Bitter Chocolate
PINKI VIRANI
Bitter Chocolate
Child Sexual Abuse in India
Contents
About the Author
Author’s Note
Notebook One
Vaishali: Three Months
What is Child Sexual Abuse?
Home as Hell
What the Numbers Reveal
Child Rape
A Mother on the Run
Arun: Ten Years
Boy Versus Girl Victims
Historical Ethics of Child Abuse
Unofficial Secrets
Women as Perpetrators
The Aftermath
Srilakshmi: Eleven Years
Brother Nature
Prema: Seven Years
Child Prostitution
Notebook Two
Daughters & Mothers
Mothers & Men
Notebook Three
Tanuja: Nine Years
What the Law Ignores
Secondary Victimization
Prevention than Cure
Dealing with Disclosure
Child Protection Units
Dimple: Five Years
Dimple’s Brother
Exit Cycle
To the Victim
Healing by Yourself
Siddharth: Twelve Years
Razia: Thirteen Years
Helpbooks
Helplines
Afterword
Acknowledgement
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
BITTER CHOCOLATE
Pinki Virani, with four best-selling books, has a body of work which gives voice to individuals who have none. It also leads to landmark legislation, not just once but twice. Her tireless campaigning for human dignity has lead to laws for two of the most vulnerable times in a human being’s life—in the beginning as a child and at the end as a terminally ill patient.
Her sustained crusading since 2000 has assisted in India passing a law against sexual abuse of children, The Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act 2012. The law includes four of her suggestions to the Parliamentary Standing Committee. This book, Bitter Chocolate, has been quoted by the Madras High Court. Since the book’s release, there have been attempts by some courts across the country to follow a few practises recommended in Bitter Chocolate to protect the child, during trial, from his or her perpetrator and from excessive re-traumatisation.
In 2011, the Supreme Court of India passed a historic judgment permitting Passive Euthanasia in the country. This followed Pinki Virani’s plea to the highest court in 2009. It’s a landmark law which places the power of choice in the hands of the individual, over government, medical or religious control which sees all suffering as ‘destiny’.
Aruna’s Story (first published by Penguin in 1998) is the book with which the author catalysed the law on Passive Euthanasia. It continues to be read by a cross-section of society: the medical community worldwide, right to die with dignity believers, human rights activists and gender-study students. As a first in Indian publishing in the non-fiction genre, it set a trend for journalists to follow in writing books. A leading critic described it as ‘India’s answer to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood’. A noted financial newspaper said the path-breaking book—which introduced the faction style (facts presented in fiction format with underpinnings firmly in non-fiction) in the sub-continent—had ‘changed the face of Indian writing for all time’.
Once Was Bombay (1999) is reference material for sociology specialists and was cited by then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in his speech on collapsing cities. Once Was Bombay, referred to as a ‘cult book’ on social networking sites, is one of the first books in English publishing to present the city in a non-romanticized, frills-shorn narrative in the faction genre. The template of Once Was Bombay—the vicious pillage of a city’s cosmopolitanism by provincial politicians in the name of language, then religion—has proved particularly prescient.
Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India (2000)—which ensures inclusion of hitherto un-researched boy-children—earned the author international plaudit for being the first in the Indian subcontinent to courageously speak up as a victim of incest. For Bitter Chocolate, Pinki Virani has been honoured with a National Award by the Government of India.
Deaf Heaven (2009), her first work of fiction, was listed among international contenders for the Impac Dublin Literary Prize. This novel has earned her praise as a writer who is willing to take literary risks. Deaf Heaven subverts form and structure to experiment with a deceptively simple narrative underlining an urgent perspective on contemporary India, its internal terrorism and the superficiality of contemporary politics pushing the nation at tipping point into modern-day fascism. Critics called it ‘a truly Indic work’, a national newsweekly magazine placed it among ten best books of the year. Eminent litterateur Khushwant Singh praised the style of story-telling as ‘ingenuous’ and described Deaf Heaven as ‘profound and profane, all at once’.
