Like A Second Skin

"Seedy hotels. Semen stained bed-sheets. Sex kits. Furtive one-night stands. Deception, lies and humiliation. When I think about my abuse and how much it has affected my life, this is what I think of.

I’m not sure if this is a good way to begin my story. I already feel dangerously on the edge of a whirlpool. I’m sure to get sucked in, not be able to extricate myself, drown. But how can I not say this? This was me, this was what a great part of my life was like, a part that not many know about. And it’s a story that’s been waiting, perhaps all these years, to be told like this. So listen. Walk with me through a maze of horror and sleaze with all its twisted alleys of shame, pain, sorrow and compassion.

I believe a woman's sexuality is severely affected by sexual abuse in childhood. She can either avoid sex or be addicted to it. I sought out sex. In the self-destructive way only women survivors of incest can, in their desperate, terrible attempts to be loved, to seek a sense of self, to regain their lost power. "

"My uncle began to abuse me when I was about six. He taught me by his terrible acts that sex was furtive, it took place behind closed bathroom and dressing room doors in a quick, shifty manner with eyes that didn’t look beyond one’s own pleasure–the man’s pleasure. I remember going past his room with my heart thumping, knowing I would be called any moment and that I would have to obey because I had been taught to obey elders. I recall my fear, the knot in my stomach, the holding of my breath in hopeless attempts to somehow not be heard as I passed by, then the inevitable sound of that voice that called my name and sealed my fate for the next few, endless minutes.

Even today when my uncle takes my name—though not with the intent to abuse me any more—I can feel the palm of my hand tingle at the memory of semen being ejaculated in it and I instinctively rub it against myself as if to get off the stains. Then, I was only six and already steeped in shame, humiliation and self-doubt, silenced effectively, my destiny shaped by what I had to see and do. "

"... Because recovery can never depend on how others respond to a situation, it depends on us and how we learn to conduct ourselves in it. That is its beauty and its flip side. To keep the power of change in your own hands also means to have to decide when to let go. It is not easy.But it is perhaps the joy of discovery that kept me going. It was the light at the end of the tunnel, it was somewhere the kindling of a faith in myself to be able to do it, no matter how impossibly buried this faith appeared to be under years of self-flagellation. Despite all the pain, I have no regrets. How can I? For me the process has been what I could only call a transformation, of becoming what I never thought I could be, of doing things I had never even dreamt of doing, of being able to dream as I had never known how to, of feeling the warmth of sheer wonder as I slowly find myself shaking off the burdens I carried all my life of what I am not and what I can’t do."

Mumbai, Age 39