In the Wake of Sparrows

Trigger Warning: Child sexual abuse, physical abuse, suicide ideation

The first boy I became “best friends” with showed me the still-raw welts on his back while we sat on my grandfather’s balcony sipping Limca on a mint-n-mango summer evening. He lived two lanes away from us in a stately bungalow which was a throwback to the Raj era. There the mimosa trees were opulent in a splendid shade of lemon sorbet. I would walk to his house with my grandmother twice a week after school; tiny palms clutching chewy sweetmeats and the familiar melt of melody-is-chocolatey. We became friends by exchanging egg sandwiches (mine) with vermicelli pulao (his) during lunch breaks at school. Nobody else would talk to us much because everyone had already formed their cliques and wrung in the totems for their respective cabals. We were both on the periphery because we flitted from city to city and were summarily labelled fatherless children of broken homes. He introduced me to Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles and I promptly renamed him Michelangelo.

Michelangelo and I had many common loves — comic books, Nightrider, cacti, solving ciphers, life cycles of grasshoppers, coconut barfi and failed attempts at starting a neat street-side business of homemade rose perfume. We disagreed and debated moot cases with the typical doggedness of pre-teens. The worst were verbal jousts about which were a better category of floofs — dogs or cats. It was after an attempt to rescue a stray dog that he first lifted his t-shirt and laid bare where his uncle had taken a split-leather strap and wrecked burning longitudes across the length of his back.

We sat in fallow silence as the smatterings of dusk’s lamplight slowly gilded the guavas. He stared straight and shared sparse details of how the wounding was graved. I listened with my eyes fixing their reach on a family of sparrows huddled over a birdfeeder dangling from the neighbour’s window. I have a distinct recollection of everything Michelangelo said while I watched the tiniest sparrow from the group struggle to get a shot at the grains. After that evening, two or three weeks would pass before he’d show me new injuries. Quite like our lunch exchange at school, I would then share the harm perpetrated against me by my stepfather. We were too young to fully intuit the purport of triggers flung each other’s way when we discussed our violations at the hands of adults. Adults who were meant to protect and care for us. We would talk about our ugly experiences in one breath and then fizzle into laughing fits reading quotes from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (Moving Pictures, specifically) out loud.

There is a kind of dangerous regularity that children descend into when their violence doesn’t meet the empathy of an adult witness. Our friendship was akin adopting an old animal from a shelter — there was a bucket list of what we needed to do before it would come to an end. As it eventually did when we both moved away from that small town.

Over the years, I forgot about Michelangelo until one lazy morning, I received a message from a stranger on Facebook who wanted to know if I had ever been in “X” school in “Y” grade in “Z” town. I wanted to respond with characteristic acerbity except I decided to click on the profile and almost snorted the tea I was drinking. I knew it was him. He was all grown up now; a “real boy” —in my mind, his voice booming in our school library as he wiggled his finger in front of his nose in a shoddy imitation of Pinocchio.

We exchanged messages and after a few days came a stark confession — “I tried to end it, you know.”

By it, I knew he meant himself. It is easy to gauge that depersonalization when you too have lived through your own periods of it. This is what most people don’t understand about survivors of childhood abuse. When we stumble into suicidal ideation, we aren’t trying to end ourselves, we are trying to end those parts of our lives that bear such heft, that inundate us with such orphic darkness that the word out starts to spell itself as end.

Writing a letter to a friend recently, I mulled over a word from Farsi—Boghz (بغض ). Untranslatable, it roughly means the physical building up of sorrow and pain in the throat/chest before crying but being unable to cry. I used it in reference to a scene from the movie “Sleepers” where childhood friends Lorenzo and Michael meet after a long time.

Lorenzo: Mike, are you sure you wanna go this way? I mean we buried this a long time ago.

Michael: You still sleep with the light on?

The legal drama — adapted from a novel by Lorenzo Carcaterra — scopes out a tale of torment and bittersweet revenge for four boys who share a neighbourhood and a torturous secret. Here’s the spoiler alert: their “secret” is being sexually assaulted by guards at a juvenile detention facility. They are sentenced to this “boys’ home” after a mindless prank misfires. Even as the boys grow up and branch out in very different directions, the latent horrors of what they endured as children remain loose over their respective lives. This scene in particular has a certain inflammable shiver to it. The boys who are grown men now — a reporter and a lawyer — are still living in the shadows of a fear that seems deathless in that moment.

