A thing demands to be told and it will. Be told.

And you will have to hold it. To reckon with it. To face it.

There is a memory I have that sticks to the brain. Light filtering through curtains and onto the ceiling, where the edge of the upright wall meets the flat of the top.

This is a memory of violence. And it unravels as it must. Over years of suffering and pain.

The shadow of light rests on the wall and the curtains billow to create waves over this light. Like ripples over clear water.

For years this is all I remember. Memory that catches light. Suspended, all on its own. No other thing to give it context, a place, a life beyond the image itself.

There is a room to that memory and a time of day. But there is nothing else: just me on a bed and the light and its shadow on the wall, where the ceiling meets the side.

It comes to me, this memory, when I am not ready. It comes to me without my knowing it.

When I put on a coat and find a hand on the back of my neck. This is a memory of rape. And this is your warning, as it was mine.

You are free to turn away. I can’t force you to face it.

The mind forgets what the body doesn’t.

The body remembers the violation. The mysterious pain in the back of the leg. The crushing weight of a body on the back.

The disfigured back I carry with me until I can’t. Until the pain that comes before its time becomes too much to bear. And the shoulders split and the blades collide. A crack in the crust of my being.

So that it takes time to repair it. The broken body. The structure that bears the weight.

Because, if at 6, when you are still not yet born into this world, and are raped, there is a lot of catching up to do.

I try to catch up to it. The growing up. I grow older year by year. I grow older, put on some pants, go to school, every year a new year, and I grow up and go to college and I graduate and I come into the world and I get a job. And I go to school again and become something.

The thing breaks you and you live on. That is the crisis.

I live on and become something. I am not quite sure what. But what it is, this, is survival.

That is enough for today. The rest for another (day). I will take my time.

Thank you for your messages. They are like one giant communal hug. They are comforting and create space.

I will begin again soon. And it will be difficult. So mute me if you need to.

What happens when you lose touch with your body? It is an unbecoming.

My friend is killed and I more than mourn him. I am devastated. We weren’t even that close. But his death reminds me that the world can be torn apart again. And again.

I am told there are bullets in his back and I can’t process it. Not that early in the morning. It was 7 when I was called and told he had died. I go back to sleep and wake up crying.

I cry for hours in the hallway, then for what seems like hours in the toilet stall. Someone asks me how I’m doing and I sniffle “okay.”

I go to attend my classes and can’t open the door. I collapse and stay there.

How do you keep with the news that your friend is killed in a suicide attack in a mosque. The mind can not comprehend the desecration.

The mind does not want to be reminded of that other time the world fell apart beyond belief.

And later it reminds me of exactly that time. I am in the bed and I turn around and touch something that should not be there.

I both know and do not know what it is. And a larger hand grabs me and makes me touch it. The thing that should not be there.

I remember the touch and I want to forget it. I am too young to be the object of desire. I am too young to know what a penis is when it is stiff and hard in my hand.

Where is the violation? Does it begin with that touch that I am forced to make. Or did it begin before that. What am I doing in this bed. Which is not mine. Which I know is not mine to be in. How did I get here?

What happens when you lose touch with your body? You lose touch with your body. You don’t touch what is part of you. For years, for 6 years or 8, you refuse to make contact with yourself there.

Every touch is a nightmare. You begin to look at your body like it is an alien thing. Why? You have a right to your body. Not every touch is one of desire. There is a touch, a feeling, of owning what is part of you. A using of your body. A functional touch.

Is it shame or is it fear? The two mix in your head and in your hands.

I remember when I begin to touch myself again. When I acquaint myself uneasily with what has been made to feel alien. A part of myself that is a thing in itself. With its own life outside of mine.

I think it will hurt me and am surprised when it doesn’t. The shame stays. It has found a home in a place in my body which is no longer mine.

Your body is your body until it isn’t.

Until it is someone else’s to use. And to enjoy. And to make their own. They have a right to it and will have it. At their convenience. When they want.

