Endless Road (Wattys 2015)

Part Two: Chapter Twelve

Part Two

2010-2012

Chapter Twelve

18th January, 2010

       Every year, about three or four times, a particular event repeated itself with continued diligence. It had started for me when I was twelve. I didn't even know what it meant, why it had happened to me or why he did it. At the time, I was too small... small enough to know that girls and boys were different, and that girls bled out onto their underwear while guys didn't. Small enough to know certain things, but not enough of them. Small enough that when it started, I found it completely normal. After all, I was a gullible, innocent girl. I'd believed him when he'd first come into my room, first approached me at my study table and settled me on his lap. When it happened, I'd thought all the little girls' father's friends behaved the same way. I thought that because that's what he'd told me.

        "Don't tell daddy," he would whisper in my ear when he would be alone with me in my room or in the bathroom. "It's our secret. We don't have to tell anyone."

        The sessions usually lasted for less than ten minutes. It would be 'my special way of greeting uncle Ron' when he came home. He was my dad's college friend, a friend good enough to be trusted alone with his daughter; a friend who worked with him at the firm as a draftsman, who had a wife and two children, who was recently divorced and living alone somewhere in South Mumbai. That time, during the beginning of his periodic visits, I'd found him rather intriguing. He'd always be nice to me, to Surya... he would bring us presents, would teach me how to draw, and would stay at our house for hours at a stretch. Then the meetings in my room began, and everything changed.

       When I was old enough to understand what exactly was happening, I didn't have the courage to tell anyone. Besides, no one would believe me. Uncle Ron, or Mr. Ronak Chheda, was a respected man and one of my father's good friends. The divorce with his wife had left him a bitter man, but he was still holding himself together and taking care of himself, getting his life back on track. No one knew how much of it was my part... no one knew that when he came visiting at our house, he reserved 'special time' for me. He sat me on his lap, like he always did, and murmured soft things in my ears.

       "Uncle Ron missed you," he'd say. "Did you draw with the pencils I got you last time?"

      "Yes, uncle Ron," I would say meekly.

       "Did you like them?"

       "Yes, uncle Ron."

        It would always be, "Yes, uncle Ron." No matter what he asked... whether it was to allow him to gift me small things or to allow him into my room and pretend to take his help when I was studying, while my parents fixed him dinner or reasoned that he liked being with their kids alone since he'd lost his own. Truth was, he was charming and he was good to me afterwards. He'd kiss me gently on the cheek after pushing me down on my feet, and he'd always get me a bar of white chocolate. I would take it, because I did not know otherwise. Not until it was too late, anyway.

       I hadn't seen uncle Ron in a couple of years now. He'd gone on some foreign trip for business, and it had left me with a dull feeling of relief. For a whole two years, I'd expected the bell to ring and for him to show his oval, jovial face. But it hadn't happened. He hadn't visited in over two years now. There had been no meetings in my room, no whispering secret things in my ears, no sitting me on his lap. That's why, when I opened the door that Wednesday evening and found him beaming at me from the doorway, I froze. My feet planted into the ground, and I gulped, feeling a huge sense of dread creep over me.