In introductory therapeutic consultations with men, a common question I often receive is when/how soon will therapy end. In comparison, most women & non-binary folks are less concerned about the outcome or the expiry date on the tin can as they are more keen on the process and the nourishment they can derive from it. I live in a country that houses some of the world’s most ostentatious billionaires but pushes down the tyranny of stigma, silencing anyone who needs help for mental and emotional illnesses. I have frequently watched men hold themselves back from breaking down when they start speaking about their own traumatization, assault, and/or abuse as young boys.

Their bodies stretch and tighten like a tense catapult.

It almost feels like they do not want to release the pain held inside of them because they fear that the emptiness signalled by its departure will augur a frozen infinity. It is assumed that confronting it will be impossible because they have been taught to believe that acquisition of any kind is masculine, superior. To let go, surrender is perceived as a form of ‘feminization’. The pressure to maintain some arbitrary standard of masculinity keeps the lid on the possibility of releasing long-held traumas that are weakening them from within. Self-remedying is either through a decline into abject narcissism and externalization of injury via domination or it is imputing the dissonant self, its locus of identity and its struggles to learned helplessness. What is truly aching within them is also constantly muted through patriarchy’s operant conditioning. This is particularly true for those who have grown up and survived within the ego-heroics of traditionalist environments where masculinity is so definitive a trope that one foregoes the most barbaric experiences of violation just to uphold its social performance.

In a world where forms of “smiling depression” and hyper-anxiety are necessitated as productive, a very large group of men is still grappling with their own stories of abuse and assault splintering them with PTSD and depression.

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.” — Alice Miller

A client of mine is a heavyweight in his field of work. He is also a father to two adult kids whose well being is paramount to him. He initially expressed immense dejection at the prospect of a psychiatric diagnosis for clinical depression. The dejection wasn’t about the diagnosis itself but how this implied his failure “as a man”. He was disappointed that his masculinity had faltered along the way by “acquiring” a disease. It is never easy to accept that one needs help especially in a world so hell-bent on guarding and preserving its ableist legacies that position “insanity” as an absolute to be feared. I did not debate him about the plausibility of masculinity in itself being a somewhat rank syndrome. I know by now that sometimes we must learn to stand where we are sown.

Four months later, amid a routine session, he mentioned being plagued by a weeklong emotional disturbance; an intense wrestling with some kind of incognito dread that had trailed him with the stealth of a charging reptile. Suddenly he paused, his voice dipped while pointing out that he has to visit his childhood home next month. He hadn’t been back in over two decades. The end of that sentence sounded off a levee sundering in a complete fall. In between hiccup-punctuated sobbing and a cannonade of expletives, he detailed the abuse he endured at the hands of an elderly male relative in his joint family. The terror inflicted between ages of ten and fourteen was as enfeebling now as it was then. He said he had lived with the shards of that memory sticking out of his gut. “I was hollowed, repeatedly”, he choked up as he tried to place his hand on his mouth as if still afraid of someone lurking outside the door, waiting for him. I have seen this before and yet every time I see it again, I am and will be rendered immovable and heartsick for a period in time. I can relate and reach into it beyond my professional circumference. I know of a terror similar to his. I also know of how recent and ancient it feels at the same time.

To understand the magnitude of child abuse in India, a study conducted in 2007 found that in India, 53.22% children faced one or more forms of sexual abuse; among them, the number of boys abused was 52.94%.

Until the passing of The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, male victims of child abuse in India were not directly recognized by law due to archaic, definitional loopholes. Violence against children is a globally pervasive reality and a recurring endangerment. One in four kids across the world is likely to experience inter-personal harm via adults and these could be emotional, physical/sexual or any other form of direct or indirect abuse. India and most of the sub-continent is replete with smothered archives of familial gaslighting and taboos related to free expression as well as exploration of gender and sexuality. These are further laced with toxic presentations of masculinity. As a result, we often end up watching the daily aftermaths of a potent cocktail narcotizing our social consciousness to the extent that it becomes difficult to even acknowledge , let alone address , these wrongs.

Men in therapy recount the first time someone touched them inappropriately. They admit that not only did they have no primer, no real guide that would allow them to trust the awareness that something perverse had taken place against their will, they were also afraid of how much ridicule they’d suffer if they spoke to someone about it. They talk about depressive depths that are carved by low self-esteem—from explicit and implicit harassment to emotional abuse. Many show signs of physical discomfort when narrating how they had to face their abusers while demands of politeness were made because the abusers were “valuable members of society” and in most cases relatives, family friends or someone they were expected to not just trust and but also obey.

“It was not until I moved to this city and found a supportive queer community that accepted and validated my sexuality that I was finally ready to unlearn the belief that my abuse had something to do with me being gay. That horrible guilt was like acid,” says P, a dance instructor, now a proud parent to a one-eyed warrior kitten. It has taken him a lot of time in counselling and fostering feral kittens to finally unknot the threads of love and abuse away from each other.