The memory of the touch. The multiple touches comes to me when I think of the bullets in my friend’s back. He is dead and I am not. I am alive and he is not.

For now, I push the thought away. It is not real, I tell myself. And go back to my grief. Focus on what is real, not what is in your head.

What is real is the body being put to rest.

Enough for today. More another (time).

Beginning again.

A portrait, for reference, from yesterday:

The mind releases a memory in drops, like from a pipette I once used in the chemistry lab at school. One at a time.

This is a recent one. A revelation that comes into view slowly, beginning as a blur and then now, this morning, coming into focus.

I remember the house where the thing took place. There is an architecture to the violence. Rooms that are stained with my childhood.

I spend a lot of my time here. It is not my house but it may as well be. I spend a lot of time here. I am entrusted to its care. I have friends here and family. I watch TV here and fight with my brothers. I grow up here and then I grow up here.

I remember scenes from a tennis match. A Wimbledon final. When I don’t even know what tennis is but can recognize that something occurs. A man wins a game he is not supposed to win and breaks down in tears. He runs into the crowd and is embraced by his family.

I watch this happen in one of the rooms of this house. The elation. This room is downstairs and to the left of the entrance door that I never use. I always use the back. That is how familiar I am to this house.

What happens in the end happens upstairs. And I need to go deep in my brain to recover my steps, climbing up those stairs on my own slowly. Usually I bound up those stairs in giant leaps.

But that comes after. It is not yet time to take you upstairs with me. For now, we stay downstairs.

There is a second room in memory that blurs with the first. A second light that mixes with the light of the first. The two are connected but they happen at different times. There is a press on my lips I don’t welcome but it doesn’t matter. I suffer it.

The violation doesn’t end with the rape and doesn’t begin with it. Time is bent out of shape.

But this, the kiss, the unwanted kiss, comes first in time. It is the drawing closer, the bringing close, the making familiar, the wicked creation of a trust that is not voluntarily given but forcibly acquired.

I understand now that this is what is called grooming: the development of an emotional link with a child, to lower the child’s guard, to make sexual touch familiar to the child. And finally to lure the child into time alone. To bring the child’s guard down.

I am called to the man. Always the same pattern. My friend, my brother, my member of my family is asked—deputed—to call me. To let me know that I am needed. Or what is really true: that I am required.

I present myself. This man is also my family. I have been taught to trust family. Family is safe. Until it is not. I go into the room where he sits.

This is the room where he does his work. There is a desk here and a huge shelf of books that I recognize by colour and not by name. Green books and red. And mementos that are awards of achievement. The titles are too great and boring to be read by a child.

There is a chair in which he sits and does his work. The work for which he wins his awards. The work that makes him strong. The chair swivels and he turns around. And asks me to come closer.

He calls me by a name I no longer use but still respond to. This is the name only my family knows. Or those who are as close to me as my family. He makes me hate my own name. The name of the time of my childhood.

I know his name but I refuse to use it here. Not because I am afraid but because you are not ready. And I am not ready either. Things must now happen on my time. You must hold your curiosity in.

I withhold the name for a reason. And you must respect my reason. I have a right to his name. He stole mine from me.

He calls me closer and I go closer. He is family and I am taught to trust family. He is older and I am taught to respect my elders. I go closer and he puts his hands on my cheeks.

His voice is soft but it can be harsh. It is soft now but it can be scary. It can be menacing. I know because this is his house and I have lived here and I have heard it when it yells at those who are at his mercy.

But now, here, it is soft. And it coaxes and it pleads. And it comes closer to my ear the closer he comes to my face. So that now I can see him and I can hear him. The face I can describe better than my own face. Better than my mother’s face. Or my father’s.

Better even than my wife’s face. Which is the face I love and see most in the world. The face I try to memorize but can’t. But I remember his face even though I do not try to remember it. Even though I try to forget it.

I am getting overwhelmed. My brain is in a mix. I can’t write another sentence. Perhaps that is enough for now. I need a break. The mind has released today more than a single drop. I must respect what it gives me and how much. It can’t be forced.

