City of fear: Child abuse has no gender

He was a quiet young man in his late 30s. I met Abhay a few times at his aunt’s house. She happened to be an acquaintance. An unusually reticent man, he usually kept to himself. His countenance intrigued me, and seemed somehow out of place.

“This is sumptuous! What’s the occasion?” I asked his aunt as I polished off the puran polis she offered. “Varun (Abhay’s younger brother) got married,” she said.

“What about Abhay?” “Oh, he has some psychological issues,” she said reluctantly. He was sodomised as a teenager, she later opened up.

The boy was so traumatised that he started questioning his mother about his sexuality. He would turn violent and hysterical and throw and bang things. Broken window panes and damaged furniture became a norm in their household. He would go missing for days and eventually come back on his own. Though academically an above-average student, he dropped out after higher secondary.

Now much calmer, he assisted his parents, both theatre professionals, in their productions as well as in conducting school workshops. But his parents always worried about him, with one of them accompanying him wherever he went. What concerned them was who would care for him once they were gone.

“So as parents, they think he is much better now and are keen to get him married but we have warned them against it. He might not be able to take up a big responsibility such as marriage,” his aunt told me.

A reckless act on the part of a sick mind had driven a bright young person to the verge of a mental breakdown and forced him to live the rest of his life on a psychological edge. As a mother of a young boy myself, I tend to worry to the point of paranoia about his safety.

I shudder to think about the sexual predators lurking in public spaces every time he goes out, and have told him ad nauseam about the dos and don’ts of interacting with strangers and what makes for their appropriate behaviour.

The city of fear knows, for sure, how to keep parents on tenterhooks.

Not to take away from the violence, sexual and otherwise, that girls face every day, everywhere around them, boys are no safer. It all starts at home.

Children model themselves after the adults around them. For those caught in this web of violence, speaking about incest and child abuse is forbidden, if they do speak out, disbelief and shaming follow. That leaves them with no tools to handle and process their experience and thoughts, and they may, in turn, perpetuate it as adults, not knowing any better. The cycle is vicious.