‘Daddy!’

Srilakshmi

This is so very clear to me because it was my eleventh birthday. I wore a green and gold paavadai, the silk long skirt and blouse, lots of flowers in my hair, amma tried to put lipstick for me but I did not like it so I wiped it off. I danced around the house. In the night I was so tired that I curled up against my anna and went to sleep. I think he, my brother, was around seventeen at that time. I woke in the middle of the night because I felt his hand in between my legs.

‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ He asked and yet told me, ‘It feels good, doesn’t it?’

I could not say no, I said yes. I began enjoying it too as I let my anna masturbate me, and I stroked him till he came. I was very happy but then he left for higher studies in America. Perhaps my mamas, my mother’s two brothers, had discussed this with my anna, otherwise how would they know? Whenever I went to their house, my mamas would take turns to masturbate me, sometimes all of us did things with each other. But I did not mind their loving me together. Often I would be raw from so much rubbing because when I could not go to my mamas’ house I would do it to myself.

I did not like it when old men tried to touch me. Once my appa’s friend, a judge, came home to stay with us for a few days from Trivandrum. After dinner in the night, my amma sent me to his room with drinking water for the night and he said, ‘Come here.’ I went to him and he hugged and kissed me but I pushed him away when he put his tongue in my mouth.

They got me married in a big hurry when I was nineteen, my anna and my mamas were all there at my wedding, pretending as though nothing had ever happened. Perhaps they all knew that I had been caught in the act of masturbation with our car’s driver and both of us were enjoying it so much. My husband is a straight in-out person, over in a minute, not interested in sex although I have tried quite hard to get him interested in these two years that we have been married. I feel unfulfilled and I masturbate but it is not enough any more.

Brother Nature

Dr Sujit Ghosh of Calcutta has dealt with a case which has registered deeply on his professional understanding of Child Sexual Abuse in the Indian context. It is, like Srilakshmi’s, a case of incest.

Srilakshmi’s is a case of multiple incest. Brother-sex. Then, maternal uncles’ gang-sex. But polite society will describe what has been done to Srilakshmi as, simply, incest.

Incest. Such a sanitized word. Perhaps that is why they chose the word so that other than the victim everyone could relate to it sympathetically, in an oh-so civilized manner. Srilakshmi does not know the word incest, when she is asked to reply in one sentence what happened to her, she says, ‘My anna and mamas played with me everywhere and put their fingers in me, I also played with them.’ That is not incest, more so since the definition of incest does not even begin to understand what close male relatives can sexually do to little girls and boys.