More from Creative Junkyard

Putting Old T-Shirts from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and friends to good use

The Start of the Creative Junkyard - Painting it Pink

The End of the Relationship

The Tale of Gujjar Women

Last year, I moved into a house on MG Road. My landlord here is a Gujjar. He is married with four kids – two sons and two daughters. The daughters aged 23 and 21 years are married with kids. The two sons are aged 16 and 13.

Sometime back, his wife came over to have a general tee-a-tee with me over a cup of tea. For some time, I had been wondering about her age as she looked quite young to me, and I would always hesitate in calling her Aunty. I would wonder to myself as to how could a woman with four grown up children , and grandchildren look so youthful. I asked her the question that day.

Her answer was simple, “ My husband was married to my elder sister. She died in childbirth, while giving birth to her third child, a son. I was 15 years old at that time. I was asked to marry my brother-in-law. What choice did I have? Anyways, he is good to me. The children love me, and I love them too. Please continue to call me Aunty, as it would hurt my husband if you call him Uncle and me by my name.” ( My landlady is younger than I am)

Three days back, I saw my landlord sitting on a chair in his garden looking mournful. Upon inquiring, he replied, “ Bad things have happened to us Beta. My brother-in-law’s daughter has become a widow. Her husband died in a car accident outside his house. She has two daughters and a three month old son. What will happen to her. She is just 24 years old. Widows do not remarry in our caste. She will have to lead an austere life from now on. No new clothes or jewelry for her anymore. She cannot laugh openly nor be seen entertaining herself else society will cast shadows on her character. Her life is gone.” And he started sobbing.

Yeh Toh Hota Hai Again !!! – The Moral Dilemma

Yesterday, my friend, Ashish came over to meet me to discuss a particular moral predicament.  He had discovered that the counselor at the drug rehabilitation centre, where he worked, had been sexually abusing four young boys in the age group of 12-14 years for some time now. The kids were street children who had been placed at the rehabilitation centre by a NGO.

He had immediately confronted the owner of the drug rehabilitation centre with this news. The owner, a young, well informed doctor himself, had pleaded with Ashish to suppress the matter. He had gone on to say, ‘Yeh to Hota Hi Hai India Mein. It happens everyday in India, but if you report the matter to the cops, I will be arrested and my career will be ruined forever. I promise you that I will fire the concerned counselor after a month”.

Ashish had been further shocked to find out that the other counselor, a lady from a well educated and affluent background, as well as a few of the other staff members had also known about this whole incident. Instead of taking any action against the perpetrator, they had tried to reason it out with Ashish. They were afraid that if Ashish called the cops, the rehabilitation centre would be shut down by the cops and they would lose their jobs. So it was in everybody’s best interest to hush up the matter.

Ashish realized that he was caught in a Catch 22 situation, straight from the Mahabharata. The doctor was an old and dear friend of his. While he felt extremely repulsed by the whole sequence of events, he did not wish to ruin the doctor’s life. 

Ashish had spoken to the kids. They had been visibly shaken by the whole experience. One of them had run away from the centre. Ashish had tried to provide some degree of consolation and comfort . They had pledged their support to Ashish and had agreed to speak up against the counselor infront of the cops.

I could provide Ashish with only one piece of advice, ‘Do what your heart says is the right thing to do. At the end of the day, you have to live with your own conscience and not with someone else. A wrong is a wrong, no matter who is involved – your best friend, brother or lover. Values have to take precedence over personal relationships if we wish to have peace within our hearts and in the world outside.”

I offered to support Ashish in this particular battle in whichever way I could. We agreed to speak over the phone in the morning to discuss the matter. I was feeling stressed. I had committed to supporting Ashish but doubts began to take shape in my head, “Do I really have the time to do this? How much involvement can I afford in a matter such as this? Am I willing to go to the police station several times if required?”

I decided to seek advice from a friend who runs a NGO for survivors of child sexual abuse. I was dumbfounded by her advice, “ This is going to be too complicated. There will be too many unknown elements – cops, NGOs, etc and then there is your own friendship with this doctor. Do you want to get into this mess? We have to pick our battles in life. Even we ( her NGO) have to turn down cases of child sexual abuse at times when we feel we do not have sufficient resources with us.” 

Ashish called me up in the morning to inform me that he had discussed the matter with his wife, following which he had quit his job at the drug rehabilitation centre.  He had decided to distance himself from the Doctor but at the same time would not to pursue the matter anymore .He did not wish to destroy the Doctor’s life.

