Most times I did not like what I heard about myself and how he saw me, often I resented his problematic patriarchy and his world view. But something else was emerging, as a writer this was an exciting realization.

August 1999. Here I am reading the reviews of Once Was Bombay. The reviews are polarized, like my city and my country. The book holds steady on the national best-seller lists. The letters I receive, the phone calls, most of the reviews, refer to the section called Mazagon, Bombay-10, as being written ‘brilliantly’, ‘humanely’, ‘effectively, through the eyes of the middle-class businessman’. I close my eyes and send up a prayer, thank you God for not allowing the child in me who feels betrayed to surface, thank you for bringing out only the hard-core journalist in me. I have succeeded in seeing, compassionately understanding, and reporting on how my father sees life. And me, as part of his environment and upbringing and beliefs. I realize I have performed convincingly in a perverse way as well: an old friend read the novella and said I had been very harsh on myself.

Just two days before I sat down to write the section called Mazagon, Bombay-10, there was complete emotional chaos; I am not sure whether it was connected or a terrible coincidence. The nervous system and its intricate, treacherous circuitry, who can tell? To me it was a volcanic explosion from within and I could feel the lava bubbling up in me, spewing out and coursing down hotly over my body.

Eventually, there was ash and calm.

Resolution. Of some sort; I can, since, see my father differently. I have known of him as that silent young boy yanked out of school and sent to work in an ink-smeared, cauldron-like manual printing press while the elders of his family drank, and destroyed what might have been my father’s better future. I have always appreciated that my father, who despite the awful failings of his family and the enormous disadvantages his father heaped upon him, rose above it all to ensure with his wife that their daughters got an education which professionally qualified them for a far secure future than he could have ever imagined for himself. I can now go beyond gratitude.

‘I am okay now,’ I told my friend Anita who is passionately involved in the book trade; we were talking about how a comprehensive book on Child Sexual Abuse in India was needed. ‘So it won’t be me doing that book, that’s for sure. Besides, what has been done to other kids is so bad, I have been lucky in comparison.’

She said three words, she said them calmly, ‘Do not minimize.’

Now I have one more truth to tell you, dear reader: I wish I was not the one doing this book.

It has cost me, it has cost me the earth.

I cannot remember when my sexual abuse began; I cannot recall, no matter how hard I try, whether my recollection of the first time it happened is actually the first time it happened. Was it happening before and for some reason I have blocked it out? I know this is not important, but it destroys me each time I have had to deal with it while doing this book: where was everybody when it was happening; damn them, shouldn’t somebody from the family have been there to stop it?