KOCHI: She was considered beautiful and told that it would be easy for her to find a husband. But, after stepping into the threshold of matrimonial age, she began to realise that nobody wanted to marry her. For, Shameela Ibrahim, a 26-year-old woman from Kothamangalam, who had come to the 11th Disabled Matrimonial Meet on Monday, is considered ‘challenged’ even among her own hearing impaired community as she cannot even speak the sign language.“Most of the men have shied away from marrying Shameela owing to this. Her inability has ostracized her from even her own kind of people. I blame myself for what has been happened to her,” her mother said. It is this desperation that has brought the mother and daughter to the meet in the hope that a loving man would overlook her inabilities and marry her.The family, who has come down for the meet for the second time, says: “ I wish today is that special for my daughter.”Shameela, according to her mother, stopped going to school from fourth standard after taunts from her classmates became too hard to bear. “She used to cry everyday after coming back from school. Seeing her tears, I told her father not to send her to school anymore,” she said. And then, there were hardly any schools at Kothamangalam to cater to the needs of those who needed special education, confining Shameela to the four walls of her home. But, this has helped her in another way. She is able to understand the language that normal folks speak.And, as she sits in the middle of the room shyly throwing glances, she is approached by a man. After the family speaks for some time, he looks at her, smiles and says in sign language “Let me think it through” and then is gone.
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