Dark Room

By Pankaj Butalia

The book is the much-needed beginning of a conversation, outside of specialized, academic circles, on child sexuality in India The middle-class view throughout the world is that the pre-adolescent stage is an age of innocence-one that precedes the  discovery of sex. Why we insist on believing this in the face of so much evidence to the contrary is a mystery. The book reminds us of the centrality of sex in our lives, including when we are very young. It is a complex area for adults to navigate.  On the one hand, parents need to give their children space and not inhibit the natural progression children need to make in the development of their sexuality. On the other, they need to be extremely careful that their offspring do not transcend boundaries of what could be called age-appropriate behaviour. Given the taboo that surrounds sex, it is not surprising that happy memories of childhood and child sexuality are intertwined with those of sexual abuse, fear and trauma. It is difficult, if not impossible, to talk about one without coming across the other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350296295

Pankaj Butalia

Pankaj Butalia is a documentary film-maker and a former lecturer at the Sri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi.

Book preview

Preface

Irrespective of what I may have thought I would do in life, writing this book certainly wasn’t on the cards. Yet, over the past two years, despite many obstacles, my desire to see the book through has only grown. The setbacks were primarily because most people I met and interviewed – and these included very close friends – did not want stories about their early childhood published. I offered to keep the stories anonymous and also said I would change the context of the narration so that there would be no way of identifying them, but for most people the thought of seeing intimate moments of their childhood in print was frightening. Was it a fear that sexual encounters of their childhood could make transparent the neuroses of the present – if not necessarily to others, then at least to themselves?

It was not as if I didn’t have doubts about my own involvement in such a project. I had no qualifications to put such a book together, apart from having lived a bit longer than some others. I had not been sexually abused nor had I been privy to anything more than situations an average child encounters. Basically, I didn’t have any special skill that made me the voice of a project like this. On the other hand, there was also a lurking fear that I may appear to be a paedophile out to get vicarious pleasure by talking about child sexuality. I had to fight all these notions in me. I also had to consider the implications of such a book for my son, who at the ripe old age of twelve was about to venture on a journey of his own, and the last thing I wanted to do was add a burden to what he might have been carrying anyway.

How did it all start?

We were a gathering of about ten friends, well into an enjoyable evening with alcohol, when Tara, probably the most reserved and conservative person in the group, burst out, ‘Ok, what is the most outrageous thing any of you have ever done?’ Predictably, she didn’t get a response, so she began narrating an incident from her own life.

When she was around eight or nine, she said, she was left at home by her parents one evening. The only other person in the house was a male cousin, who was about six years older and was in charge of looking after her while her parents were out. Over the evening, they talked and read a bit, but after that, there seemed to be nothing much to do. They were seated on a sofa and, as the evening wore on, Tara and her cousin sought comfort in cuddling each other. This took a sexual turn. This experience, she continued, was repeated three or four times and then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Tara could not recall any other sexual interaction with other people in her entire childhood, though she said she did become sexually promiscuous by the age of fifteen. Her subsequent meetings with that cousin were initially a bit tense because neither could confront what had happened, but later, as they grew up, they fell into a pattern of normality. Today, both of them are happily married (to different partners). They meet as friends but also have between them the secret knowledge of that special time.

This is not a situation that classically would be defined as abuse, but it is mentioned here only because it brings to the fore something we are so reluctant to recognize: the sexual lives of children. This book explores the subject not to propagate childhood sexuality, but merely to recognize different aspects of it that exist.

We were still processing this story when another friend, who was then in his forties, told us of a widowed aunt who used to visit their house every summer. Since they were a lower middle class family, the aunt would have to sleep in the room where the children slept. One night, he noticed some movement under his aunt’s sheet. It was as if she was wriggling rhythmically. He looked up to see that she was looking directly at him as she moved. This excited him and he started masturbating gently under his sheet. For the entire summer, both nephew and aunt kept up this ‘undercover’ nocturnal relationship, which found absolutely no mention in their interaction during the day. This, however, lasted only one summer as the aunt did not come to their house again. He remembered that he was eleven when she last came to the house, and rued the fact that he hadn’t discovered this pleasure on her earlier visits. He never figured out why she didn’t return. He tried asking the family but didn’t get a satisfactory response.

Getting into the spirit of the discussion, I competitively went on to narrate episodes from my childhood. As I recounted a few, yet more emerged from the deepest recesses of my memory (one of these stories is included in this book). Another friend gave an account of the way she allowed herself to be seduced by her uncle, who was also her local guardian (this story has been fictionalized by my collaborator Nilofer Kaul and is in this collection).

