When I first came to Karnataka as a kid in her late teens, I had
lived in a place where people were ashamed to be seen throwing their own
dustbins but would pay little servant children one rupee to throw the
dustbin into the main dump for them. Little girls were brutally molested
at the age of four on buses with their mums standing right next to
them, unaware a grown man was torturing their child.
My
prettier classmates were so traumatised by molestation on buses, that
they would avoid taking the particular number of the bus for the rest of
their lives. I saw naked or semi-naked teenagers walking dazed and
abandoned on the way to school, having lost their minds after being
raped by perverts who took their clothes away so that the kids would
keep suffering even after being raped as they would have to walk around
naked. At school, teachers having an eye on little class 9 girls and
sometimes marrying them as soon as they came of age did happen, but
should such paedophile behavior be tolerated even if it ends in
marriage?
Because my dad was dead, the uncle who was an
uncle to all other kids, and had a son my age, deliberately rolled his
tongue and bent his head to show me he was staring at my body, even in
front of his wife. I hated life and wanted to die ever since I was four.
I hated men. I continually fantasized of torturing my molesters to
death as a means of escaping from the pain. I was not alive, nothing
seemed real.
I then came to Karnataka. The first time
in my life, I saw how nice and trustworthy Kannadiga men were, how kind.
They treated me like a child, and were so fatherly. Far from molesting
little girls, they were more interested in going to work, cleaning their
houses in the morning, taking their wives out for a treat at the hotel
so that they would not have to cook. These men made me realize that my
attitude towards men was generalized and unfair, and gave me the gift of
learning to think of men as good human beings who could be some of the
most decent friends I have ever had.
I learnt to smile
after many years, to want to live. I started making friends, even male
friends, I stopped shivering when I saw a man. I learnt to accept love
and friendship. Among South Indian men, even poor laborers were much
more unperverted and kind-hearted than professors in the sadistic place
I'd left. One day, when I was new to Bangalore, a lorry driver started
putting his hand behind my neck on the back of the seat, and flicking
his fingers. A poor Tamil laborer sitting behind me gave him such a
glare that he got scared and moved away. Where I came from, if a man saw
a child being molested, he would join in. That is why, Karnataka is a
place I love.
Little do people know what exactly
happens when a kid is located in an unsafe part of India. I see
Indibloggers theorizing that women are bad and torture men in offices,
that fears are exaggerated, and I wonder how much of life such armchair
social scientists have seen. Let them take their four year old daughter
to such a place and when she comes and tells them in their baby language
how and where they have been touched, such armchair scientists will
puke out their theories with the vomit they feel like making.
I'm
grateful that people in Karnataka protect and love children for the
major part, and such incidents are less here. If it hadn't been for my
coming here, I would not be alive today. This is the only place I've
felt safe in, and healed to become someone who loves people. Today, I've
left my fears behind, but I still wish people at least try to
understand how unsafe female children can be and have some sympathy for
them instead of getting defensive and passing generalisations about
female bosses being worse than male bosses or females misusing the law,
both of which, even if true have NOTHING to do with child abuse, and
therefore do nothing to refute the existence of child abuse.
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