But I am steeling myself for any kind of backlash—the unbridled power we accord to patriarchy in India comes with its own manipulative mechanism.

And I am taking enormous courage for this book from my husband Shankkar Aiyar, my fellow journalist, my good friend—he hugged me tight when I first told him. My fingernails cut into my palm in shame as I told him. But I felt no guilt, I have never seen what was done to me as my fault. He was at Cambridge when I had my little, late-at-night emotional crisis in 1999. I phoned a psychiatrist friend who could not correctly help me; my mistake, he believes in strong medication, besides Child Sexual Abuse is a subject which his mind just switches off from, so appalling does he find it.

I disconnected and dialled my husband at Cambridge: international phone calls and e-mails can go a much longer way than the original inventors ever thought. Shankkar continues to hold me tight, he never lets me go: the best friend a woman can have is her husband if he is a good—real—man. Let me not give you an incorrect impression: we have had our upheavals, far too many of them; we did not even have that sparkling swirl a courtship should, since professional and financial questions quickly hung heavy over our joint future. We still, to this day, have to work very hard on our emotional partnership; this might also be because there is no third person in our house. Not that having a child cements marriages anymore, if we go by the numbers coming unglued. Meanwhile, relatives and acquaintances—who clearly see their own children as bonded labour or slaves for a lifetime—want to know who will ‘look after’ us in our old age since we do not have children.

It is because of my husband, and without his knowledge, that I have been through two intense, and terribly expensive, psychiatric sessions. One of the long-term effects of Child Sexual Abuse is fertility control. What I needed to understand from both these psychiatrists—one man, one woman—were two things: was my childhood abuse stopping me from wanting a child; was I solely, and slyly, responsible for the decision my husband and I had taken not to have children? I am so relieved to write that our decision has been ours, and most important, it has been of our free will. Shankkar now says he could have told me that and at no cost, that he is ‘almost grateful’ for ‘one of our better joint decisions’.

I too knew it, the background I come from has helped me acquire a handy crap-cutter which I have carefully built into my system; I use this on myself and my environment. I knew it anyway since before I met my husband, I was planning on being a surrogate mother for a friend. But the research on this book gave rise to my own demons and they needed to be first fed, before they could be fully and finally slaughtered. Both psychiatrists have given me diagnoses independent of each other: fertility control is not among the after-effects of the sexual abuse in my childhood. I displayed short-term effects and still have some long-term effects of Child Sexual Abuse. There are other points which make me cringe with embarrassment on earlier behaviour: some destructive friendships and relationships, other stuff.