Veehangi SinghGuest Author My mornings don’t start before 9 AM unless they absolutely need to. One of the many reasons why I prefer to sleep in later than most people is because of how long my days feel if I don’t. I have been on the road for 4 hours now, and it feels like half the day’s already passed us by. ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Bessel Van Der Kolk is my most recent read and an essential on a 10-hour-long ride into the hills. I read two paragraphs out of his chapter on ‘Developmental Trauma: The Hidden Epidemic’, before forcing myself to stop, in an urge to prevent the motion sickness of the bumpy ride from reaching my throat. As I look out the window, in a mere attempt to distract myself from nausea, my mind goes back to this one line in the book: ‘Most of the public only knows them as statistics’. They are hundreds and thousands in number, absorb enormous resources , often without much benefit. Who is Prof Van Der Kolk talking about? Who is someone who takes up an array of professionals to keep themselves fully functioning? I never liked riddles either. Let me make it easier to navigate around answering this one. Excited about making my mark in the field of psychology, an excited 18-year-old Veehangi, during her first year of college, took up an internship in Bangalore. I remember staying up all night, hours before my flight out of sheer excitement about my first ever internship. Looking back, to this day, I often wonder if it’s a sad ordeal—the process of finding happiness in others misery. For as long as I can remember, I have found excitement in reading about cases where the mind acts as a protector against something a body cannot deal with, cases were a person’s entire life is reduced to a set of adjectives and a provisional diagnosis. While psychologists are expected to be more human than most people, often the process of becoming one can be dehumanizing. It can steal us of the ability to look beyond a person’s demographics. Exhausted and sleep-deprived, I landed in Bangalore. After an hour of car ride to our location, I spotted a colourful multi-storey house at a distance. As I made my way past a small iron gateway, I looked up before stepping in, to get a view of the number of floors in the building. Dragging the suitcase with one hand, I made my way into what looked like a partially furnished hall. Two girls, between the ages of 4-6 years ran past me in a hurry. They were giggling under their breaths and pacing unusually fast on the stairs attached to the hall. I felt a tap on my shoulder. A beautiful, innocent-faced girl of seventeen stared back at me, and nodded towards my luggage, asking if she could help me out with it. They all seemed ‘normal’. The 18-year-old Veehangi didn’t know better. She thought if they didn’t look like ‘it’, it probably wasn’t as bad as she had imagined. But only, it was worse. The girl led the way, intentionally missing a few stairs, as the payal (anklet) on her feet made a sound with each step she took. As we took the final step on that awfully steep staircase, we stepped out into a long and broad terrace. Groups of girls were seated on a carpet, scattered around the terrace, they all looked engrossed in the notebooks that lay out in front of them. At a distance from the rest, sat a young girl of six. She was small, dressed in a floral dress and a rosy hairband. She would gently brush the hair out of her face as they would fall on the paper she was drawing in. I asked her what she’d made in her notebook. She continued to look down at her drawing, carelessly colouring out of the lines, she mumbled something in either Kannada or Tamil and I pretended to understand. I looked around to find her mother, but couldn’t spot anyone older than seventeen on that terrace. I nudged her playfully, and asked, ‘Amma?’ She looked up from that sheet of paper and stared at me blankly. Assuming it to be a language miscommunication, I didn’t inquire it any further. She was six. It didn’t cross my mind for a single second that maybe that blank stare meant “I don’t know who my mother is. I haven’t seen her since she put me away because she couldn’t protect me from them. Wearing a Nazaar bracelet on my wrist, and she still couldn’t protect me from the evil eyes of the world. From the evil eyes of men.” This is what denial does. It sat right in front of me, all along. Yet I chose to look away. Much like the rest of the world does. She was right there, sitting in a group of girls who looked nothing like her, but were more family than blood defines in their community. They didn’t share the blood that ran in their veins, but they shared something far more binding. Abusive men. Sitting on a terrace of a building that was a shelter for run-away girls who had been sexually abused and yet somehow, my mind convinced me to believe that there is no way a 6-year-old is on this terrace because she belongs here—that humanity had not fallen to a level where a 6-year-old girl was in a shelter for the abused. So who was Bessel Van Der Kolk talking about in his book? Hundreds and thousands of girls who we know merely as statistics. They take up an array of professionals to keep themselves sane: Mental health professionals, police officers, welfare workers and judges make the childhood of a 6-year-old girl and the childhood of millions around the world. They are the victims of sexual abuse. We use these women to further our knowledge in scientific research—perform millions of tests, psychological evaluations, hunt down their family members to fill the gaps in their medical history but we never really stop and ask them how they feel. How does a 9-year-old feel when she stands in court, with their abusers sitting only inches away? How does it feel to prove your truth in a country that will expose a child to relive the nightmare of having her hands tied down and her mouth shut tight, all so they can have a ‘fair’ trial? ‘Fair’ for these girls would’ve been having policies