The Room With One Door

"Sixty years later, I still want to clean myself. I wash my hands at least fifty times a day. There is a need in me to rid myself of any smell or contamination, and remain at every moment of the day, clean and pure. I do not allow anyone to sit on my bed, except those I trust and there are very few who have that privilege. Nobody but I, is permitted to touch or wash my clothes. A dog guards my cupboard. He is trained not to bite but only to ward off those approaching it. I have an enormous collection of boxes, two hundred to be exact. They must always be neatly and tightly shut and stored away in a safe place. Whenever I have had sex, I have watched myself from a corner, distant and removed, a woman mechanically going through all the necessary rituals associated with it. I have never enjoyed it or had an orgasm. I do not allow myself to be in a room with one door. Once a long time ago, I made that mistake and paid for it dearly. I do not want to make the same mistake again.

My story unfolds in a traditional, well-to-do Bengali household of the 1930s. It is a story of the proverbial ugly duckling who grew up to be one of the most celebrated and beautiful woman of her times and who was abused when barely six, for four long years by a man, bound by the code of his profession, to be a keeper of law, to protect the weak and the vulnerable."

"The abuse fitted in so perfectly into the routine of our everyday life that it had an almost surreal quality about it. As was the custom of those times, the abuser would place his shoes outside the door and scrub his feet on the mat before entering the room. The twisted irony of that gesture haunts me even today. I remember the deep brown, leather-bound sets of encyclopaedia that lined my father’s study, their golden lettering somehow standing out in the subdued atmosphere of the room. My mind would often be blank, the blankness punctuated by stabs of blinding pain. I do not recall any other sensation in my body. Then the familiar sounds of my father and the servants returning from a shikar and settling on the verandah for tea and sandwiches would drift into the study. It served as a signal for the abuser to leave, and he would do so, going through the ritual of scrubbing his feet. It was disconcerting the way he could greet my parents, his clean-cut open features betraying no sign of the revolting act that he had perpetrated just a moment ago."

Calcutta, Age 67