I had never take pleasure in speaking, you know. And not just in the public sense, I hated speaking in general, because I was terrible at it. During my childhood days, I used to stammer, and I used to speak always with fear, too slowly or too quickly so that I didn’t bog down with totlami. Sometimes, words either break open out of my mouth and bustled all over each other like mice fleeing a house on fire, or my tongue or lips puts up such a break that my words could not come out open, and sounded like a broken record. I had to repeat myself over and over and over. “Slow down”, my family members used to tell me. Or, my mother used to tell, “Take a deep breathe”. But most of my friends and other outsiders used to ridicule. Shamim, one of my school friends, a class captain and a peer leader, now a (almost confirmed bachelor) Rajshahi Bar lawyer gave me a name too: totol. I also had problems with accent. Words starting with ‘ka’ or ‘pa’ echoed anything but hard when they came out of my mouth. How could I start a word when another one was already barrelling through my larynx? These, of course, were mere mechanical issues. The real problem was that I had difficulty thinking of things to talk about though it was not a problem while I used to write. The problem of speaking, however, was not real one while I converse with my friends; that was relatively easy. We used to talk about girls, or cinema, or girls we used to see in the cinemas. But talking to real girls, well, that wasn’t so easy. I’m going to tell you the story how I cashed first ever in my life on this battlefront! I was 14 perhaps and a student of class nine in Rajshahi Collegiate School then. I wrote earlier that my elder sister who happened to be a girl two years older than me but used to be a student in the P.N. Girls High School one class junior to me. A friend of the friend of my elder sister, a cute girl from a nearby house in Kadirganj where we used to live stopped me once in the passageway at home, and she told me that her friend (the cute girl whose name I suppress for reasons not unknown to you) like to discuss with me how to overcome her hurdles in learning English, and if I didn’t have any problem, she would be happy to talk to me at her house on Sunday afternoon next. Innocent, and callous as I’m still today, didn’t understand the significance of such invitation to ‘tutoring’ went to her house, and we talked for a half hour. I thought we had a wonderful chat. The following Sunday, I went to her place again in the afternoon, and the look on her face said it all: she didn’t like to ‘being tutored’ by me anymore. She said it would be best for me as I was: junior brother of her friend (my elder sister). We never spoke to each other again. It was raining mildly on that day, and I spent the rest of the day sitting on the wall of our house, alone in the rain, feeling sorry for myself. The August rain was cold and soaked through my shirt, but it seemed appropriate. I thought I was the biggest loser who ever lived. What had I said that was so bad? Eventually, word got around that she thought I was boring. I have talked a bit too much about my knowledge on English, with my speech problem, the totlami, you know? I didn’t recall now exactly what I talked about, but it was possible, I guess that I was irrelevant on both the subject, and the way I talked about the wrong subject. I had been nervous; in truth, I didn’t recall much of what I have said on that fateful rainy afternoon. Things got better after the War of Liberation when I went to college, and in politics. But I still wasn’t the most confident guy around though my stammering problem gone for years, and I was comfortable with who I was, or, at least, with who I was becoming in the future. But I could never master the art of talking, and in fact, still a loser on this front. So what if I couldn’t flabbergast people with pretty talk? I was a nice guy. They would see that but my awkward speech continued to blur many people’s vision. Recently, I was having tea at break time during a workshop with a lady that I liked and the conversation turned to high-school activities. “I used to be a sprinter,” she said. “You must have been in good shape back then,” I replied. I wasn’t implying that she wasn’t still in good shape, but that’s how she took it. She grabbed her tea and left. I saw some of my friends, colleagues and others didn’t do the way I deal with speaking. When they talked to others, or to be specific, women, their voice turned to syrup and they chuckle in their ear and tell them that he would never felt ‘this way’ about anyone before. If that didn’t work, they would share heartbreaking tales of their childhood. It was all show, of course, but a good one that I couldn’t master, I swear. To be frank, I didn’t want to be like them. The voice I spoke to my mother was good enough for everyone else. I wasn’t going to make up stories to get attention. Besides, I knew that someone, someday, would give me a chance to make a second or even third impression. And, who knows, maybe people would see that a good heart is more important than a man of good delivery.