‘Your ammee did not show it to me.’

‘Where is it ammee, I want to show it to abba.’

‘Later, later, child, let him have his lunch in peace. As it is he gets only one day of rest on Sundays at home and God knows there has been enough tension in the house lately.’

During dusk, Razia approaches her father, ‘Abba, did you see my painting?’

‘No.’

‘Can I show it to you now?’

‘Oh, all right.’ He is feeling expansive.

Razia’s abba holds the large white sheet with both his hands and stares at it.

‘What is it, beta, I cannot understand what you have drawn. Surely it would make more sense for you to draw landscapes, or people, and show us your talent?’

‘But it is people I have drawn.’

‘It is? I cannot see them, beta.’

‘Can I explain my painting to you?’

‘Okay, but don’t take too long, I have to watch the news on television in another five minutes.’

‘Painting-teacher said to draw any scene from real-life which has people in it. So I drew from the Hindi picture ammee and I saw long time back in the theatre. The hero marries the heroine because another man has spoilt her. This is their wedding scene, and this is my sister with her husband and they are clapping for the hero and heroine but I am not there.’

‘Hush, what are you saying?’ hisses Razia’s ammee.

‘Do you like it abba?’ asks Razia, she has not even heard her mother.

‘Yes, yes, it is very nice. Next time you must do a landscape. Now go to bed.’

Five months later Razia commits suicide. She throws herself from the top of a neighbouring tall building. She lands with hardly a sound among people going about their business on the road. The post-mortem reveals a three-month old foetus in her broken body.

Children can have two kinds of deaths.

The real one.

And the one later, when they grow up, which people see.

Helpbooks

• Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. HarperCollins, 1994.

The authors weave personal experience with professional knowledge to show the reader how she can come to terms with her past while moving powerfully into the future.

• Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton. I Never Told Anyone. Harper & Row, 1983.

Writings by women survivors of Child Sexual Abuse.

• Alice Miller. Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.

Society’s betrayal of the child.

• Sandra Butler. Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest. Bantam, 1985.

Feminist analysis of Child Sexual Abuse.

• John Crewsdon. By Silence Betrayed: Sexual Abuse of Children in America. Little Brown, 1988.

An award-winning journalist’s look at Child Sexual Abuse in America.

• Beatrix Campbell. Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse and the Cleveland Case. Virago Press, London, 1988.

A British journalist’s examination of the 165 cases of Child Sexual Abuse which were diagnosed in the first half of 1987 in Cleveland, Great Britain.