad. But what has it to do with me."

"He needs help. You see his stuttering is back."

"Tried a speech therapist?"

"Oh yes. No success. I think that there is a deep psychological reason that needs to be unearthed and treated."

Oh dear here we go again, thought Yasmin. From being totally unaware or in denial a generation ago, educated Indians were now fully into Psychology.

"You see the whole thing was very messy - court shourt and all that. And suddenly the boy's stuttering was back."

Yasmin waited. It had been a while since she last met Preeti and now remembered what it was that irritated her so much about her - it was this dramatization to extract the maximum out of what could very well turn out to be a trivial issue. Typical Punjabi overacting, she thought, but then applying her professional persona to herself she calmed down and waited for Preeti to complete her story.

"You see his father arranged his marriage to this girl from a Sikh family in Delhi. Good family, very rich. Only, the girl was not educated beyond high school. As you know the boy is brilliant (and no, Yasmin Sorabji did not know this). Topper from IIT, Powai. This difference in intellectual level is what Harbans says was the problem. The girl claims otherwise - abuse from the boy and her in laws. Anyway in less than a year the girl was back in Delhi with her family. And her family went berserk. As you know because of all these dowry demanding, bride burning cases, the law these days is heavily tilted towards the bride. They used the law to extract a lot of money from the boy's father and even had the boy in jail. Not for long - just a week. But that was enough! Finally a divorce settlement was reached."

"The divorce came through last year. So Harbans and her family are finally free of the court system. But the effect on the boy has been devastating. He has lost all confidence, has withdrawn into himself and of course his stuttering is worse. He was fired by Infosys and has barely been able to stay employed. He is now working in a very inferior position for Voltas here in Mumbai."

Preeti Khanna paused with arched eyebrows, and Yasmin felt her irritation rising, because she felt once again something petty was going to issue out of her friend's mouth," It is almost as if he has suffered a significant injury. To his mind you know. When I see him now, he reminds me of Madhu Ranade's nephew after the Kargill war. And you cured him. Remember?"

Of course Yasmin remembered. PTSD. That had been Madhu Ranade's nephew's problem. It had taken concentrated counseling over four years to get him functional. To get rid of the severe trauma of seeing dismembered bodies, the smell of burning flesh and the intense sense of helplessness on losing friends.

Even now more than ten years later, she still saw him once every three or four months or so but these counseling sessions were more to allay the anxiety of everybody involved. He was fully functional - good job, excellent prospects, stable marriage, good kids. She knew intuitively that Preeti had analyzed the matter correctly. Her education may have been limited to convent school and then one year towards a bachelor of arts degree but her native intelligence and high emotional IQ allowed her to see things in clearer perspective than most other people. I guess, thought Yasmin, that is why I like her despite her irritating ways.

"So what do you think?"

"About what?" asked Yasmin.

"Oh ho baba, will you treat him or not?"

"I can certainly meet with him - if he agrees. And then we can decide if he needs to be treated or not."

So a fortnight later Balbir Singh presented himself at Yasmin's office on the fourth floor of an old colonial building in Colaba. He was slightly built, around five foot four in height, the very antithesis of the popular concept of a Sikh, though he did have thick facial hair. A large head (crowned by a neatly tied turban) with some arresting features made him marginally good looking. Yasmin, who was five foot eight, found she towered over him, more so because he stood hunched up, making himself even shorter.

There was no doubt that Balbir needed help. That he lacked confidence was glaringly evident. Whether this was an extreme manifestation of inherent shyness, or something more pathological, needed to be determined and that thought Yasmin would direct her efforts to heal him. Balbir felt very comfortable talking to her - she was an accomplished therapist. In a few sessions she established an excellent rapport with him and ascertained that indeed mental trauma had made him regress emotionally - insecure, extremely shy and completely lacking in confidence. Stuttering, was a part of this syndrome. He had stuttered as a child, been cured by a speech therapist, then reverted as an adolescent and again been relieved of it by another speech therapist. This time around, it was the mental trauma which had prevented speech therapy from being effective. Exactly as Preeti Khanna had surmised, Yasmin ruefully acknowledged.

Exactly what the mental trauma was that had triggered this regression escaped her - for the moment. She narrowed it down to something sexual. Something had happened in the privacy of the bedroom. Through the years Yasmin had treated several married couples with sexual problems. In India where marriage was regarded as something that happened to everybody, it was not unusual to come across this problem. The usual suspects were homosexual tendencies, impotency, lack of interest in sex, or hormonal or developmental problems that resulted in abnormal anatomy. However, these usual suspects were soon ruled out.

She discovered the key to the puzzle purely by chance.

One evening they were making no headway. Balbir appeared distracted and fidgety. Finally he said, " Iii m sorry. I rrrreally hav ttto go!"

