Safe Away

By ANASTASIA FREEDOM

My first book is the autobiography of my life in 3 different countries (Malaysia, Jamaica, and Nigeria) on three different continents before returning to Kerala in South India. It focuses more on the arranged marriage to a total stranger who later covers his controlling and abusive behavior under the face of a personality disorder, and later the escape from him after coming to Canada. This book intends to create an awareness of abuse, domestic violence, and its influence on children for others suffering in similar situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ANASTASIA FREEDOM
• Release date: Aug 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201681005

Book preview

Preface

My name is Meena which means precious blue stone in my language Malayalam, in Arabic means starling, heaven glass, and in Hindi and Sanskrit means fish, in German and American means Love pronounced the same way but spelled as Mina. I am a South Indian woman from Kerala state in India, aka GOD’S OWN COUNTRY, but who lived in 3 different countries and traveled around the world (Malaysia, Singapore, Jamaica, Boston, Miami, New York, Nigeria, London, Rome, Paris, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat & Canada!).

Kerala state has the highest literacy (about 99%) in India and is also the land of coconuts, Kera meaning coconuts and ala meaning land. Kerala is well known for rubber tree estates, tea and coffee estates, coconuts, banana plants, mango, and jackfruit, to name a few, and rich in exotic spices like cardamoms, cinnamon, vanilla, turmeric, tamarind, Garcinia cambogia, black pepper, and many more with fertile soil, and lots of greenery that releases vast amounts of oxygen and keeps the climate cool, and breathtaking for tourists.

In this book, I will be telling you my story from - my birth to childhood to youth to marriage and to the present time. I hope by telling my story, I can inspire and motivate other girls and women like me or not, that nothing is impossible, and there is always a purpose for us in this great big bad difficult world, so let’s be hopeful and pull through!

I wouldn’t mind portraying my story in a movie, especially by any lady directors or first-time filmmakers who could show the pain and struggle I went through despite my worldly exposure and modern mentality. Anyone for the grabs if this book is appreciated, liked, or maybe becomes a good read??? Living in fear for so long for over more than 11 years, cocooned in my shell, isolated, unable to speak and share with my relatives, has made me feel it’s high time now to break free during this COVID 19, which has stretched itself to another year of gloom!

I have to say I became inspire*d to write this book after reading PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS’S BOOK UNFINISHED, because I saw some similarities in my life, especially in the earlier years I could relate to. Priyanka is one of my favorite actresses in the Hindi cinema (Bollywood), and I’ve been an ardent fan watching her win the Miss World contest on the TV while I was in India, and watched many of her movies like Fashion, Dostana (Desi Girl), Gunday, Mary Kom, The White Tiger to mention a few, and the TV series on Quantico when it was aired in Canada. I am very proud that she is the 100th most influential person in the world from all her hard work and efforts to educate the girl child. 

I wish I could do the same but not in acting but in helping others in some way. Celebrity status makes it a lot easier to do such things, but what do you do when you are not financially strong. So, I’m using my words the least I could do through this book in this world. 

I’m a single mother of 4 boys and am a survivor of domestic violence, something my mother tried so hard but could not do in her time. Thank God for Canada, where women in such situations can escape and be free. It took 15 years of my horrific married life to achieve my freedom and a better safe life for my children, the two older ones being abused physically by their father and subsequently by me being imprisoned and isolated in the cycle of abuse. I wish I could have changed the clock back, but the 15 years were spent in Kerala, India, where help and support were impossible to get.

Canada had better support  systems, resources, and assistance from social workers. We were in the proper country and with good hands – the police, social workers, priest, counselors, lawyers, and friends were fortunate and blessed to get such good professional people to help us. God bless them all, and I will always be grateful to all of them.

The reason why I’m using this image of the power and control wheel in my book is for people to understand the harm, use of violence and the different forms of abuse within a family perpetrated by the head of the family.