The evening wore on and we listened to each other with relief, excitement, curiosity, impatience and, of course, prurience! It was intriguing to know the intimate textures of childhood memories and the different meanings sexuality is reposed with – for me, a boyhood adventure and perhaps an initiation into sexuality; for Tara, a source of gratification; for the male friend, a forbidden encounter with a quasiincestuous figure; for another, a hostel epidemic.

This was when I initially thought of looking around for other accounts of child sexuality and putting together a collection of such experiences in a book. Some people I met talked about the seemingly innocuous car ride as an activity with sexual undertones. ‘We were a lower middle class family,’ said one young woman, ‘and there was one second-hand Premier Padmini our uncle owned. When we were driven to India Gate for ice cream, everyone would be bundled into that one car. For us kids, the excitement of sitting next to each other, male or female, and that of touching each other’s bodies or of having someone leaning on ours was as much the reason for the journey as the ice cream was.’

The range of experiences I came across made me feel there was much more to our early sexual experiences than we were willing to acknowledge or were even aware of. The irony remains, though, that the middle-class view throughout the world is that this pre-adolescent stage is an age of innocence – one that precedes the discovery of the centrality of sex in our lives. Why we insist on believing this in the face of so much evidence to the contrary beats me. Every psychoanalyst knows that the genesis of many issues patients have lies in their encounters with sex and sexuality very early in their lives. So why are we in such denial about this aspect of our lives?

Sadly, however, happy memories of childhood and child sexuality are intertwined with those of sexual abuse, fear and trauma. It is difficult, if not impossible, to talk about one without coming across the other. In India (like in many other parts of the world), some of the loudest proclamations about the sexual innocence of childhood come from conservative middle-class households. Such households live in complete denial about any sexual explorations children may be up to. However, the epicentres of abuse often lie in the very same places. Could there possibly be a connection between the refusal to acknowledge the existence of child sexuality and an increased vulnerability to sexual abuse? Creating a taboo around sex only drives it further underground and therefore makes it impossible for a child to share the knowledge of a sexual experience with an adult. This has repercussions for the sexual curiosity of a child and it also shapes the extent of damage done by the trauma of abuse.

As I set out to collect these stories, I met a large number of people – individuals as well as people in the social sector. I was keen to try and get material from across class, gender and geographical locations. But everywhere I went, I was met by curious glances, and almost always the same question: ‘Are you a psychiatrist?’, ‘What is the point of doing such a book?’ It dawned on me that books on sex and sexuality have to be explained, while others do not.

The most encouraging response I got was from people working in the social sector. Whether it was organizations helping street children, middle-class school children, victims of abuse and abuse-based incest, they all realized the seriousness of the issue. Most such groups had come across enough instances of child sexual behaviour to not think of it as an aberration. However, for them the focus was not so much child sexual behaviour as child sexual abuse. Many of them had already brought out small pamphlets, booklets and full-length publications documenting some of the cases of abuse they had come across.

RAHI (Recovering and Healing from Incest), for instance, is one such organization. It works primarily with victims of incest, which is defined much more broadly than merely sexual relationships within the (blood) family or even extended family. It covers all sexual activity which takes place within what is considered a personal or protected environment, that is, one in which the child has learnt to feel secure. Incest, therefore, is a threat from within surroundings previously considered safe. A violation of this trust can have devastating consequences. It leaves the child defenceless because it takes away the existence of the guaranteed safe haven children need till they grow into adulthood (or perhaps throughout their lives).

Both Anuja Gupta and Ashwini Ailawadi, who founded RAHI and continue to run it, have worked extensively on the issue of incest. In addition to the counselling they provide, they have also published a collection of stories written by some of the abused women who came to them for assistance. The House I Grew Up In is a compilation of stories by five women who were abused within the confines of their homes. The perpetrators were members of the family – father, stepfather, brother, uncle or some other close relative. The women write about the relentlessness of the abuse and the emotional turmoil they went through as they tried to deal with their trauma. Their chronicles are poignant and point to the damage done to the victims by those who were closest to them. Often, such damage is irreversible. Abused children could end up becoming abusers themselves or become completely dysfunctional. One of the women hints at the fact that she herself became abusive towards her younger relatives as she grew older. Fortunately, not everyone is affected in the same manner, because another narrator in that group is today the primary care-giver of her now old and ailing abusers. Finding a coping mechanism is critical and those who manage to do so are able to deal with the trauma of their abuse, while others can remain trapped in that disturbing moment.