There is a stunning paragraph which quotes Terrence Real in bell hooks’ “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love” (2004): “When I first began looking at gender issues, I believed that violence was a by-product of boyhood socialization. But after listening more closely to men and their families, I have come to believe that violence is boyhood socialization. The way we ‘turn boys into men’ is through injury: We sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase ‘be a man’ means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.”

I have been trying, repeatedly, to fathom ways to speak about assault and this compartmentalized regression of how masculinity is organized in our socio-cultural consciousness. Stand in the shade of a tacit pause and regard this mean machine coding — masculinity’s dominant socialization is through normalization (and in most cases, glamorization) of injury; both causing and receiving.

No surprise then as throngs flush their razors in protest of an ad that seems to abet a cognitive dissonance merely by showing how sensitivity isn’t a gendered quality. This, of course, gets more convoluted when you consider how race, caste and class intersect to create and maintain versions of masculinity centred in a virulent oppression of others. No one is invested in sifting through the titillating theatrics of news cycles and reaching into the reality that most, if not all, men in India from marginalized/minoritized castes, religions, tribes are possibly carrying a strain of unchecked and eviscerating intergenerational trauma. This is an indicator of our social health and we have repeatedly been smacked on the wrist by this oversight. We don’t have a mental health syllabi to account for this. Social stratification dissuades men from marginalized backgrounds to even consider verbalizing their histories of childhood abuse.

Debasement is maladapted into daily living. Pain is invisibilized, muzzled. My grandfather, a public service officer, often teared up detailing the repulsive segregation that reduced the bodies of boys from underprivileged and overexploited populace into bartered commodities. He was a man who suffered severe casteism through the length of his life and was living proof of that yoke’s embittering spite. Every day I am both a witness and challenge to these modes of self-viewing that have been preserved in their place for no other reason than to create false hierarchies and power struggles that offer no real rewards.

My father, a proud Spanish Romani man, would carry my birth certificate with him whenever he took me out as a baby because it is a common event for Roma parents in Europe to have their babies snatched without warning and then get accused for child theft. He eventually was so torn up about giving me a better life after his divorce from my mother that he almost erased himself from my life hoping that I wouldn’t have to live in the shadow of his lineage.

Society teaches young boys that resistance to vulnerability is a superpower, that crying is a gendered activity, that sitting still with your own emotions softens your manhood and that pain is a seductive payoff. These men are left summoning their eclipsed boyhoods as they rock back and forth in therapy while counting days, weeks, months; they walked around like poorly fashioned petrol bombs suspended in time, ready to blow up because they could no longer suppress the flashbacks nor had they developed the pathways to exit their internal conflict zones. How they were hazed and shrunk when they spoke about it to other men or how — as a client related with habitual obduracy — they were bullied into admitting that they “enjoyed” their “early adventures”. The most disturbing of it all is the insinuation that boys can’t be sexually abused because there is a vicious conflation of sexualized violence with the conquest of a heterosexual experience that is the designated prize of being a man. It doesn’t help that legal parameters often erred on the side of such gross falsehoods.

At my clinic, K is always worried at the lack of coasters and how terrible he feels when his coffee cup leaves messy rings on an otherwise spotless table. He is twenty-one and at the brink of a new life after his acceptance to a program of study about which he is passionate. He has OCD and social anxiety when he has to speak in public especially since he feels his voice is not as gravitational as his father’s. He taps his knees while staring at the muddy liquid- “I was 11. I didn’t consent to it. I didn’t even know what consent was at that time. It was rape, it was not an adventure.”

These are lives lived shadow boxing with a kind of intimidation that has no coherent shape. Beyond the drama of aggression are the very real risks of causing further injury either to self or others. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman surmises―"But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.”

Several studies on ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) have shown that child abuse is the most preventable cause of mental health problems while also being a heavy contributor to both physical and psychological illness. Unless we start speaking and creating space where softness is not derided, where gender isn’t propped as a currency and where men can confront the ravages of compulsive masculinization which does nothing to unlock their own repression and associated trauma, the world around us is not going to get safer for anyone.

A few months after Michelangelo messaged me on Facebook, I encouraged him to speak to a psychologist. Later, a year into therapy, he sent me a box that contained 4 action figures of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a copy of Prachett’s “Mort”, a photograph of a sparrow, a bunch of mimosa flowers, and a note that had a single line — “As simple as that? You didn’t use magic?”

(Author’s Note: Gratitude for anyone/everyone who shared their story with me and agreed for it to be included in this essay.)