that protects them against these monsters. ‘Fair’ would’ve been the ability to have a normal childhood like the rest of them—where you push and shove each other around playfully, instead of getting startled and defensive every time someone so much as touches you. Fair would’ve been having a parent to rely on to protect you. Nothing about their lives was fair. As my naïve attempt at categorizing them failed miserably, I decided to be a friend. I decided to put aside my diary of notes and adjectives in mind—to simply spend time with them. That was my first ever lesson in psychology and one no university will teach you. Be a friend. Remember the kind, innocent and beautiful girl of seventeen? She and I had come to become great friends over those ten days. I would teach her basic French words and she would teach my basic Kannada sentences. One of those days, she grabbed my hand and led the way into her room. I sat adjacent to her on her bunk bed as she began to scavenge through her box of collectables. She pulled out a thin, lined notebook out of the lot and stared at it for what felt like, a very long time. Shuffling aggressively through the pages of the notebook, she stopped midway. This one, was a harder stare than the last. The longer she looked at that page, the heavier her breath grew. I couldn’t understand what was causing her so much anxiety to look at, it was merely a drawing. A poorly scribbled drawing of a man. His face was unclear because of endless aggressive scribbles over it. I could tell from whatever space was left untouched that he had a moustache. Barely any hair, strands of it. Unusually large and poorly constructed ears. A single dot for a nose. But one thing that stood out the most, and was perhaps the most human-like feature was the smile. You could tell from one glance that this man, whoever it was, had horrible tobacco-stained teeth. But the smile wasn’t one that was welcoming. It was a clever, sarcastic grin. I could almost hear it say ‘Gotcha!’. As I began to grow restless over her silence, I asked her to explain if I was missing a piece of the puzzle. I wasn’t missing a piece of the puzzle. I was forcing two wrong pieces together, ones that obviously didn’t belong together. It was him. The man with the scribbled face. The man who had so many holes forced against his face with a bare pen that they made a hole through the pages that followed. The man with the grin who wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done. ‘What did he do. Who is he?’ She began to describe what continues to remain one of the most horrifying stories I have heard. When she was fourteen, her father had sent her away to work in the city under a family. She was the ‘collateral’ he owed them for the money he had failed to return. Serving as a housekeeper, she would scrub their floors and wash their clothes. In return, she would have a roof over her head and food in her stomach. They would beat her and yell racial slurs once in a while, it wasn’t something she couldn’t deal with, so she knew better than to complain. Until one day. The man in the house was unemployed and his wife would work everyday from 10 AM to 6 PM. One morning, she recalled waking up, startled from a thrashing sound and angry words. Just as she made her way to the door of the closed room to understand what the fuss was about, the lady of the house stormed out of the room and left for work angrily. She could see the man sitting with his hands against his head on the sofa. She explained to me in discrete details the happenings of the day, as if she were reliving it with every word she spoke. As she took a glass of morning tea for him, he grabbed her hand and squeezed it so tightly, that the cup lost grip and slipped out of her hand. The warm tea splattered by his feet. Startled, he started yelling about punishing her for her mistake. He promised her a lesson she would never forget. As she didn’t. He took her by her hand to the washroom and locked the door behind him. That’s it. She looked into the void as she told me in detail what happened next and each day from that day moving forward. She had lived in constant agony until one day she packed up her two pairs of clothes and ran away. The constant pain between her legs wasn’t worth her father’s promise to that man. That was when they’d found her. That’s when she ended up in a shelter for girls like her. Girls who grew up long before they should’ve. It happened three years ago, but a part of her was still stuck in that bathroom. Every time she would enter the courtroom, the tiles underneath her feet would turn white, the rest of the room would fade away into a faint yellow and the walls would feel like they were closing in on her. The only other person in that room with her was the man with the wide smile and the tobacco-stained teeth. The safety of the welfare officer beside her would melt away and the policemen standing by the man would disappear and she would be in that washroom all over again. Alone and cold. A huge part of all the girls in that shelter was still stuck in a bus, in a closet, in a relative’s house, in a park, and the list could go on. While the rest of the world views these girls as mere demographics or even a name on a case in a courtroom, they find their justice in stabbing a scribbled man’s hands, his eyes and every part of his body that ever touched theirs. It was the only version of these men she was strong enough to fight, by herself. So as that man walks freely on the streets, viewing the world with the same set of eyes with which he once viewed a helpless girl’s face, listening to the sound of traffic with the ears he once heard mumbled cries of help, there is a 17-year-old girl still stuck in that washroom banging on the door of a house that no one lives in. Veehangi Singh, on her path to be a developmental psychologist, documents her experiences on her blog. She is a Guest Author at Rightantra.
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