My uncle touched me wrongly

(As told to Aritrik Dutta Chowdhury)

I knew it to be art classes. I was convinced as a toddler that my youngest maternal uncle, in class 9, was a brilliant painter. I, a class 2 student, needed art classes to culturally equip myself as per my parents’ tastes. I hardly knew what lay between my legs, outside my body; or what hung like a sack with two seeds that hurt when touched.

My uncle held my hands and taught me to draw – animals, birds, trees, and then, human body parts. I was shown a nose and made to draw one, shown eyes and made to draw one, and then something that looked like the front part of my toy aircraft. I was told that I too had one, a tinier one, which was supposedly waiting for me to grow up like my uncle.

Click here to read: Her live-in partner sexually abused her daughter. 

I was touched wrongly, tickled at weird places. I found it fun, nothing affected me as it should have, and I just knew it was a perverse pleasure to seek out privacy from the pandemonium of a parent-made monotonous life.

I was promised another attic pleasure if I finished my drawing, and intelligent kid as I was, I rushed to complete the same.

Months passed, every Sunday I rushed to my art classes, quickly finished my work, and was taken to the attic-room. I was taught ways of masturbation, and was told that it wasn’t my age to use the method. My crotch ached as I tried to emulate my uncle, my mouth was used as a vessel that received my pulsating uncle’s secretions. I thought that was the way. I was told that was the way to turn into a man from a boy. The dream of growing up itched within my crotch, the dream of being a man…

Today I’m in college, I fall in love with women, take them to bed, satisfy them, breathe in and breathe out, sweat in effusion; and still remember my uncle’s organ thrust into my mouth; I still don’t know whether I was meant to give or receive. I know, I’m sanguine rather, that I am not a homosexual, I don’t feel attracted by the idea of rubbing against another man; yet what perplexes me is the ambiguity of not being able to comprehend the allure for the organ, which I was taught was the masculine way.

I love to love dearly, I know I can keep a woman happy and contented. Yet, I fail to satisfy myself in any such sexual encounter. I envy my friends who gossip about the fulfilling afternoons when their parents have been away, I dream of a day when the face of my uncle would be obliterated from my vision when I hug a woman or kiss her. I await a night when the pillows won’t smell of a man’s sweat anymore; when I won’t look at my organ and panic if it was like my uncle’s.

Click here to read: She puts so much pressure on me in bed, I have lost interest in sex. 

I wanted to be happy, I wanted to settle down with the girl I had left back in the alleys of adolescence. She knew it all! She knew it enough to cure me and care for me.

My best friend had told me how I was a victim of child abuse! She convinced me that it wasn’t my fault to feel confounded about my orientation or sexual interests. My senses and genes were mutated at an age when they found shape.

Was I raped? What do you call a child who had had his inception of sexual life with an adult of the same sex using him to quench his libido? What do you say to a child who grew up knowing that the feasible form of sex was when he was made to receive something he already had in all the areas of the body which was meant for usage otherwise?

Click here to read: What do when a father abuses their child. 

I  still wonder. I still wait. For the manna-dew to besmear me when I would live without the qualms, and confusions. When I will feel satisfied while satisfying my spouse. When I will have a true inception of romance, one free from the clutches of forced sexuality and morbid frustrations; one that exalts, not excruciates?