She was eight years old with long, thick wavy hair which was a chore for her mother to maintain. The child’s hair grew so fast and there was so much of it. Daily she’d arrive with a comb or brush in her hand, as well as a hair tie and ask her mother to help her tie up her hair for school. Every morning, tired and not fully rested, her mother would have to endure braiding or pony tails in such thick hair. Her hair was too much to manage.

The child found herself being taken to a salon and plonked on a chair. The hairdresser asked what she should do and her mother commanded the woman to chop it all off. The child had no say. She couldn’t speak afraid to anger her mother who had really had enough of her hair. She was old enough to wash and brush short hair herself. It didn’t even occur to her mother to teach her how to braid it herself. There was too much going on in her mother’s busy life and her hair was not a priority. Why should it be?

A few days later her mother was going the waxed, a ritual the children were used to. The mother went into a room alone with a woman and then went for a bath. That day, however, the mother decided the eight year old was old enough to be waxed. For a while, the mother had been telling her daughter that she was too hairy which was strange to the child. Her brother was hairier. Her father was spectacularly hairy. The child began to notice all her hair and wondered why she should be ashamed of it. She had been told girls should be hairless everywhere but their eyebrows and the hair on their head. She had been told men don’t like hair, a sentence her mother often uttered which left her feeling confused.

The child was told she had to get waxed. She asked why and she was scolded for being disobedient. The child was stupid. She didn’t realise that she would have to get used to being waxed because eventually, she would have to get married and who on earth would want to marry a female who refuses to remove all her body hair? Who on earth would put up with such a dirty woman? Such a woman would be unworthy and a misfit. Her mother was doing what was best for the child knowing the child would not just understand but thank her later in life. She was told waxing would reduce her hair growth by pulling the hair from the root thus weakening it.

The child felt nothing but excruciating pain. The waxing woman roughly grabbed her and applied a layer of hot wax to her leg. The child wanted to scream but she couldn’t. The woman then applied a cloth and ripped the hair away. The child started screaming and wanted to cry but her mother got angry. Stop it! The child cried and wondered why she was enduring this. Is this because her mother wanted to hurt her? Is it because her mother wanted to hit her but she couldn’t do it herself?

The child was left sticky and hairless. The woman waxed her arms and legs until not a hair was left on a toe or a finger. The child had never experienced a pain like this before. She was silent and in shock. She knew crying would get her nowhere.

The next time the waxing woman came, her mother told her to get ready. Her mother gave her a list of all her cousins who were waxed early and acknowledged it hurt them. But really it wasn’t much pain and wait until she had a child. Then she’d know real pain. The child was upset but had no voice. She locked herself up in her bathroom when the woman came. Her mother dragged her out and bribed her with candy. She wasn’t allowed candy. She took the candy knowing the waxing was going to happen anyway.

Waxing became a ritual she had no control over. She wasn’t informed when it was going to happen so she wouldn’t kick up a fuss. She was too young and too stupid to be given time to find a way out of it. She was too stupid to understand this was for her own good.

The child had already learnt her body didn’t belong to her because her grandfather used to pull her cheeks until they were raw and red. Her relatives could pick her up and do as they please with her. They could throw her around, kiss her, hug her and make her sit on their laps even if she didn’t want to. The child knew it was rude to refuse adults anything which is why she didn’t try.

A little while ago, the child was repeatedly molested by a driver who was allowed to pick and drop her alone. He would often take the wrong route home saying he needed to do something on the way. She soon realised what that meant and would sit in the car frozen with fear as he parked it in an isolated spot and approached her. She was tiny and he was huge. He would hold her down and feel her everywhere. He would force open her mouth and put his tongue in hers. He would then return her home often complaining about how rude she’d been knowing she’d get a scolding.

That summer the child’s father gave her a big surprise. He would take her to Malaysia to be with her beloved uncle and aunt. They would fly to Singapore together and then go to Malaysia. The child was excited and she was eager to spot Care Bears in the clouds. She wanted a window seat so she could look for them. Her father sat next to her drinking from the second they took off to the end of the flight when he was refused more. He had an argument with the man sitting next to him on women’s rights.

