Damn it, so much power abused, so much trust betrayed, where are the parents of these children? The politics of domination, the vulnerability of a woman, the girl’s very gender being a liability to herself as a human being: damn, damn, damn, a young woman can never really say what she wants to, wear what she wants to, go where she pleases; she cannot feel complete freedom because she is always, always in sexual threat. And these little boys who are being sexually abused by the males in their own homes; why are protectors turning predators?

The man who sexually abused me in my childhood now lives in an upmarket area of South Mumbaii, he and his wife have a child and they lead an upmarket life. I feel worried as I write this—would I be hurting his daughter with this disclosure? My stomach clenches; I hope not. And his wife whom I like as a determined woman? I hope to God not.

An acquaintance who heard from the literary grapevine that I was doing this book, phoned to cross-check. She presumed that the book was all, and only, about me. ‘Oh,’ she trilled, ‘it must have happened in your Dongri days. Well you must feel all right since you have left it, and him, behind you.’

‘Dongri may be downmarket and undoubtedly children are being sexually abused in Dongri as they are anywhere else, but it did not happen during my Dongri days. Incidentally, the man lives in your neighbourhood now, just a few buildings away.’

The acquaintance has not phoned since; we do this a lot, we like to think that people who sexually abuse children cannot possibly be People Like Us. And if they are rich and famous, we simply close our eyes to their reported perversities. We think they ‘do it only once’; sexual abusers are multiple abusers, the same child often, other children at the same time or subsequently. Like the singer Michael Jackson. We also thought nothing of the film-maker Woody Allen taking pictures of his stepdaughter in the nude and having sexual intercourse with her. The children of single mothers are constantly being hit upon by sexual assaulters, most of these perpetrators are the single mother’s man-friends or subsequent husbands, when not the elderly neighbourhood uncle. This is being proved again and again with cases all over the world as also in India.

I recall the time I was joint editor of Stardust, learning production and being helpful with rewrites and interviews until Nari Hira, Magna Publishing chief, could give the green signal on the city magazine we subsequently launched. I edited a story of a big star sexually molesting a sixteen-year-old on his sets in full view of the unit and the girl’s mother. During an intimate scene he said loudly, ‘Naariyal phod du kya?’ (‘Should I go ahead and perform the “auspicious” ceremony?’) The widowed mother of this girl was hysterical with rage and frustration, she went on record with her quotes. The story created some commotion though most refused to believe it, the girl and her mother were hounded out of the Hindi film industry, the male star went on as before.