Fuck It! I break my silence by Rituparna Chowdhury

With the way, how headlines and news papers are boldly filling pages with more and more rape, assault, being hit by strangers on road, and people watching and doing nothing, and then calling a girl’s letter of agony a publicity stunt just because she incidentally happens to be an actress, it was time I wrote this. Breaking my silence. Sorry Mom and Dad. If I do not wash this dirty linen outside, many more linen layers would be stripped due to the same mistake a lot of us once made, years ago, by keeping shut. Many more would wail and cry behind locked bathroom doors, and wash their faces, and come out yet again and try to breathe. For many it would be a sadism, or gossip scoop. No. Being sexually molested or raped at an early age does not determine how good I will be in bed in later years. Yes, I have heard those too. I also might not be the ideal candidate for marriage post this, as the return on investment value of my body is will be lesser now than the person I am :). That anyway is a breather as automated moron filtration happens at large.

I am a Woman. A single working girl in Mumbai. A non celebrity. I do not have any film release this week or the next. A tax paying citizen, who was first abused at childhood in 4th grade, till 9th grade, and was asked to keep shut about it. Do I remember the gory details? Yes. The touch, the blood, the pain, those eyes and that grip. The only way I could escape it was bunk that tution class, or lock myself in the house, and put a note that I am not at home outside on the latch, switch off all lights and sounds and hide under the bed, till I could hear the man leave from the door.

I used to rarely meet my father. He was busy doing everything he could to give his daughter the best. I realized it pretty early that majority of the mothers in India have fantastic intentions but absolutely fuck all execution of the same, since they have had protected obedient lives, where ignorance was bliss! No one realised that to know what to ignore, one has to know the context entirely. I love my mother, irrespective of the fact that she was my immediate security mechanism from womb days who never stood by me, when I went crying to her. Not her fault. She did not know how to bring up a questioning mind as she has only been a follower. I was asked to shut up. Apparently it was my fault, that in 6th grade I went to play at my neighbors house with other kids when their father molested me and I ran away.