The question that lingers on in my mind is, “What about these kids who have been abused? What hope is there for them? Are they not going to end up being criminals, rapists and thugs tomorrow, as is evident from the extensive research done on the effects of child sexual abuse on thinking and behavioral patterns.? Who is taking responsibility for that future – the future of these kids and the future of our country? 

We ask what is wrong with our country. We talk about the socio-cultural factors behind rape and sexual abuse in the country, and when we are faced with real life situations, we conveniently close our eyes and refuse to take responsibility. We knowingly chose to live in denial, wishing the whole thing away. And when the whole cycle repeats itself, we ask the question once more – What is wrong with our country?

And life continues……

The Anger Within

Few weeks back, my brother, along with his fiancé came visiting me and mom. Now, Mom and I stay in a two-room apartment. Having a guest stay over (which is rare) means giving up my bedroom and sharing the other room with my mother. 

My brother and his fiancé were supposed to stay over for two days .I had mentally braced myself for that period. But when at the end of the two days period, they announced their plans to extend their stay by another two days, my heart sank. 

I caught myself feeling irritable and angry with everyone around me, especially with my mother. I stopped myself in my tracks. What was happening? 

Fortunately, I had recently come across a different approach to anger management in a spiritual text. The text spoke about my feelings being my soul’s ways of communicating with me. Each feeling communicates a particular need, desire, or a state of being to me. Sometimes, the feelings tell me of a lack, and at other times of the fulfillment of a need. And the feeling of anger is usually our soul shouting to us about an unmet need.

 This approach to anger management consists of five steps :

Step 1 : Take responsibility for my anger without blaming external circumstances or other people for it. My anger is “my” feeling. I am feeling angry - PERIOD. I cannot blame other people - mother, brother, his fiancé, etc for my anger. I revised my statement from “I am angry with my brother for overstaying in my room.” To “I am angry.”

Step 2 : Pray ( you may laugh but it works) .I sat down in a quiet place and prayed to my Higher Power,” God, I am angry, and I hand over my anger to you. Help me return to a place of sanity.”

Step 3 : Share it  – I have discovered that sharing my feelings with someone else always helps. The feeling becomes less intense. I feel lighter and saner. Humans are social animals. When I share about my anger with someone I trust, my desire to express my anger in damaging or unhealthy ways diminishes. 

Step 4 : Write about what caused the anger. Writing is cathartic. It puts me in touch with my deepest needs and fears . In this particular scenario, I wrote about my anger, and discovered my need to have some private space to myself. It was not my brother, or mother, or anyone else. It was the un-fulfillment of my need that caused the anger. 

Step 5 : Take action to fulfill the need. Upon discovering my need for private space, I went to a park, and spent some solitary time with myself. I felt calmer. When I returned, I asked my brother in a respectful manner if he could spend some time somewhere else , so I could have my room for a few hours. He understood. I got the room.

Everybody was happy in the end.

No Country For Women

A few months back, when the Nirbhaya rape incident rocked Delhi, everyone started painting Delhi as “the rape capital of India.” I wanted to determine the veracity of this statement. I went online to check the rape statistics and incidents across various states in India. As per the Crime Bureau Statistics, this statement was not true. Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal account for the maximum number of reported rapes in the country. Rape cases are regularly reported from across the country.

When I posted on my facebook page  “Maharashtra is more unsafe for women than Delhi’, a  Mumbai based friend made vehement protests..She went to great lengths to prove me wrong, despite the fact that I had substantiated my claims with research data. Well, the recent broad daylight rape in Mumbai narrates a different story.

I decided to take my research to the next level and take an in-depth look at rapes at a more global level. I had been unnerved by the rape incident in Delhi, and wondered about cities/countries across the world where women could feel safe. 

I was quite surprised with my findings. As per a UN report, the United States had amongst the highest number of rapes with more than 80,000 cases of rape reported to the police from 2004 to 2010. India was at Number 2 with more than 20,000 reported rape cases every year. Australia, Botswana and Lesotho ranked highest in number of rapes per capita. But tallying sheer totals, Europe and the Americas consistently top the charts.
 
South Africa has the highest rates of rape in the world, with some 65,000 rapes and other sexual assaults reported for the year ending in March 2012, or 127.6 per 100,000 people in the country. A 2010 study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province in South Africa, more than 37 percent of men said they had raped a woman. In South Africa, rape is so common it barely makes the news. The rapes of elderly women and babies are outlined in four-line stories on the inside pages of local newspapers, but most sexual assaults get no public attention.