What Is Domestic Abuse? | United Nations

It took me a very long time to open up and reconnect with people I knew from the past due to fear of the Ex-husband, who is still out there in Kerala, ready to kill me and go to jail. A true Psychopath, as he has many snitches and fans among both my mother’s and father’s relatives who all thought that I am in the wrong and an unfaithful wife, even though I was not, and purely dedicating my entire life to bringing up my children all by myself. I don’t know if I could ever revisit Kerala as long as my Ex is alive. It would be like the last scene in the movie, Sleeping with the enemy, with Julia Roberts and Patrick Bergin, except that I would be the one who would be dead. So scary! Enough of the morbid stuff, and let’s get into my life story! 

Safe Away

CHAPTER 1

MALAYSIA, MY FIRST TRIP ABROAD

This chapter deals with my birth, childhood, baby brother, family, and life in Malaysia!

My book focuses on life before and after being married to a sociopathic narcissistic abusive man and the implications of enduring a long-term toxic relationship on the children and me. After living 20 years abroad with parents who were well-established and sociable teachers in 3 different countries on 3 different continents, I found myself forced into an arranged marriage to a total stranger. My parents were still old-fashioned and conservative in bringing up their daughter and never allowed the idea of falling in love, dating, or having a boyfriend. Because of my strict parents, I was afraid to venture into romance even though I was a romantic at heart and buried myself in reading romantic books during my teen years and watched many movies on love stories. Sometimes I wished I was born fair-skinned and to parents who were modern in their thinking of love, open to giving children opportunities to choices and opinions, and being treated fairly. Maybe reading many detective novels and watching many thriller movies helped me plan my escape from this ever so brutal, controlling, and manipulative husband. Also, how I hid things in my handbag and discussed with outsiders how to get away was similar to how Julia Roberts did in Sleeping with the enemy. If I hadn't met the people who helped me in the process of escaping, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you my story, and my children wouldn't know most of the things I went through. With that being said, I shall proceed to tell you all about the person I was before marriage and after.

This is my story of the girl, who was told by her mother's older sister, aunt Hilda, that I would be an extraordinary woman when I grow up, but my life did not turn out in that way. I was born in December of 1965, at a hospital in Thiruvalla, Kerala State in South India, underweight, very dark chocolate brown baby, and my aunt (my father's sister) was the first person to take me in her arms to show me to my grandparents and my dad. Everyone thought that I wouldn't survive being so thin and tiny, but probably it was the unyielding, resilient willpower in me that got me through. My grandfather, Gee Varghese Koshy, was the one who gave me the name Meena, after the famous beautiful Hindi cinema actress, Meena Kumari, from the 1940s. I was also given the middle name Alice, the English version of my grandmother's Malayalam name, Aleyamma. Being the first grandchild to my grandparents, I was later followed by five more grandchildren – Preetha, Ajit, Pratheesh, Leena, and Teena.

My family was a middle-class and highly educated one, with both my parents being teachers with Bachelors in Education, who taught in high schools and colleges. My dad, Varghese T. Koshy, was both an English and Maths teacher, and my mum, Stella Varghese Koshy, taught botany, biology, and health science. While my mother came from Kackottumoola in Kollam district, a Roman Catholic, and my father, an Orthodox Syrian Jacobite Christian from Pynumoodu near Mavelikara city in Alappuzha district, my grandfather was the one who arranged their marriage in 1964. So, my mother had to leave her Catholic faith and join my father's Orthodox Jacobite denomination through marriage. It was very late in my 20's that I learned that my mum was 4 years older than my dad.

My grandfather, who was over 6 ft tall, light brown, immaculate, and a pious man was also, a teacher who lived a very healthy long life and loved walking 5 miles every day to the school he taught at. He read the entire bible every day after he retired and later died at the age of 102 in 2002. There was a strange true story about my grandfather when he was a baby, he was thought to be dead because he was not breathing, and his family went to bury him in the church cemetery. But when they were about to cover him in the coffin, he began to move and cried miraculously. So, he ended up being the longest living person in his town, and on his 102nd birthday, he was honored and garlanded by the ministers and governor of the district.