They made it to Singapore. The child had to carry her father’s large shoulder bag because her father was in no state to do so. She doesn’t recall how they got their luggage and a taxi to go to their hotel. They managed to check in. Her father quickly opened the mini bar and she got distracted with her book. She then had to go to the bathroom. When she came out, she saw her father lying face first on the floor.

The child panicked. Her father was dead. What was she supposed to do? She didn’t even have shoes on but she ran down to the lobby and asked for help in her broken English. She remembers saying the words, “my father is dead.” A kind man quickly took her back to her room and said, “your father is just drunk. You need to call your mother.” He connected her to her mother and told her mother they would have to call child services. The mother then took the phone and told the child to stay put. Someone would come and get her and make sure she went to Malaysia unaccompanied. Her mother told her some nice family friends would come and get her. The child was frozen, unable to process what was happening.

After what felt like an eternity, a kind woman showed up with her son. They asked the child if she was hungry. She nodded not knowing how to speak. They fed her and got her suitcase. They took her out and showed her some of their city. They then drove her to the airport where the airline took over. They put a tag on her which said “unaccompanied child” and made sure she reached Malaysia safe. They handed her over to her uncle who took her home and gave her the unconditional love she craved. He picked her up, gave her a hug and made her feel safe. She was ok.

Her father came and no one talked about what happened. The child learnt that talking about this would be THE WORST THING because her father was not a BAD MAN. Her father used to get drunk and if she asked why he was drinking so much, he would tell her it was because of her. Having to take her to another country must have made him drink. She must have done something because she was never without blame and she was obviously stupid. She was also ungrateful. Didn’t she know how much the trip cost? her parents asked as if a child would understand money. Didn’t she know only good parents send their children for holidays abroad? Didn’t she know there were homeless children starving the streets? She nodded. Of course she knew having toured slums and other areas with her mother since her early years. Her parents made her realise she was an ungrateful brat.

Soon after she came back her brother was getting a piggy back ride by the cook. The cook offered her one and held her tight. The house was empty. He took her into the guest room and proceeded to pull her panties off. He stuck his fingers in them and wiggled them around. The child froze. He was talking but she couldn’t hear him. She finally heard him ask why she wasn’t enjoying it and she got angry. She asked him why he did it and he laughed. She threatened to tell her mother and he laughed again saying she would never believe her.

The child wanted to talk to her parents. When her mother came home, she was angry and too enraged to be approached. The child kept wanting to speak but no words came out of her mouth. Her mother never noticed looks of despair on her face. That night, her father drank and her parents fought. She knew she couldn’t tell them.

The cook then approached her whenever he wanted and whenever he pleased. She started running away from him and realised he was terrified of coming after her when she was on the slanted roof. That roof became her safe space, the only space she knew she couldn’t be found. She was standing there a few days later when her mother saw her and started yelling at her. Are you mad? Do you want to die? You will fall off! Get off!

The child obeyed and her enraged mother told her she was stupid. She was too stupid to realise how dangerous it was. Why was she doing this to her mother? The child had no answer. She was stressing her mother out. She apologised and promised never to do it again. She did only to have the cook tell on her.

The cook often found the child alone so he would take her to his room or other rooms in the house. The child was often supervised. Earlier, she was always with her grandmother who watched her like a hawk. Her grandmother was sick. She missed her immensely but she knew even her grandmother would not be able to help her.

The cook didn’t just insert his fingers in her vagina anymore. He would feel her everywhere, squeezing her, leaving her in pain. He soon started to overpower her in a way where she froze. She knew fighting him was futile. He reminder her speaking to her parents would make her an even worse child. After all, her father drank because of her and her parents didn’t care. Why would they leave her in his care if they didn’t want him to do what he did? She heard it all and realised he was right.

She remember the day he forced her to take off all her clothes and he took his off too. The child was terrified, crying but his giant hand muffled her screams. She felt intense, sharp pains as he inserted his penis into her vagina. She was squirming and biting his hand. He finally let her go. She remembers only this: she got up in a daze and somehow ran to her bathroom where she saw blood tricking down her legs. She panicked. Her mother would kill her. Her underwear was soiled with blood and she desperately stood in the shower, under a small tap rubbing the blood away. She used shampoo, soap and everything else. She was terrified of anyone finding it.

