Bejun Mehta

For someone who would end up singing and for whom language and self-expression would be major themes, I was ironically nonverbal as a baby. I exhibited little interest in speech for most of my first year and a half, and my taciturnity was a subject of some discussion between my parents. Then one day, I suffered quite a fall from my high chair, smacking my head on the kitchen table on the way down. After the crying had subsided, bones were checked, and I was safely reinstated in the chair, my mother recalls that I immediately began speaking in complete, correct sentences. The baby-talk stage was essentially skipped. Apparently, I had been steeping in language and understanding all along, and had just been waiting and observing until I felt I had learned enough to commit to it myself; the blow loosed the floodgates. My mother relates that she and my father looked at each other in amazement at this leap - together, my parents and I were beginning to discover evidence of my accelerated faculties