She is currently working on her fifth book, Bloody Hell, a literary diptych to Deaf Heaven which can also be read as a standalone book.
Born 1959, in a Dongri-chawl (ghettoized area in one of south Bombay’s seven original islands), Pinki Virani began working as a typist at the age of eighteen. In journalism, she began as a cub-reporter for a newspaper and is India’s first woman editor of an eveninger. She is married to veteran journalist and public intellectual Shankkar Aiyar and divides her time between Delhi, Bombay, Pune.
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
You have looked at the cover of this book, you have looked at its back cover and the question you might want to ask of me is this:
Have you been sexually abused in your childhood?
I shall be as direct:
Yes.
I could tell you, at this point, about the mostly mystical marrying of an Author with her, or his, subject matter. I could then explain how it is me who has wound up doing this book instead of someone else. I would not be lying as I lay out my procession of thought before you to consider. My first book, Aruna’s Story, is about the politics of rape and the rape of women; Penguin publisher David Davidar read my newspaper article on the nurse Aruna Shanbaug’s fiftieth birthday while she lay in a semi-coma, a quarter of a century after she had been raped, and asked me to develop it into a book. My second book, Once Was Bombay, is about the communal politics in what was once India’s premier city and the gang rape of it by politicians. This book is about the rape of an entire childhood, of scores of innocently unsuspecting children in the upper and middle-class homes of India.
But I would also be truthful when I say this: I have no compulsion to tell the world about the sexual abuse in my childhood.
I refuse to be a victim.
This, I have attempted in all spheres of my life; each time one falls down one must simply pick up oneself after weeping a bit, brush away the tears and dirt and move on.
That’s the spirit.
The flesh, though, responds to its body’s nervous system: the nervous system and its intricate, treacherous circuitry.
Which begins sending out signals the moment a man, or a woman, sexually abuses a child.
I had, and still have, to deal with my—I hate the use of the personal pronoun in this context—abuser. And it is only now, after the detailing for this book, that I realize—and recollect—why I have so many marks on my legs, between the knees and calves, where they could be seen when I wore dresses and skirts. Instead of going to a beauty parlour where hot wax could be poured over my legs and the hair yanked out by their root, I declared it to be a detestable process and instead would shave my legs. I began doing this early in age, as prominently as possible at home, and as I would shave I would cut my legs. Strips of skin would shave off too, one gash went rather neatly almost to the bone; blood, lots of it, on the floor. When I would be forced to wax instead, I would develop red skin rashes and allergies on my legs so that I could keep shaving. As I shaved, I nicked, wounded, profusely scarred. I was hurting myself because my pain was not being validated, that I could not bear to have that man around me.
In 1999, too, I childishly thought my spirit and will would be victorious again.
For my second book Once Was Bombay, it was decided that if I could literally rise to the idea, the presentation would be a previously untried one in faction (facts written in story-telling style). A blend of short stories and novellas which would be connected and yet be able to stand alone as individual pieces of oral history. David Davidar added that he was very keen that one of these novellas deal with the life of a middle-class man, born and brought up in what was then Bombay, preferably Muslim, who was attacked by the rioters after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The key element in this novella, he felt, would be the slow but obvious ‘falling down’ of the area in which this man lived: symbolic of what was happening to the middle class and their city.
‘What about your father?’ he asked.
‘Can’t write about me,’ I protested.
‘It is not about you,’ replied David Davidar, quite brutally I thought. ‘It is about your father, the changing times and city through his eyes.’
My father. Who has known about my sexual abuser and never once told this man off. My father. Who actually holds this man the way his mother did: in thrall.
But this was not about me, it was about my father and his feelings.
I spent several hours and days with my father, questioning and cross-questioning him. I went to his shop and sat there for what appeared like forever to understand his actions and reactions. We must have made for some sight in the middle of Mumbaii’s Bhendi Bazaar: the shopkeeper and his daughter.
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?
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.