The child never wore her Wednesday underwear on Wednesdays again. The cook had made it clear to her that if she told anyone, he would do it to her brother and maybe her toddler sister too. The child, the eldest daughter, knew she couldn’t let him do the same to anyone else so she resigned herself to her fate.

The child continued to live with the belief that her body belong to her mother, the cook and everyone else to do as they pleased with it. The waxing continued. The taunts that it had to be done because men don’t like hair continued. The cook continued to thank her for being hairless for him as he ran his hands all over his tiny, hairless body. She understood what her mother meant now. Men didn’t like hair and her mother was raising her to realise this young, before the world or any man could tell her otherwise.

The child turned nine and her summer holidays started. She was playing with her cousin when her aunt made her and her bother come to her room. She told them coldly that their grandfather was dead and they would have to go to the funeral. The children were confused. They had never experienced death before. They held on each other not sure what to expect. Soon they arrived at their grandparents house where there were many people around. Their grandmother was hysterical. Their father came to tell them their grandfather was dead. He took them to see the body and they saw their grandfather’s face frozen with cotton stuffed in his nose and mouth. The understood that death meant he could no longer breathe. They stared at the body unable to move as their father wept.

A completely brokenhearted grandmother barged in screaming at her husband’s corse. She was commanding him to wake up. She wasn’t accepting he was dead. They asked her for permission to take him away for burial and she refused. She not only refused she kept screaming at them to bring him back. She had to be restrained. The children watched as she screamed, ran outside after the ambulance and was then brought back in, still weeping, angry and hysterical.

That was the day their grandmother lost her speech. She would never talk again.

When their grandmother came to live with them, the child was happy. She had a safe space to go to. She knew the cook couldn’t come and get her in grandmother’s room especially not with nurses around. He would try but she could refuse. Although watching her grandmother become a shell made her sad and sick, she knew it was safer for her than to allow the cook to do what he did to her.

One night, the child was asleep in her bed and someone came in. She didn’t think much of it because her mother often came in or sent a maid on occasion. But the maid slept in her brother’s room perhaps because he was more worthy of protection.

It was quite late and everyone was asleep. The child woke up because someone picked her up, muffled her mouth with a large hand and took her away.

The cook did what he always did. He had a key he could enter from and was given to him so that her parents wouldn’t have to unlock the kitchen door for him to start making their morning bed tea. He told the child about the key proudly, and showed it to her. He asked her why her parents would give her the key unless they wanted him to use it whenever he wanted. The child had spent a long time now trying to speak, trying to explain but she feared she wouldn’t be heard. To top it off, her father was drinking even more and her mother’s anger amplified too.

The cook eventually left after two years and the child forgot about what happened to her. She spent five years blissfully unaware of what she had endured until one night when she had a vivid dream which lead to many nights of vivid dreams. She told her friends who told her she must tell her mother. She didn’t tell them everything. Her dream mostly focused on the first incident with the piggyback. Not all memories had surfaced yet.

The now teenager had lost her grandmother after being told her grandmother could be miraculously cured if she prayed enough. She prayed with all her heart and came to realise that even God didn’t really love her enough. She took her friends advice and told her mother.

“So?” her mother said, leaving the teenager confused at her reaction.
The teenager told her, again, that the cook had done bad things to her.
“Oh servants do that,” her mother said. “It happened to all of us.”
The perplexed teenager was told that was happened to her was a rite of passage in every home. She assumed it was like waxing: she didn’t know well enough to realise that it wasn’t a big deal but she was a dramatic child who liked to make a mountain out of a molehill.
The teenager’s face gave away her despair and grief. Her mother then told her it wasn’t ok but she would be ok.

The next evening, her father was drinking earlier than usual and more than usual. It was all her fault. She was the reason why he was drinking and she remembers his words, “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop what happened to you. I’m upset this happened to MY child. I’m drinking to cope.”

The teenager instantly regretted telling her parents and her mother was angry that her husband was drinking so much. It was very much the teenagers fault. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? Why couldn’t she realise she was responsible for her father’s drinking and now she had really proven she was. Her family suffered because she chose not to keep her big mouth shut.

The stupid child grew into an angry teenager who then became a depressed and suicidal adult. She was told she was unforgiving. She was told she was ungrateful. She was told she spoke too much. Those who wounded her with words couldn’t tolerate her wounding them with her own. She wrote, daily, to have a place to put down her words. She wrote because she knew humans wouldn’t hear her but a paper might.

