Perpetual Shadows

It’s interesting how a fine morning suddenly transcends into a day of introspection. I had heard people say that a song can either make you forget everything or make you remember everything. Well, here it was a movie. It’s about a high school boy who battles his inability to make normal relations with people and being unable to “fit in”. This, he finds out stems from a childhood trauma of being sexually abused by a near relative. The movie brought back forcefully suppressed memories from my own past.

I had been a child raised lovingly and protected by her family; but this beautiful landscape of childhood is marred by a particularly painful memory of being sexually abused as a child. What began as innocent hugs and caresses, turned into something so sinister, that it makes my fingers clench and I break out in cold goosebumps.

For the longest time, I held myself somehow responsible for the entire ordeal. Afterall, how would a 7-8 year old draw any sense of what had happened? The false sense of shame heightened my inability and fear of opening up about the abuse to even my closest ones, until now.

Last year, bollywood actress Kalki Koechlin had come out about her abuse and I second her when she says it’s not about gaining sympathy, its about realizing that child abuse in all forms is chillingly real and prevalent to epidemic proportions in India. Today when I read about children and infants being sexually abused, my skin crawls from a relatable ache.

. The Asian centre for Human Rights stated that more than 48,000 child rape cases were recorded from 2001 to 2011 and that India saw an increase of 336% of child rape cases from 2001 (2,113 cases) to 2011 (7,112 cases); experts believe that many more cases go unreported. A government report adds that 53% of children-both boys and girls- are victims of sexual abuse.

These appalling statistics do not just give validity to the issue at hand, but also highlight the gravity of this social evil.

We have to realize that for a child, the experience is a cruel nightmare, except its real. A child doesn’t fully understand the nuances of what is/had been done to her or him, we remember it only as an ‘unpleasant feeling’ until later in life. When the realization of it finally hits, it gets hard to breathe, it becomes hard to live with yourself and everyday becomes a constant struggle to be ‘normal’. The gash splits open time and again; and everytime you have to say ‘I’m fine’ to those around, all you want to do is crawl into nothingness and stay there.

All of this came from my inability to be able to speak to anyone about the trauma then, the lack of understanding of it. It is therefore crucial that parents create a favourable atmosphere in the family for children to be able to freely interact about their bodies, sex and sexuality. Parents need to make their children aware about ‘Good touch’ and ‘Bad touch’; to speak up and to resist and fight back. Most importantly, we need to start heeding our children. Often it happens that we dismiss children’s words as mere stories, they need to be heard; to be taken seriously; else they will not speak for the fear of not being believed.

I tried to speak to people like me, attend talks on how to heal myself, to try and transform my life and my efforts have been quite fruitful. The truth is; the hurt, the pain fade away with time; time does heal all wounds ; but the perpetual shadows it leaves behind stays and we carry it with us, we merely learn to live with it and in certain cases use it to fuel our goals in life; to prove we’re better than our past; and feverently hope that no child goes through that.

The movie ends with a beautiful quote that is going to stay with me all my life, “we can’t choose where we come from; but we can choose where we go from there.”