Trigger warning: This article contains details about sexual assault and harassment which may be triggering to survivors.
“You didn’t protect me from your sick society. Both of you failed me.”
I yelled that line while on the phone with my mother and hung up soon after. Before I knew it, I was sobbing and shivering uncontrollably. I hoped my mother would call me back, but she didn’t.
Talking about sexual abuse you went through as a child with your parents is not easy. I procrastinated on talking about it until few years ago when circumstances forced me to acknowledge the abuse. I thought that by not telling them, I was protecting them from the guilt and pain they would go through after knowing what their child went through right under their noses.
However, that was only partly true. I was also shielding myself from the ‘how’, ‘when’ and ‘why’.
How do you tell the story of your abuse? Where do you start? More importantly, where do you end? And without a possible beginning and ending, how is a story even possible? Do I tell them about the multiple men and incidents with everything that happened in chronological order, or do I just summarise it into something compact and pretty that it doesn’t even look like abuse? Should I include the painful recovery filled with sleepless anxious nights that still visit uninvited?
Am I telling a story of a girl who is victim or a story of a woman who is a fighter? My story resides somewhere between these million unanswered questions.
“Mom, Dad, I was abused as a child.”
I started with a stone cold face when I finally uttered the words. Their obvious questions were about who abused me and why I didn’t tell them. I ignored the latter and took one name out of the three men who sexually abused me at the different ages of my childhood in varying degrees.
An awkward silence ensued in the room for what seemed like eternity, but I ended it with, “You don’t have to feel guilty because it is not your fault.”
With those words, I walked off and wasn’t followed by any of parents. We all needed time and space to acknowledge the truth of the moment.
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I have vague memories of when ‘it’ happened the ‘first’ time. I must have been four or five. My mother had sent me to buy some groceries to a shop nearby. After finding the shop closed, I wandered off further to find a shop that was open. The man behind the counter asked me what I wanted and invited me inside. I went in and he picked me up in his arms.
Moments later, I was behind a rack with his hands inside my knickers. I started crying and shat in my knickers. He quickly pulled his hands out and allowed me to leave his shop. I went straight to the bathroom after going home and didn’t come out for a long time.
A few years later, a distant cousin of my father came to live with us. He was supposedly renting a room on the first floor in our house. The first floor of the house had two rooms with a terrace where I would often go to day dream, star gaze or play. He started inviting me to his room and we would talk for hours. He told my parents that I was way ahead of my years and would become someone very important.
I enjoyed the attention and started seeking his company. “Come sit on my lap,” he told me one evening when I was telling him about school. We were sitting in his room and the door was loosely shut. I ignored his request and continued to talk. He kept asking me to sit on his lap but I was unfazed by his demands.
After few minutes, he stood up to sit closer to me.
“My stomach is aching. Will you rub it?” He soon took my hand in his hand and placed it on his stomach. Within a few seconds, my hands were on his penis where he claimed to have ache. I don’t remember for how long it lasted – a few seconds, minutes or hours? There are moments that teach you how time can’t be measured in units of seconds, minutes, hours or even days. I am unable to remember how many times this happened. Sometimes I tell myself that it didn’t happen at all.
This cousin left my house after a few months – only to return to live in my neighbourhood a few years later. He was now married and had two kids. I was a teenager now. He was still very charming and would visit my house with his two kids. I started suspecting my memory of what he did to me years ago. Did I imagine all of it? His reappearance brought back flashes of those episode (or episodes) I thought I had hidden away safely. It started with sleeplessness which turned into insomnia that lasted for almost five years.
Also read: Child Sexual Abuse: ‘You Can’t Hide From Me’
While I was trying to cope with the realisation of having been sexually abused, he tried to assault me again. I was coming back from a school trip late in the evening and had asked my father to pick me up from the school. I don’t remember why, but ‘he’ came to pick me up instead of my father. I sat in his car without fear and started telling him excitedly about the trip. He was listening and would interject animatedly. I had forgotten everything about what he had done to me years ago. Maybe it was all a bad dream.
As we got closer to my house, he turned the car in the opposite direction – towards a secluded road that seldom had any traffic. He pulled over and began fondling my hands and before I realised it, he was on top of me.
I screamed, but he gave me a baffled look and began telling me that it was ‘okay’ to have a little fun sometimes and that he was ‘so much in love’ with me. As he was talking, I noticed that his phone was lying on the dashboard and before he could move, I grabbed the phone and dialled my mother’s phone number but stopped before pressing the call button.
“Take me home right now or I will call my mother and tell her everything,” I said. He looked hurt like I had just broken his heart into a million pieces. He dropped me home and I vowed never to see his face again.
That night I could not fall asleep. “Did I lead him on?” I asked myself. All the memories that I had brushed away under the carpet of ‘bad dreams’ came flooding back. Why me? I asked, but that was a rhetorical question – as I would learn later. I walked to my parents room and crawled into their bed. My father asked, “What happened?”
“Nothing. I could not sleep.”
The words that were lingering on my lips deceived me now. It was too late for this conversation. I would tell them tomorrow.
But that tomorrow never came for many years and when it finally did, it was too late. Between the shopkeeper and the cousin was another neighbour – who was perhaps no more than 15 or 16, who should technically qualify as my first kiss. But instead of making my heart flutter with excitement, it made my skin crawl with shame and fear.
Even though I talk about everything under the sun with my parents, we all freeze whenever there is even a slightest mention of child sexual abuse. We have finally acknowledged that it has happened, but we don’t know what to do with that acknowledgement. I see the struggle in their eyes to ask more questions, but they are scared of discovering what exactly lies between the folds of what we label ‘abuse’.
The last time when we tried having a conversation about ‘what exactly happened’, I started and ended my story with the incident with the cousin in the car. It made me look like a fighter – like I was in control – like even in this story of abuse I wanted my parents to be proud of me.
Maybe a few years later, when memory will loosen its noose around my neck, I will tell them ‘everything’. Till then we can both pretend to know and not know it all.
Bhawna Jaimini is an architect and activist in making. She works closely with the residents of one of the most marginalised neighbourhoods to improve their built environment.
Featured image credit: Dmity Ratushny/Unsplash