The third word is "justice".

Picture this:
JUSTICE FOR (insert your child's name here).

And then pray, pray, pray.
Because you never know.

Your god might be busy with something else
when your child needs him most.

Pray for street lights, or sanctuary,
or even for some serendipity.

But don't ask for justice,
because justice was just
a meaningless word
for that other child.

An awarding of that which is due.
That's what the dictionary said.

What is that to a dead child?
To the woman she will never grow up to be?

Justice can't restore the dead,
or return the lost years.

Justice is just for us,
the spectators, the survivors.

Justice makes us feel a bit better
about still being alive.

It can't reach down into the grave
and delight the broken little body lying there.

By Nazu Tonse

The second word is "outrage".

I meant to come, dressed in black, and stand at your side.

But then I remembered the last time, and the outpouring of anguish and rage, followed by .. nothing until the next time .. and I wondered if these protests are anything more than a Festival of Grief that revisits the nation every so often. Like sparklers, this outrage burns so bright, it makes hearts leap for a while with hope. But then it fizzles out, and we are back in the dark.

Why is there a time limit on this outrage? Is it only those men with the blood still fresh on their hands who deserve to hang? What of the rest?  The ones who've walked free for decades, or passed away peacefully without a blemish to their name? Are they excused because their victims managed to stay alive?

There aren't many protests for these children. Because these children kept quiet. Or were told to keep quiet. These children learnt that their honour meant nothing next to the family's. That they should forget about it, get over it, stop dwelling on it, forget the past, be positive and well it's not like he killed you. These children grew up and are among the men and women around you, and you would never know because they hide so well.

They hide from the the rapists of their childhood, the ones who've walked free for decades and probably always will. They hide from each other, certain that their own pain is unworthy in comparison to others'. And they hide from you - because they have seen that this outrage, this anguish pouring forth demanding castrations and lynchings for those men in the news, doesn't burn long or bright enough to illuminate those dark secrets of another time.

Ask yourself why. Look around you at friends and family. Could you take a stand and condemn someone you know, love, or respect? Or is your outrage a limited offer only, with an expiry date, directed at strangers, for "the others" that are not part of your particular "we"?

Only when your outrage is against every rapist, even if you find one in your own home, your own village, your own state, your own caste.

Only when your anguish is for every abused child:  the dead, the living, the ones still young, the ones long gone grey, the losers, the successes, the weirdos.

When you can do this, text me. I will come, dressed in black, to stand at your side.

The first word is "fragile".

Fragile is something of value.
Fragile must not be broken.

Like glass or crystal, I suppose,
though they can be replaced
without too much heartache.
My Swarovski sunglasses
would hurt a bit more.
My life, on my Samsung?
It would shatter me.

Which reminds me.
Children break too.

Some of us you can glue
back together
and we shall go on.

Distorted, disfigured, damaged forever,
a bit lopsided but still - alive.
Never as alive as we might have been,
but at least, not dead
(only sometimes,
some of us wish we were),
and so we go on.

We may even come to see
our shattered mess of a childhood as a mosaic,
and find beauty in it,
and then find a way
to share that beauty with the rest of you.

But
sometimes the pieces can't be fixed back together.

Because no one saw.
Or someone looked and chose not to see.
Or looked then merely looked away.

Or perhaps we just looked too late.
Too late to do anything
but light a candle
and shed some tears,
and rage - in sincere pain - at the injustice of it all.

We rage and we grieve,
and our horror is true.
We rage and we grieve,
but that is all we do.

Just like the last time.

I did so hope,
as we gathered together her shards
to toss them in our bottomless pit of unlearned lessons,
that our hands bled,
because her blood was already on our hands.

Please don't break the children.

The family that makes you
will be the one which breaks you.
They'll torture you
but that's not all.
Then they'll get mad
when you stumble or fall.

How we are accessories to the crime.