More later. I appreciate those who are reading. Who have the strength to read. This is not easy. It was not easy to live and it is not easy to confront. I respect your courage.

These are things that happen to us. To those close to us. By those close to us. Maybe these are things that have already happened to us. And for that reason it is easy to turn away, to disclaim responsibility. Easier to put our heads in the sand and pretend they never happened.

I see you. I appreciate you. I feel your shock and your pain for me. Which is also a kind of love. But it is okay. I am okay. And you are too, and will be. We heal together.

If this makes you angry, which is inevitable, I ask you to hold on to it for now. Anger can consume. Both you and me along with it. Let the anger go and feel sad with me. Anger is not useful at this moment. It is a threat to the space I have to speak.

I look at my arms and my hands and see my inheritance from my grandfather.

Sorry, I had to return to class. It has now ended. I will be writing again soon. Maybe after a glass of water. The memories intrude and our lives and our work go on.

There is a texture to the violation. A hairiness. I look at my arm and I see the hair that has come to take root on it.

My grandfather is a hairy man. My father too. And my uncle. All the men I love are hairy men. Hair on your arm, on your chest, on your legs, on your body are signs I take, as a teenager as indications that I am growing up to be a man.

Puberty is a strange time. You develop. A mustache unbecomes your face. It makes you look silly. Halfway between growing up and staying a child.

I begin to shave. I take pride in it. My father shaves. And my grandfather, the other one, who is now dead, may he rest in peace, did too.

To become a man is to start shaving. To become a man is to have hair on your chest and under your arms.

In the mirror in the bathroom of the house we move to in Lahore, when we move, I inspect myself daily. I see hair come to me. Sparse hair in the middle of my ribs on my chest, in a faint line that gets thicker by the day.

I give up cricket and start watching football. There is a player I admire but also despise. Because he is the captain of the team my friends support and I, therefore, hate. His name is Patrick Vieira and he plays for Arsenal. He is the captain of the time I despise.

He is a tall man and he gallops around the pitch with his long legs and his bald head and he is a great player. He sweats and the sweat forms a wet patch on the front of his red shirt. On his chest. It looks like jelly.

I clip out images of any football match the local newspaper prints on the sports page which is at the back of the newspaper. Every day I start reading from the back of the paper, turn a page and look for the pictures I can clip.

I paste these pictures on to my bathroom door. It is a collage of images and Patrick Vieira is there with his sweaty jelly patch of sweat, captured in an image.

I look at myself in the mirror and stare at my chest. I am growing up. And I am also a half-decent football player. At least I think so. I have just made the team. The elder boys call me Ronaldo because I am fast and I have red shoes that my grandfather got for me on his travels.

I am sorry if this is boring to you but this is my life as a teenage boy. Chest hair and MSN Messenger on dialup Internet and football on TV and during the lunch break in school. The game gives me friends. I feel seen.

I am happy and I am growing up. I measure myself by the length of the hair on my chest. I am becoming like my father, like my grandfather: a man.

One day when I am older, when I am old enough that the hair on my chest is like a thick forest and I am old enough to know without measuring the length of the hair on my chest, I clip it all out.

I take a tweezer to it and pinch out every last hair from my chest. I am naked on my chest for the first time since I was a child. But I am not a child.

It hurts but I do it and feel relieved. I tell Diana over the phone what I have done and she doesn’t know what to make of it. But she is sad.

I look at the hair on my arm and think of grandfather. I look a lot like him. I have inherited so much from him.

His arms are my arms. My hands are his hands. Soft and boxy and young. His hands are young even though he is old. My hands will be young if I grow to be old like him.

I look at my hands and always want them to be like his. Soft and clean and comforting. When he touches me on my cheek I feel loved. Sometimes he does it still. Even though I am old. Because he is older and he loves me still.

My friend tells me when his father was young he was a teacher in Cambodia. When the Pol Pot regime came they wanted to kill all the teachers or send them to the labor camps. They identified teachers by their hands. By their clean hands that were soft not hardened by real labor.