My grandmother, who also happened to be my grandfather's student, whom he fell in love with when she was 16, was a fair, very beautiful, devoted, and hardworking girl, and they got married when he was 34. My grandfather was such a romantic person that he managed to have the audacity to go to my grandmother's house to ask for her hand in marriage, even though her parents did not like the fact that there was an 18-year gap between them and she being underaged. Anyway, because my grandfather was so adamant, they got married and had 3 children, my dad being the oldest, followed by his sister and a younger brother. My dad's sister Ponumamma was also an English teacher, married to a teacher in Thiruvalla, and later became a headmistress and then the village council leader. Dad's brother Thomas, who was born blind in one eye, was a successful accountant but very disloyal to his family. He later ran away to Bombay and secretly married a nurse he fell in love with.

According to Kerala Orthodox or Protestant Christian traditions, when a woman gets married, she leaves her parental home to live in the husband's home with his parents, a joint family system, especially if the husband is the oldest or only male child. At first, my grandfather lived in my grandmother's home in Venmony, in a small rural place, which had quite a low-lying land that when it rained heavily, the roads would get flooded, and in the 1960s, there was no electricity in the houses. My grandmother's house was an old-fashioned traditional village model, with terracotta clay roof tiles, a cow shed next to the kitchen, outside the rest of the house connected through open verandahs. Firewood furnaces were used for cooking, and kerosene lamps were used at night to see our way in the darkness or go from room to room. The bathroom, a small cubicle situated outside the house, was next to the well, where water would be drawn into buckets for taking a bath. The toilet, which was further away surrounded by wild bushes and creepers, was the old squat toilet model before the European closet toilet came into use much later. Luckily for my mum, soon after my birth, when I became 2 months old, her cousin brother, Bastian in Malaysia, managed to arrange job visas for teachers for both my parents. So off we went, to live in Malaysia, my first ever flight where I slept well throughout without troubling my mum too much.

After some years, my grandfather moved to his ancestral home in Pynumoodu, nearer to the city of Mavelikara, which he inherited being the oldest son. Later, my father and mother did many renovations and extensions with the money they made overseas. This consisted of a sitting room, more bedrooms, a dining room with wall cupboards, an attached bathroom with shower, washbasins, attached toilets, an overhead tank to pump water from the well through the pipes, kitchen sink, a gas cooker, and a new storeroom. These were unique lifestyles for my grandparents to adjust to that made them very happy, proud of and made their lives a lot easier.

I guess I was lucky to have had the opportunity to have lived abroad, but it was not going to be a rosy happy ever after family life, with my father being addicted to alcohol and a heavy chain smoker. Three years later, in 1969, my brother, Ajit, was born in a Malaysian hospital with complications, as his skin turned blue in color because of being tangled with the umbilical cord. Due to delayed oxygen to his brain, Ajit was a bit slow in learning to read and write but gradually recovered over the years. I was so jealous of my brother that I would do naughty things to him to make him cry to get my mother's attention. However, my mother was so forgiving and understanding that she got a Malay servant woman to look after Ajit when she returned to her teaching job. I was sometimes sent to play with the Chinese neighbors' kids, whose parents were pleased to supervise my playing with their kids, took good care of me, and fed me their food till my parents returned from school.

There were days dad came home with the stench of alcohol, which annoyed mum, and huge fights would erupt with dad beating up mum. During these fights, dad would shove mum into the bedroom and lock the door, leaving me alone in the sitting room, terrified and often sobbing, with my baby brother sleeping in his baby cot. On one such day, uncle Joseph came by, hearing the fights and seeing me through the closed window, crying alone. He knocked on our parents' window to tell them to open the front door, but they chose to ignore him. Finally, he returned to me and asked me to try and call my parents, which somehow worked out. Because of this uncle, who acted as a perfect therapist, managed to make my parents not repeat these incidents but rather focus on their children's welfare instead. I remembered this uncle for removing my first tooth in his house when my baby tooth was hanging loosely. But sadly, he is no more, and I was too late in reconnecting with him. However, I was able to connect recently with his wife, Santha aunty. Scooter Koshy uncle, who was famous for his scooter, would take me on his scooter for a ride and whose son Bobby, the same age as Ajit, played with us. This uncle, who is healthy and still plays lawn tennis internationally for men in his age group, in his 80s, and was by my father's side till he died, is still in touch with me. Funny to know that another uncle named Meesha Koshy was famous for his big mustache and happened to be Joseph uncle's brother is now ailing with age.