"Oh, of course," she said, relieved that the reason for his distressed behavior was so trivial, "you know where the bathroom is."

While he went to relieve himself, Yasmin stepped out on to the narrow balcony that ran the length of her office. The blast of heat and humidity that greeted her reminded her to do whatever she was going to do and quickly get back into the air conditioned comfort of her office. She had various plants in earthen ware beds firmly attached to the guard rail of the balcony, and as she had suspected, the help she shared with a few of the other offices in this building, had not done their job of watering the plants properly. There was a small extension of the balcony around the corner just outside the bathroom that housed a money plant that she was particularly fond of and which they invariably forgot to water. Picking up a pitcher of water she made her way sideways to the plant. As she started to water the plant she detected some movement out of the corner of her eye and heard the tinkling sound of water meeting water. She turned her head and found she was looking through the partially opened ventilator into the bathroom. It should have been closed to enhance the air conditioning but for some reason had been left partially open. The shaded ventilator slats were tilted vertically in such a way that the person peeing into the pot saw only the murky Mumbai sky. But the eyes of someone peering in, were directed downwards to the bowl. And what her eyes saw had Yasmin mesmerized. She saw a big cock emitting yellow stuff vigorously and noisily into the bowl.

Not just a big cock but an extraordinarily huge one! She had never seen one this big. Apart from her husband's, Yasmin had sampled a couple, one (cousin) before getting married and one (a distant cousin, during a marriage) after that. But she had seen quite a few in her line of work - on visits to prisons and mental hospitals, where deranged men would expose themselves. She always had a male escort who would quickly step in and get the loonies to cover themselves but not before she had more than a passing glance at their sexual appendage.

This thing was longer and thicker than anything she had ever seen. It was bigger in its present flaccid piss discharging state than the three cocks that had fucked her had been in their excited erect state.

She stood motionless, holding her breath till the pissing stopped, never taking her eyes off the huge piss emitter. Then Balbir swung his dong rhythmically, in the time honored way that men have of getting rid of the last pesky drops, before stuffing it back in his trousers, zipping up and leaving. Only when she heard the door to the bathroom close did Yasmin begin breathing once again. Then she quickly made her way back and stepped into her office just a few moments after Balbir had settled back on the couch.

He was more involved now and in a short while Yasmin brought up the marriage issue again. Veering from her normal practice she asked a direct question, "Was the size of your organ a problem?"

He looked at her with a shocked expression on his face. It took a few moments before he could force out a very soft," Yes."

It turned out that his wife had made it a major issue. On their wedding night they had been too exhausted to try anything. It was on the second night of their honeymoon that their first attempt at coitus took place. She simply lay passively on the bed and lifted her night garments up to expose her vagina. No attempt at intimacy, no fore play. Not really knowing what to do, he had taken off his clothes and approached the bed with a half erect cock. She had allowed him to lie on top of her but made no attempt to embrace him or make any gesture of affection or encouragement. He remembered that he had rubbed himself on her to get a full blown erection. He had then inserted his cock in her vagina. He got the head and a bit of the shaft into her cunt before she began complaining vociferously and made him take it out. She had then told him that he was too big for her and that he had to give her time to get used to his size. After that she had turned around and fallen asleep with her back to him. He remembered masturbating his frustrated cock to an orgasm later.

Subsequently he had made attempts to fuck her but had gotten nowhere. Then one night out of frustration he had gone to bed naked. She was as usual completely covered. She had looked at him sternly and asked him why he was naked and sprouting an obvious erection. Plucking up courage, the courage of the frustrated, he had told her it was time they fulfilled their marriage obligations. This sent her into orbit and she let him have it. Among the many demeaning things she said about him, he remembered in particular that she had stated that his cock was a monstrous abnormality, something no human could have possessed; he was a rakshas, a vile non human creature of the underworld and she was going to have nothing to do with him. She had made him get off the bed and sleep on the floor. And that was the end of their sleeping on a conjugal bed.

Yasmin established that his wife's demeaning comments and her despicable behavior could be traced back to a comment he made after their first and as it subsequently turned out, only attempt at copulation. He remembered that he had not felt the resistance of a hymen, something he had been told to watch out for by one of his uncles. Later, he did not find any blood on the bed sheet and mentioned this to her.

Yasmin made him think back, and slowly made him realize that unlike him, his former wife had been sexually active before marriage, and most probably had been having an affair that had been terminated by her marriage. She was unhappy because of this and more importantly she had wanted to transfer her guilt to him. To her paranoid mind his comment about the lack of blood implied that he knew she had been screwing around. She was not going to forgive him for this, even though he had not connected the dots till this moment and his comment then was one of relief that he had not injured her in any way.