She wanted to die because her existence was a burden to her family. What has happened to her was shameful and made her parents look bad. She ate food and breathed in oxygen she didn’t deserve. She acknowledged she was why everything went wrong. She understood she was blamed because she was responsible for everyone’s suffering. She wanted to end their pain by dying. She wanted them to live happily knowing she was the reason why they couldn’t be happy.

The child became an adult who grew up with extreme pain which would take over her whole body. Her periods were excruciating but doctors told her mother to get her a psychiatrist for being demanding. They told her to get married and have children. Her mother told her the same. Even though she would be sent home from school for fainting from period pain, she was repeatedly told it would be over when she had children. She was told this as if she had no option but to have children. She lost all hope in doctors.

By her late thirties, the pain became debilitating and severe. She desperately searched for a doctor to help her but they all told her it was normal. She found herself unable to walk on some days. Her back pain was consistent. She would throw up randomly and she was repeatedly told to lose weight. She tried and she failed. She kept thinking she was responsible for her own suffering.

She wasn’t a stupid adult despite being made to feel like a stupid child. As an adult, she made an effort to become a theorist, a feminist one at that to desperately heal her mother wound. She couldn’t understand why her feminist mother was not at all feminist when it came to her own daughters. She couldn’t understand what feminism really was because while her mother advocated for other women’s right not marry, she was repeatedly told she had to get married. She became a theorist to help her make sense of not just the world but her world.

She had grown up in a family where she knew she was the misfit. She also knew that everything that went wrong somehow went wrong because of her. She was aware that no matter how much she did, it was never good enough. She was fully aware her father drank because of her and she was stupid because she started reacting to him. Her mother recruited her for help with her father and destroyed their relationship.

She finally reached out to an old friend in another country who told her to get an ultrasound. Her mother took her to a doctor who shamed her and yelled at her for being a bad Muslim. He told her she wouldn’t even need a check up if she had been a good woman, a good Muslim and had children. He forcibly stuck his finger up her vagina, leaving her in pain that lasted days and refused a transvaginal ultrasound saying he would not perform them on unmarried women.

She found another doctor and insisted on a transvaginal ultrasound. A large ovarian cyst was detected. She was told it was so large it had to be surgically removed. The surgery left her brutalised. She woke up in pain and was refused painkillers that would help her. She was only given Panadol. She was mocked by the nurses for not knowing how to endure pain. She had a tube sticking out of her which her doctor brutally pulled out the next day as she told her she had stage 4 endometriosis and would need further treatments including injections with large needles stuck through her abdomen to fix her issues.

She ended up with another cyst and more surgeries. The fat woman was rapidly losing weight and her loved ones told her it suited her to be sick. She wilted and became very thin. Everyone told her being sick made her look good. She basically had an autoimmune disorder. She got sick of doctors, sick of treatments, sick of being sick and went into therapy specially for medical trauma.

Therapy helped her uncover that it wasn’t medical trauma that was the issue per se. That was something she could overcome. She learnt that many women with issues like her had a similar childhood. She learnt that trauma survivors with endometriosis were often misdiagnosed with mental health issue. She learnt she had PMDD and CPTSD. She had to learn how to overcome.

The therapy continued and she entered dark placed until one day, her therapist told her she was well on her way to healing. But she continues to feel unvalued, unheard and unhappy with her family of origin. She had realised years ago that women need to make their own families and support systems. She realised women like her would have to do everything on their own and asking for support was the same as asking for abuse.

The wounded child no longer collapses in pain expect when she’s around her family hearing them talk about her in third person and although she doesn’t tell them much, she hears them make assumptions. She listen to them blaming her for things she has nothing to do with. She tolerates being scapegoated silently knowing conflict with those who will not hear her will lead to her collapsing in pain.

She will keep trying to heal herself with her writing, with her analysis and with her stories. The trouble is, as a South Asian, she knows everyone will read themselves into her stories. She knows that people who can make her illness about themselves can easily make fictional characters about themselves. She cannot heal the unhealed. She can only heal herself even if she’s disowned. She finally has the strength.

Disclaimer: no one has been named and this writing has not been categorised as non fiction. As a result, any inference is the readers and not the author’s responsibility.