You are brave. You are strong. And you are, quietly, a role model for many.

Like Meera, who is also healing on her own. Meera has taken a conscious decision towards natural healing; each time she looks within, she mends.

Meera laughs when this slight adaptation of an African lullaby is read out to her on the phone:

Hush, little baby; don’t say a word,
Mumma’s going to buy you a mockingbird.

And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
Dadda’s going to find you a wedding ring.

And if that golden ring turns to brass,
Baby can get herself a looking glass.

‘How slight is this adaptation?’ she asks.

Very slight, baby and daddy are interchangeable for mummy; the irony laced with bitterness would remain intact.

Meera is healing in her own way, through a very quiet if scarring process. And now she is trying to make very sure that her daughter does not need to scar. Meera is an Ahmedabad housewife and recently had to bring up the topic of Child Sexual Abuse with her politician-husband. Her husband was insistent that she let their seven-year-old daughter go for a weekend to their friend’s house in another city.

‘But we don’t know what other kind of people will be there,’ said Meera softly.

‘What do you mean?’ growled the husband.

‘Please humour me,’ she replied, ‘please sit down and listen to what I am saying.’

The husband sat down, lit his cigarette, closed his eyes to humour her.

‘Imagine your little girl watching her favourite cartoon programme on television. A hand gently pats her little thigh. The hand travels, still very gently, to the upper part of her body to check on her development. The hand comes back to her thigh and fingers slowly crawl into her frilly knickers.’

Meera’s husband opened his eyes and looked at her with hostility. ‘What kind of a mother are you to think such things of your daughter? You are disgusting. These things don’t happen in good homes.’

‘Yes,’ said his wife so very quietly that he almost did not hear her. ‘These things do happen in our homes.’

A woman three bungalows down had spoken to Meera of her trauma. Her husband’s male friend had sexually abused their own daughter. They would send their child to play with the daughter of the friend, over to their house, and the man had been using his fingers. He had also exposed himself to the little girl often and tried to get her to hold him as he masturbated. We are playing a game, he kept telling her, Vasco da Gama took off his pyjama and pulled out his banana.

‘Vasco da Gama,’ said the little girl at the dinner table one day and completely out-of-the-blue as the mother served banana custard to their guests as dessert, ‘took off his pyjama and pulled out his banana.’

There was a small silence at the dinner table and then the father asked, very loudly, ‘Who taught you that?’

The child would not answer.