Yasmin expanded on this realization and gradually Balbir came to accept the fact that his ex wife had used the size of his cock as a means to an end. She also made him realize that his former wife was not normal but a psychologically disturbed person with definite personality problems. That the onus of their failed marriage lay with her not him, and certainly not his sexual organ. As a result he began gaining confidence and went for long periods without stuttering. And this new found confidence showed at work, where he quickly advanced to higher positions.

But there remained an unresolved issue. He stone walled whenever she brought up the need to start again - get married and move on. He still thought that his cock was a disgusting piece of flesh that no normal woman would ever take into her body. Yasmin had come to genuinely care for this intelligent, introverted, gentle person. The fact that she wet her panties at the thought of his huge penis had of course nothing to do with it.

She decided on the next course of action. A completely non professional approach. Why she chose to do this, she could not have consciously explained to herself, except to tell herself it was to help a client. If she could have psychoanalyzed herself she would found the subconscious motivator - lust. Or maybe she did know but chose to continue in blithe denial.

Otherwise why did she one day in the middle of a session abruptly say," Show it to me."

He looked at her uncomprehendingly, so she pointed with a shapely, manicured finger, to his groin and said, "Your thing."

To say he was taken aback would be an understatement. He just sat there paralyzed.

"You still have this fear that it is abnormal and no woman would ever want anything to do with you once she saw it. I just want to reassure you by giving an unbiased opinion."

They sat there looking at each for what seemed like an eternity. Then he stood up and dropped his trousers and his shorts. He stood there looking down at nothing while Yasmin inspected his dong. She could no longer pretend that her interest in his cock was purely clinical. Seeing it in its naked glory made her consciously acknowledge the real reason - pure unadulterated lust.

She managed to say in a matter of fact way," Yes it is big." She saw him cringe at the word 'big', and so added quickly, " But nothing that would harm a woman."

In a flat tone he asked," How would you know?"

Taken aback, she said," I am experienced and just know."

Still in the same tone he continued," Have you directly experienced something like this? You know when it is excited it is much longer and thicker."

"No, I haven't but.... Okay let me see it in an excited state." Why on earth had she said that?! Pure unadulterated lust had made her say that. Yes, she was coming to terms with the fact that his humongous cock had triggered this reaction in her middle aged brain. She had never consciously been an overly sexual person. Yes, she loved to fuck, but what sex she had with her husband was enough. Till now that is. Even now she did not really want to fuck Balbir, but his cock - that was what she wanted. But, did she want to fuck it or just see it and maybe handle it and thus get this absurd lust for a huge cock out of her system? Let's find out thought her conscious mind.

Meanwhile Balbir mechanically reached down and began working his cock with his hand. She watched enthralled as it responded.In what she thought was a very professional tone she said," Well bring it here and let me feel it and I can then give you an informed opinion."

He stepped forward and she grasped his prick and moved her hand over it as if measuring it and comparing it to others she had handled. She was unable to get her hand around its girth. She used both her hands and looking down was struck by how small they looked on his cock.

"No," she said, fighting hard to keep her voice even, "it will definitely not harm a woman. She may take some time to get used to its size but a normal sized woman should be able to handle it." She did not remove her hands but found herself working his cock with them, stimulating it further. Her soft hands on his cock were more than he could handle, and a few strokes later he was on the brink of coming. He tried to warn her and then tried to pull away from her firm grasp on his penis but got caught up in his orgasm. With a grunt he ejaculated - all over her clothes, her hands and arms, her neck and a little on her face. She did not move till he finished coming and continued playing with his cock till he was done, only then did she let him go.

He was totally embarrassed," Sorry," he said, as he quickly pulled up and zipped his trousers.

"Nothing to be sorry about," she said in a matter of fact manner, as if this happened to her all the time, as he saw himself out of the door. Afterwards, she spent quite some time in the bathroom, washing her face, neck and arms and then sari and blouse. Luckily he had been her last client of the day, so she had the time to wait while her clothes dried under the fan. Mentally she noted to herself that from now on he would always be her last client of the day. Why? Consciously she felt it was because she was making progress in a very difficult case and having the day end in triumph was going to make her day. But subconsciously?

He was very awkward when he returned for his next session. When you have ejaculated all over your psychologist, of course you are going to be discomfited. But she continued in the same matter of fact manner, as if nothing had happened. Gradually his diffidence evaporated and they had a good session. In the weeks that followed he continued to make good progress - his confidence soared and his stuttering was almost gone. At work he reached the highest position he thought he could attain at Voltas and was actively looking around for a new job. But he still baulked at the idea of meeting another woman, of getting married, of getting on with life. And without that she knew he was not completely healed.