I am a teacher and my hands are soft.

My friend tells me his father took a knife to his hands and cut them up so the people who wanted to kill teachers or re-educate them wouldn’t know he was a teacher.

I don’t want to cut my hands up. My hands are my grandfather’s. And I want to keep them that way.

I think about the hands that touched me on the cheek that one time when time stood still. When the lips drew close to mine and I could smell his smell.

The smell that stays with me. It is the smell of man. The smell of expensive perfume liberally applied to the chest I will come to know later.

He touches me on the cheek. And later when my grandfather touches me on the cheek I squirm away from him. He has ruined for me my grandfather’s love for me. I don’t want to be touched on the cheek any more. Not by anyone.

When he presses his lips to my lips I am not in the room.

I am somewhere else. I am outside. I am outside but I am also inside looking out.

The shape of the room changes. There is a window in this small room that looks out into the garden. There are flowers under the windowsill in a bed that is attached to the wall. I know this garden. I have played in it. Sometimes. On occasion.

We play in this garden but not often because it disturbs him. It also disturbs the grass, the flowers, and the windows here break easily. We are told to go play elsewhere. The garden is off limits.

We find other places to play. It is no big deal. We play out on the pavement between the two houses. I have family in both houses. There is room to play here if we move the cars.

But when he kisses me I am in the garden. I am in the garden with the pink flowers beneath the windowsill. The grass is long and unmowed and there are hedges around the garden across from me. There are electric lines overhead and a clear blue sky with faint, wispy clouds.

But I am also inside. I am inside and the room is different. The window is high overhead and it is a rectangle instead of the square it normally is. It is so high I see only the sky through it. And a single faint, wispy cloud.

I am happy to see the sky through this window. It takes my mind away from the lips kissing it.

Enough. For today.

That was tough. That was a lot.

My sweat. The smell of my sweat.

The smell of my sweat is the smell of summer.

The smell of my sweat is the smell of summer and of play.

We sweat like dogs, my cousin and I, my cousin who I grow up with. The cousin who is my best friend and also my brother. I bully him and order him around and I boss him and I love him and I wait for him and I miss him.

We sweat like dogs when we play together. Out in the sun in the front lawn of my grandmother’s house. We play all day out in the sun and are never exhausted.

We play cricket and we play football and we dig in the mud with sticks after it rains and we let our beautiful bodies dry out in the sun.

We meet once a week at least and these are the highlights of my days. We make up games and sleep in the same room and in the same bed and we are inseparable.

We make up games and we knock balls into the neighbour’s garden and then giggle and our biggest problem in these days of happiness is how to retrieve those balls which are 35 rupees each and therefore valuable.

I am better than him at these sports and I am also older by a year and I am the leader and he follows happily, most of the time. I am the older brother and we play Power Rangers and I am Jason the Red Ranger and he is Zach the Black Ranger.

We are obsessed with the same things: Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers and Pokémon cards and cricket and, later when we grow out of these things, with football. I introduce him to it and he is obsessed with Manchester United because I am obsessed with Manchester United.

In the sun outside he is David Beckham and I am Paul Scholes and we sweat like dogs and never come in.

We play outside in my grandmother’s lawn and eventually it gets so hot she yells at us and tells us to come in and have some lemonade or something cool from her childhood she brews with the pulp of a mango.

We chew on cubes of ice and wipe sweat of our faces and I look at his face, red like a tomato, and I am overwhelmed by the love I feel for him.

I think I am the stronger one but in reality he is the one who holds me upright. Because inside I am hurt and I take my hurt out on him by bossing him about.

He is my brother, the strong one, who bends flexibly like a reed against my strong wind. Against the tempest inside of me.

The smell of summer is the smell of air conditioning from a yellowed wall unit that has seen better days.

When we move from Karachi to Lahore the precious two or three wall units move with us. One says Pel and the other two say Waves. I trace the logo of the waves with my finger and I put my hot face to the rungs and cool down.