One day, my father returned home from school during his break to find me, 2 and a half years old, sitting on the floor with an almost empty Vapor rub Vick's bottle, which I had eaten. Dad immediately rushed me to the nearest hospital, using shortcuts with his white beetle Volkswagen car. But, on the way, he accidentally slightly hit a Chinese teenage girl who was riding her bicycle. So, he had to take her as well in our car to the hospital. Luckily, she had only minor bruises, while I had to get detoxed from all the overdose of poison, I had taken in. Anyway, the doctors were excellent, and all went well! After that scary incident, to keep me happy and occupied, dad gave me a cat, but I ruined it by bathing the cat. Then came the puppy, but he had a kennel outside, so he was safe from me, and we would play outside together. My love for animals grew so much that when dad took me out to the market, he told me to stay in the car. I disobeyed when I saw a stray cat, and I went running after the cat. When dad returned to the car, imagine the fear of not seeing me, but luckily the local people were so kind to help him find me and got me back to my dad.

When dad didn't touch alcohol, he was a perfect, kind, and caring father who taught me to say the Lord's prayer, helped me with my ABCs and homework. I adored him when he was like this, but I hated his slurry drunken side, which frightened me a lot and made me so nervous. Mum would stitch me beautiful dresses with pretty laces using her electric Singer sewing machine. Some of these dresses were kept with us when we went to Jamaica and Nigeria. Both our parents were great at cooking and would cook from scratch; the spices were roasted, then freshly grounded. Dad would help my mum cut large fish, meat, and chicken while mum cooked 4 or 5 other traditional dishes. Dad was also great at taking photos that he often did wherever we went and at each stage of our growth. Both were great as teachers, often promoted and talented in their hobbies, with remarkable social skills in appreciating people of all races and cultures that they would invite them over for a party at our house. They both taught in the same school, St. Elizabeth School, Sibu, an all-girls high school, for 5 years, during which I completed my kindergarten in Malaysia. We had lots of Malayalee close family friends (Bastian uncle and Bia aunty, Koshy uncle and Santha aunty, uncle Philip and Leela aunty, uncle Joseph and Santha aunty, Meesha Koshy uncle and Kunjamma aunty), and whose children I had played with and later we would meet again in Kerala after many long years.

It was the era of the black and white television, and as I grew past 4 years moving on to 5, I became more curious and naughtier. Most nights, when dad goes to sleep with the TV still on, I would watch the program going on, and when it was over, I'd quietly go back to bed. Usually, scary TV soap opera series like Dark Shadows was shown late in the night, and I would sneak behind the sofa to watch it. I guess dad caught me one night and made me go back to bed with his stern voice. Maybe that's why he would take me in his car every night for a long ride, till I fell asleep in the backseat, and when we returned home, I was carried to my bed and covered with a sheet. I still remember the very first movie we all went to watch in the cinema theatre, it was the classic musical movie - Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Even as a child, I was so fascinated by movies and stories that I would take them with me and dream most of the scenes in my sleep. Right from a very early age, I was very imaginative and loved reading storybooks and visualizing each scene in my mind. Thanks to dad, who introduced me to the world of books and encouraged me to read, which carried on even when we went to the next country, Jamaica, after 5 beautiful years in Malaysia.

(1966-1971)

CHAPTER 2

JAMAICA, THE BEAUTIFUL PARADISE ISLAND

This chapter deals with our childhood, growing up years, our family life, and the fun we had in Jamaica!

After Malaysia, my father had a passion for traveling with us to Jamaica, part of the Caribbean Islands, at the end of 1971. In Jamaica, both my parents very easily got teaching jobs in a highly exquisite boarding High School for girls, Hampton High School in Malvern. At first, we lived temporarily in houses made of wood that had rats running around, lizards and cicadas, with dragonflies flying in the night and very nice and kind maidservants to look