I came across this yesterday on Facebook. The author is Anonymous. I know I don't normally post other people's writing here, but I thought this was worth sharing and preserving on my blog. Although it's addressed to men, I agree with Chaitrali from whose page I found this, that women too can be guilty of many of these crimes:

A Message - by Anonymous:

"You stay silent when your mother is treated like shit by your father,

You stay silent when your friend takes dowry from his wife's family,

You stay silent when your classmates sits at a nukkad whistling 'maal' at passing women, saying it is innocent fun,

You stay silent when a million women every year in this nation are murdered before birth or their breath dunked in milk before god, after it,

You don't report the drunkard husband who beat up your maid servant because it is not your business,

You stayed silent when your boss hit upon a female colleague and you told her to grin and bear it because it happens everywhere,

You sing along with your favourite male stars as they call their 'items' chikni chameli and halkat jawani etc.,

You stay silent when our police and paramilitary gang rape tribal and lower caste women and shove stones inside their rectum, saying that that's an aberration of the system,

You did not protest the lower pay that your female colleagues got just because of their sex,

You helped your parents arrange a marriage for your sister against her wishes saying she doesn’t know her mind,

You stayed silent when in a family discussion a woman’s voice was silenced by the cacophony of male voices,

You force a woman to wear burqa in the pretext of sharia law, or justify her domesticity because some asshole called Manu wrote some asinine laws hundreds of years back,

You think feminism is shit and feminists loud mouthed 'bitches' who have no better work to do than cry victim,

You applaud as Hindu right wing men barge into a hotel and slap ‘immoral’ women with the intention of ‘reforming’ their ‘maa’ ‘behen’, (mother, sister)

You stay silent when females in a party are sent away to discuss 'childish' things even as you discuss 'important' things like politics and all in their absence,

You stayed silent when your father directly and sarcastically showed your mother that she's lower than men in intelligence time and again,

You objected loudly when your girlfriend, wife wanted to put her life and career ahead of yours, saying yours was more important,

And now suddenly you have become a man because ONE woman was brutally beaten and raped while you conveniently forget the hundreds of women whose psyche you were responsible for brutally beating and raping directly, or indirectly through your inaction... and now you evoke the same 'maa' and 'behen' argument to protect them...

Thanks to the serpent of your awakened manhood, that woman in Delhi will perhaps get justice. But what about the millions of other women in the country of different religion, region and sect united by their shared injustice who will perhaps never get justice precisely for the same reason - your manhood?"

-Anonymous

Angel tears

What makes angels cry? Is it something I've done or something I didn't?

The burning grief of phoenix and angel alike tell us that tears heal.

Is it in the dew? Sobs hidden in the thunder? Or sighs in the fog?

Stop being so bad or the angels will weep, they said, and the angel wept anyway.

Bad girls make them cry. That's what they said. 

When she wept the angels joined her.

"You bad little girl! Stop being so bad! The angels must be weeping!"

Yes. They weep for her. 

16/7/2008

Ode to Amazon

In answer to your possible question, "Where have you been?", I have explored all options and chosen to blame Amazon.com. Of course, it's not entirely their fault that I've been away so long. But they did cause me enough of a distraction to put down my drawing pencils for quite a while.

This distraction came not because I am a bookaholic, but because of one book in particular: a how-to guide for paedophiles that Amazon published on their site recently. It disturbed me right out of my depression. The warrior in me (now a one-and-a-half-eyed warrior) woke up. And while my health won't permit me to return to full-fledged activism on the child abuse issue, my heart and my history wouldn't allow me to stay in hibernation.

So I have been doing what I can, updating Askios, (online resources on the child abuse issue), reading, writing, sometimes despairing and taking short trips back into that abyss of depression that I can't seem to erase entirely from my travel itinerary. But mostly, trying to deal with all the emotions that Amazon's attitude to the CSA issue succeeded in jarring awake.