Sweden has the highest incidence of reported rapes in Europe and one of the highest in the world. According to a 2009 study, there were 46 incidents of rape per 100,000 residents. This figure is twice that of the UK which reports 23 cases, and four times that of the other Nordic countries, Germany and France. The figure is up to 20 times the figure for certain countries in southern and eastern Europe.

It is not only the rape statistics that confound me. It is also the rape laws that exist in various countries that brings several questions to mind. As per Amnesty International, Danish laws on sexual crimes fall under a chapter called "Vice Crimes", unlike in most Western countries, which sends the message that rape violates public morality or public order, rather than the rights of an individual to bodily integrity. The definition of rape is very narrow focusing on violence and excludes many situations dealing with other forms of abuse, which, according to the report, are considered rape in most other Western countries.

 In a 2006 case in Italy, the Court of Cassation ruled that a 41-year old man who raped his 14-year-old stepdaughter can seek to have his sentence reduced on mitigating circumstances, due to the fact that the girl had been already sexually active and "since the age of 13 had had many sexual relations with men of every age and it's right to assume that at the time of the encounter with the suspect her personality, from a sexual point of view, was much more developed than what one might normally expect from a girl of her age". UNICEF in Italy stated that the decision "seriously violates human rights and the dignity of a minor.

In a study, some of the common conclusions were given to the participants, it recorded that 33% of the police officers suggested that "some women deserve rape", 66% of police officers, as well as nearly 50% of other professional groups except the psychologists about 18% and 27% of psychiatrists, suggested that "the physical appearance and behaviors of women tempt men to rape." 

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines rape as penetration by the offender, and excludes rape by envelopment.I am not even going to delve into Middle-East rape statistics for obvious reasons.

I am left wondering  – Is there a Country Safe for Women? Or Is there “No Country for Women?”

The Prodigal Daughter

It was her younger brother's engagement. She had been invited to attend the function back home. Her brother was very keen that she be a part of this important event of his life. She was his only sibling.

But the thought of going back to that house sent shivers down her spine. She had visited the house many a times in the past few years. But every time she had to brace herself for the familiar nausea in which that house managed to envelop her. She had however done it in the past in the name of social and family obligations. She had tried  hard and in earnest to shrug off the dust of the past - to forgive and to forget. But it had not happened.

Her abuser still lived in that house, and the sly smile on his face never failed to bring the memories flooding back - memories of being abused at the young age of 13 years, memories of feeling suffocated and trapped, memories of an innocence lost forever.

Should she do it again in the name of her brother's love, in the name of family honor? She was not sure. She had found a little oasis of her own, and she was not willing to step back into the desert anymore. "But Didi, I really want you to come. There will be no joy without you," her brother had said over the phone.

After some introspection, she realized that she really wanted to be there for her brother's engagement. She loved him. She did not wish to deprive herself or him because of the abuser.

So how could she participate in the function without having to go through the trauma of staying at that house. She decided to book herself into a hotel." But what will the relatives say? This is unheard of - staying at a hotel when you have your own home. What about the family image?" her mother protested.

She chuckled at that. She had come a long way in life and had found a guiding philosophy that was serving her well - "To thine own self be true".

Letter from 80 year old me to the 35 year old me

I was asked to write a letter from “me at 80 years” to “me now at 35 years” expressing what the 80 year old Pearl, looking back at her life would want the Pearl right now to do with her life. I wrote it impromptu, so please excuse the causal writing. I never intended to make it public initially, but then I asked myself – what the hell, I want to share my lessons and experiences with others. Here goes the letter:

Dear Pearl at 35

I send you my love. My memory is somewhat faded but I still remember all the wonderful times we had together. I would very much like to tell you to get off your ass and go out and fulfill your dreams - does not matter how, just go out and fulfill them. Do not worry about money and other issues. Do not give in to your fears.  Just book that ticket to South America - your dream destination. You will never regret it, it will become one of the most cherished memories of your life - trust me on that. I promise you. 

Book that ticket. Do not over-think it. Ask for some help from the people you know there - ask Vandana, Deepa, etc... but just go, go, go, go.... The experience will leave you completely transformed. And when you are 80 years of age, and you look back at life, you will be really glad that you did it for me and for your own self. The trip will set the stage for all your other dreams to follow. So go for it. Do not wait any longer. You have already caused yourself so much trauma and pain by waiting for so long. Nothing else matters. The dream is waiting for you to fulfill it.

And yes, keep writing. Your writing is improving day by day. I am a published author today but it is all thanks to you, and your consistent effort - so keep writing and keep the faith .

Lots of love
Pearl at 80

What do you think "80 year old you" would ask you to do with your life now?