An inspiring triumph over speech disability

On a Saturday morning, I am on my way to visit Niranjan Bhat and his family. Niranjan, a 23-year-old engineer, was born with over 90 per cent deafness. Today, much to the astonishment of people who believe hearing impaired people can’t speak, he speaks fluently in Kannada and English.

As I arrive at the house in Maragondanahalli near Kengeri, I gawk at the clean and green surroundings. It is set on a private road and surrounded by what looks like a forest. “Yes, it is beautiful but the peacocks are a menace. The gardens are frequented by them and they destroy all our plants. Chillies are their favourite,” Ravindra Bhat, Niranjan’s father and a well-known newspaper editor, tells me.

When I meet Niranjan, it takes time to realise I must enunciate my words and look at him directly while talking to him. I reintroduce myself. Niranjan is unfazed. Clearly, this is something he commonly deals with.

Ravindra recalls Niranjan’s childhood story: “He was born in 2001. When he was about three months old, my mother felt something was not all right. I thought it was too early to put him through medical tests.” He decided to wait until Niranjan was a little older. Niranjan was an active baby, and would react to what he saw on TV and play with toys like any other child.

Fireworks incident

“We were living in Davanagere,” Ravindra says. “Our house was on the first floor — above a shop that sold fireworks. One day, during Deepavali, the store caught fire and the firecrackers set ablaze produced a deafening sound.”

Niranjan was unperturbed and in fact seemed to be enjoying the bright lights from the fireworks going off. His older brother, on the other hand, was terrified by the racket and locked himself up inside the house. Niranjan’s unusual reaction prompted the family to seek professional help. That is when they first learnt of his condition. But Davanagere, a city in central Karnataka, was not equipped to offer the right treatment. The family then travelled to Mysuru for a more thorough check up. The test revealed that the hearing loss was 105 db in one ear and 95 db in the other. Hearing loss of over 70 is categorised as severe, and above 90 as profound. 

They say there is no such thing as deafness, Ravindra muses. Those with normal hearing can hear 35 to 40 db sounds. For people like his son, the capacity is 90 db and above. If one talks to him in that range, he can hear what is being said. 

People with hearing impairment are also unable to talk. It is not that they cannot talk, but most do not learn to talk because they don’t know what words and languages sound like. “That is not their problem but our problem. They end up being mute because we don’t teach them how to talk,” he elaborates.

Auditory filters

The Mysuru institute that tested the extent of hearing loss explained that Niranjan would benefit from speech and hearing classes. The doctors also fixed a hearing aid on him. “One can’t hear clearly right after a hearing aid is fixed. If your eyesight is bad and you wear glasses, you can see immediately, but the same does not apply to hearing aids and people with hearing loss. This is because they are unaware that there is such a thing as sound. The first reaction when someone places a hearing aid on them is to get rid of it immediately because they find it alarming,” he explains.

The challenge for parents is to convince the children to keep the hearing aid on and to convince them it is absolutely necessary if they wish to learn speaking. Ravindra, working as a reporter for Kannada daily Prajavani back then, took a transfer to Mysuru so that his son could have access to better treatment. Niranjan was enrolled at the Institute of Mother and Deaf Child. The school teaches such children to read lips and learn talking.

Children are admitted on the condition that the mother also joins the school. Mothers are trained to teach the children so that the school can maintain the 1:1 teacher to student ratio. The mother is asked to teach other children and not her own. One reason for this is that it requires an immense amount of patience. It is easy to lose patience with one’s own child. Another reason is that it becomes easier for the child to pick up lip reading if he or she is exposed to multiple teachers. 

In a regular school

Niranjan was two-and-a-half years old when he was admitted to the institute. He spent four years there. He was then admitted to a regular school. He joined Class 1 a year later than other children. Ages 1 to 5 are crucial. This is the time when children learn things quickly so it is important to train them at this age, says Ravindra.

Early detection and training is key. Now, there are cochlear implants, electronic devices that send signals through the auditory nerve to the brain. But one needs a year of therapy just to learn how to hear, Ravindra explains. With our ears, we hear multiple sounds but we know what to tune into and what to tune out. But artificial hearing aids capture every sound and unless one undergoes therapy, one cannot differentiate between relevant sounds and background noise. 

Cultural beliefs

In India, parents do not worry too much if their child does not begin speaking at the right age, Ravindra has found. Friends and family tell them not to worry because someone they know had a child who did not speak until the age of four or five. Or they end up taking their kids to godmen and native healers, unaware of the scientific reason for their lack of speech. 

First and foremost, the parents have to accept that the child has a disability. Then, they should convince the child that there is a problem and that they have to overcome it jointly. “We depend on doctors and teachers to heal and improve our children’s skills. We should also depend on ourselves to make them better,” Ravindra explains. Ravindra and his wife are now part of the committee of the institute. They travel to Mysuru often and offer counselling to parents of children with hearing disabilities.

Mother speaks

When they found out about her son’s condition, Deepa wanted to focus on how to address the problem. Naturally she was devastated and spent many days in tears. “I did not want him to waste his life. I was afraid he would not be able to survive after his parents’ time,” she says. 