And now I'm here.  And while I did put aside my favourite 9B pencil, I did find the time, one angry-sad evening, to pick up a pen and scribble this out:


Ode To Amazon

In our dreams, the monsters don't win.
In our dreams someone walks in.
Someone who's ready to stand up and fight,
to tell us what happened to us wasn't right.

But that's in our dreams. In the clear light of day
things tend to go in a different way.
We reach for a bottle, a pill or a knife.
We search for solutions and try to live life.

We may hide the wounds
but we can't lose the scars,
and we bleed when betrayal
mocks this pain of ours.

###

"If I could ..

Many survivors of child abuse feel like this for much of their lives, knowing that there is something wrong with their lives, but not knowing what it is, or why. Learning and understanding about the long term impact of childhood abuse changes that.

If I could only drift like a shark,
cruel and free
and not drown in petty seas of my own misery.

If I could only sleep as a child does
and wake wondrous and pure.

If I could only dive into my soul
and not simply wait on the shore.

HOW TO COOK YOUR DAUGHTER, by Jessica Hendra

"When he was finished writing for the day, Daddy turned off his typewriter, stood from his desk, and held out his hand. The veins shone greenish-blue against the pale whiteness of his skin. They seemed like huge, protruding pipes just under his flesh. When I looked closely, I thought I could see his blood pumping through them. I would take his hand and run my little fingers over the back of it, exploring the bumpy map. Then we would go down the office stairs together and out into the night.

The two of us walked in the fields or the woods around the house, exploring fallen trees, stopping to spy quietly on deer or rabbits. He'd tell me stories about the spirits that lived in the woods. I'd hold his hand tightly, reassured by those bumps on the back. They proved he was alive. They proved he was my dad. And as long as he was with me, nothing horrible could happen - to me or to him."
*
"I remembered my life backward, from the last time I had confronted my father at Aunt Celia's, back to my teenage years, when he slipped me some coke the night he told me he was leaving my mother. Back to the days when I first started bingeing and purging. Back to the night just before I turned seven. Back to the piece he had written for the Lampoon just a few months before. He had called it 'How to Cook Your Daughter', and it started this way: A recurrent problem facing the gourmet who wishes to prepare this excellent dish is the difficulty he experiences in obtaining a daughter. .. People so often ask, How do I tell when my daughter is ready for the table? Well, there's always some little variation, but generally the exact age falls somewhere between the fifth and sixth birthdays .. "
*
Picked this up at Bangalore Book Fair last year. It's the biggest book fair in town, held annually at the Palace Grounds (yes - for those of you outside India - a real palace, belonging to the ex-Maharaja of Mysore, and vast amount of grounds where various events get held, and there's never any problem parking).

Bangalore Book Fair is massive and not to be taken lightly. I wear comfortable shoes, carry a bottle of water, my trusty portable trolley, and make sure I have a good breakfast. It can take me a whole day to get through from one end to the other. I love it.

So why am I telling you all this? Probably because it's easier to talk about the fair than about this book (which cost me the princely sum of Rs. 150 - more than I usually pay for my second-hand treasures).

I have shelves full of books at home. A lot of them are on child abuse. And some of the child abuse books are memoirs by adult survivors. But here's the thing. I never read the memoirs, just buy them and keep them.

Today, though, I decided to read this one, and I sat and read the whole thing through in about four hours. I have a headache now. I'm not sure if it's from bad reading posture, or from what I read; perhaps both.

I'm supposed to say something about it, but I'm not sure what I want to say. So I'll just say this: it's a good book. It's more than a survivor getting herself some healing by telling her story, it's also a good story, a good read. All the same, I'm disturbed after reading it, although in a way I'm glad I did read it. I'm not sure if I'm going to have scary dreams tonight, or if I'll have to sleep with the night light on, or if I'll see and hear things I know aren't real any more.

Well, I'll worry about that closer to bedtime. Meanwhile, I've done what any sensible survivor does after triggering herself silly over someone else's story. I've ordered a cheese and pepperoni pizza with a Coke on the side. And it's just arrived.