Other organizations, too, have brought out booklets and publications that bring to light instances of child abuse. As is by now well established, most abusers in such stories turn out to be familiar to the child – classic examples are domestic workers, drivers, stepfathers, teachers, tutors and, every now and then, the more immediate members of the family such as fathers and/or brothers. While the abused child could be of either gender (although given this caveat, it does seem that more girls are abused than boys), abusers tend to be male more often than not. Paradoxically, this would run counter-intuitive to the argument that abused children sometimes turn abusers themselves because, if more girls have been abused than boys, then it ought to follow that more women would be abusers. So, does gender play a role in determining how we respond to the same trauma, that is, do boys feel the need to assert themselves as a defence against the passivity that being an abuse victim implies? Similarly, are girls more inclined to accept the passivity that abuse implies because of an internalized tendency to accept passivity in life in general and in sexual activity in particular?

However, the terrain of child sexuality is quite broad and even our understanding of sexual abuse needs to be revisited because such abuse, no matter how reprehensible, cannot always be painted with one broad brush. What can one say of sexual activity between two children – one ten years old and the other seven? Can the exploration of the ten-year-old’s sexuality be seen as abusive of the seven-yearold’s? This is too complex a question to find easy answers for but it nevertheless merits attention.

This collection is a modest effort to put together intimate accounts of sexual episodes from childhood. There is diversity here. There are stories where childhood sexual encounters have been one of many activities children engage in and leave behind (this is not to imply that even this would not have some long-term impact), and there are others where sexual encounters take place in an environment of atrophy and hopelessness. Then there are encounters which are clearly abusive and exploitative. These experiences cut across class and gender. I would like to imagine that there is little didactic purpose in this work, and almost nothing prescriptive. Yet, it does begin with an impulse to address an area of silence, denial and shame.

There are eleven stories in this collection. The authors of only two of them are named. ‘Love, Kiss, Marry, Fac’ is my story and is as accurate as an account can be fifty years later. The second story, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, is the story of Kalpana Misra – one of the women who approached RAHI for counselling. As part of therapy, RAHI encouraged her to talk about what she had experienced, as they had advised other women. She agreed to be a part of this book after the first meeting I had with her but was not so sure of putting her name to her story, so we worked out an elaborate system to protect her identity. However, it was after Aamir Khan’s Satyemev Jayate was aired on national television that she decided her diffidence was unwarranted, and asked to be identified as the writer of her story.

The other nine stories are anonymous and were narrated on the assurance that there would be no way of identifying the persons. Four of these anonymous stories were nevertheless written by the protagonists themselves (Matinee Shows, The Tenant’s Son, A Game of ‘Seep’ and You, and You and You), while the details of Trellis Yarn were told to Nilofer Kaul, who then rewrote it in her own style. The other four (The Back Benches, The Landscape of Garbage, Diary of a Child Moll and Elizabeth’s Tale) were written by me on the basis of detailed recorded interviews with the protagonists.

Three of the stories are of working-class protagonists and have been written in a manner that stays as close to their style of narration as possible. Surprisingly, the ragpickers in two stories (The Landscape of Garbage and Diary of a Child Moll) were not at all reluctant to talk about themselves. The brutal landscape they live in is a constant reminder of their own insignificance and is hardly conducive to the creation of a moral and social edifice within which their actions could be judged. There is an uninhibitedness with which both narratives unfold and provide us access into a world far removed from that of our insulated middle class.

The protagonist in Elizabeth’s Tale is a lonely woman, reconciled to a life of solitude in an alien city. She is a domestic worker in a Delhi household and seems to have given up on any possibility of improvement in her life, even though she is barely forty. In this sense, she was perhaps the most damaged character in the book. Her story emerged in bits and pieces over a very long time. The story had to be fictionalized to a large extent to be able to present a coherent, consistent narrative, though in the details it is very close to the original. Her narrative has a lot in common with stories of abuse of countless young women – regardless of the class they come from.

A couple of well-known journalists have written about the school mentioned in The Back Benches, but nothing I had read could ever have prepared me for the extent of sexual activity that took place in its classrooms, as narrated in the story. It seemed to have reached epidemic proportions! I spoke to other students from the same school in north India to check the veracity of this story and found that experiences of others varied only in minor details. I don’t think I need to add more.

Two others, Matinee Shows and The Tenant’s Son, are small stories from friends I have known for a long time. One comes from a large metropolis while the other has primarily been a small-town person. Nothing in the long association I had with them gave me a hint of what they had experienced in their childhood.

You, and You, and You is a short account by a well-known Bengalaru-based writer who writes on trans-gender issues under the name of ‘nilofer’. She got to know about the book from a friend in the city and expressed a desire to write what she called a ‘short summary of her early life’.

A Game of ‘Seep’ was the last account I got. I was talking about the book to a few people I didn’t know very well. As I was leaving, a young woman walked up to me and asked if I would be willing to include her story. I said I would be glad to, and within a few days, a mail arrived with the piece. She also told me something very interesting – that the person she had written about was not from her social class but somehow she still missed him. I was perplexed. It later transpired that he was