Vocabulary is built through listening. But for children like her son, it is built by forcibly making them understand, writing, repeating and making them touch objects. For instance, if the word he was learning was ‘chair’, they would show him a chair, make him write the word, touch the chair, and see the shape of their lips, and feel the vibrations of their vocal chords when they said the word. This is the only way to teach a child with severe hearing loss, says Deepa, who dedicated all her time for more than four years to help Niranjan speak. 

To make hearing impaired children understand one word takes many days. First they are taught vowels and their sounds. They are told to place one hand on the neck of the teacher or mother and the other on their own while producing the sounds. They notice the way the lips move, how facial expressions change, and how long the sound is held. This is followed by word and then sentence formation.

The process is thorough and detailed, recalls Deepa, who is a singer of folk songs. She often performs traditional songs at weddings of family and friends.With one word or situation, the child learns multiple sentences. “For example, with a breakfast scenario, we can ask them what they ate. If they say ‘dosa’ the teacher at the institute asks them ‘How many dosas did you eat?’, ‘What did you eat it with?’, ‘How big was your plate?’, ‘Did your mother make the dosa?’, ‘How many dosas did your father eat?’, etc,” she says.

Sometimes, she refused to give Niranjan food unless he asked for it using words. “He would get frustrated and express his anger. But I refused to budge. It was the only way to make him learn,” Deepa says. When hearing impaired children attempt to speak, they are unaware how long a sound must be held. “They don’t understand that we don’t take a breath while saying a word and that we breathe in between words or sentences. They try to speak while simultaneously taking a breath,” says Deepa.

It was hugely challenging to keep such children engaged. While working at the institute, Deepa taught many. Most were below five when they were admitted. Apart from their hearing, everything else was normal so they preferred to be left alone, to play and explore. At that age, they cannot comprehend the importance of the training, she says.

The frustrated children would try to remove their hearing aids and bang their heads with their little fists. With Niranjan, Deepa would begin the training from the time he woke up from bed. He would have to say “Niranjan yeddanu (Niranjan woke up),” before getting out of bed. They would label all the objects in the house  — coffee table, door, shelf, switchboard, etc — in Kannada to make it easier for him to learn what they were called. “The speed at which children from the age of one to three pick up new things is unbelievable. Training Niranjan made me realise what my older son had missed out on during that age,” says Deepa. 

Niranjan was first taught Kannada for four years. When he joined a regular school, they taught him English by following the same system. Teaching the first language is difficult. It becomes easier to teach subsequent languages as the child is able to understand what is being said.

Learning self-reliance

“When he joined a regular school, he would come back with complaints. At first I would rush to his school to solve his problems for him. But I later realised it was not possible for me to be constantly doing this. One day, when he came back with another complaint, I told him he would have to deal with his problems himself. Since that day, he has not complained to me. He dealt with all problems at school by himself,” Deepa says. 

Niranjan’s words

“Problems keep coming my way. I have accepted my condition and the complications that come with it. But my parents have equipped me with the skills I need to live a normal life,” says Niranjan. His Kannada is fluent but it takes a little getting used to. It is easier to understand him after a few minutes of conversation.

His early therapy and training made it easy for him to communicate with his classmates. He ended up making friends with almost everyone in his class. In turn they would help him with homework or whenever he had trouble understanding the lessons. “From class 1 to 8, I was in the same school in Mysuru. When I moved to Bengaluru for Class 9 and 10, it took some adjusting,” he says.

A life lesson

One day his mother sat him down and explained to him that insults and prejudices are part of his life because people are insensitive. “She told me I should not let this bother me. That day, I realised that no matter what, I should move past these small problems and live my life to the fullest,” he says.

His hearing loss is increasing as he grows older. “People like me have to
keep changing our hearing aids regularly,” he says. 

His brother, Nikethan, three years older, taught him to play cricket, and things like how to conduct himself at his friends’ birthday parties. Niranjan also rides a bike. “People like you rely on your ears and eyes when you are riding or driving. I only rely on my eyes,” he says.

Niranjan enjoys movies and photography, and has even acted in plays. “I enjoy watching movies but cannot watch them without subtitles. Kannada films are easy to follow, Hollywood films are a bit difficult because they don’t always speak to the camera. Lip reading becomes hard,” he says. Most recently, he has become a fan of animated TV shows. ‘One Piece’, a popular manga series, is his latest obsession. He regularly posts his photographs on his Instagram account. “But I don’t want to become a social media addict,” he says.

It was during the Covid-19 pandemic that he faced a unique challenge. He had enrolled at a college in Suratkal for a BTech degree. But as the classes were entirely online, he had difficulty following the lessons. After struggling at first, he wrote to his professor to request him to switch from Google Meet to Microsoft Teams because the latter had the option of live captions. The professor agreed.

Living alone

But from the second year of college, classes were back offline. He left his family and moved to Suratkal. It was challenging at first. For the first time he had to fend for himself. He learnt how to manage his money, cook, and live alone. He spent two years there and returned to Bengaluru after completing his degree in March. He is looking for a job and has attended some interviews. “But they haven’t hired me because of my condition,” he says.