The great pleasure of summer is the smell of the air from the air conditioner when it runs. Which is not often. Only rarely during the day. Because it is expensive and we have to save the air for the night when we sleep.

In the night we sleep four to a room. On mattresses on the floor and in the night we are comfortable until the electricity goes and the air escapes and we are uncomfortable until the air conditioner rumbles back to life again. Then we are at peace.

Cold cold air is a blessing. A treat. Like ice cream. Like the mango drink my grandma makes from a recipe she remembers from her childhood.

Cold cold air from the yellowed air conditioning unit in the wall dries my sweat. My sweat which tastes like salt when it drips down the front of my head, from the wet lock of hair and down the side of my face and into my mouth. I lick it and it is like salt.

The smell of the air conditioner drowns out all other smells. If you stand close enough to it. If you put your face against the grill. If you stick your nose right in it. It smells like gas. It smells like safety.

I think about the other smells that I consider my favourite smells from childhood:

(A) The smell of petrol when it drips out of a hose and fries on the pavement of a petrol station.

(B) The smell of paint when it dries on the walls of a house and lingers for days in a room.

(C) The smell of cigarette smoke exhaled from a mouth. But not when it sticks to the tip of my fingers.

I hate the smell of cigarette smoke when it sticks to the tip of my fingers.

I like smells that kill, I think. There is a strength to them. A potency. A danger. Smell it too long and you die.

That is why I like them. Because I shouldn’t. And I do. Because it could kill me. And I flirt with death.

I start smoking when I am 12. I steal from a box of cigarellos someone has presented my father and which he keeps carelessly in his closet in their bathroom. He doesn’t smoke them. He doesn’t smoke. He never notices.

None of my friends smoke. My best friend has never smoked. Not that I know of. And he is the one I look up to most. This is not peer pressure.

My grandma smokes and so did her husband, my grandfather, who is now passed. The smoking killed him. Or helped kill him. But my grandma smokes and she enjoys it. Nothing can stop her.

I am a child and we live with them for a while and our room is upstairs and they sleep downstairs and every morning I run down the stairs and I nestle in between them and they are both smoking like chimneys and the smoke they breathe out forms a cloud above me and it comforts me.

I am small and the cloud of cigarette breath is a big giant cloud in the great sky above me and I am between two people I love most in the world. And this is my happy place. First thing in the morning. Before breakfast. And I cozy up in my space between them.

This is my space, I am told I tell my aunt, the younger one who is still in college when I am born, and who treats me like an equal.

This is my space and these are my people and this is my house. And I am letting you know.

The smell of cigarette smoke is familiar to me. The sight of a packet of Gold Leaf, red on the top, on the flap, and white on the bottom, a portrait of a sailor between a gold ring and the sailor is a white man with a beard and he looks stern and dons a blue cap, also familiar.

Behind the sailor is a beautiful world, the sea shore, and what he has to do with smoking cigarettes I don’t know but he is the face of a smell of my childhood.

I want to stop here. For today. Thank you for continuing to read. I appreciate you. I send my love to you.

The memories now flood me. There are so many of them. And for years I had none. Now they come and come and come. In waves and in droves. It is a lot and they batter me about.

I have to take them one at a time. Slowly. Patiently. Piece them apart and give each its due. This, I realize, and I hope you will too, with me, will take time.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I tell them. I’ll take you one at a time tomorrow.

A postcard from the happy days:

There are flavours to my childhood. An entire palette-full. A spectrum of flavours that run and drip from the mouth.

My aunt, the younger one, who treats me as an equal and is my favourite, to be honest, works for an ice cream manufacturer.

This cements her place as my favourite, to be honest, and you can see why.

She works for Wall’s and she convinces us children, her nieces and nephews, that all the other companies are bad for us.

“They mix their ice cream with their feet,” she says, of Hico. And the other brand, Polka, she can’t stand either. Until Wall’s buys them up.

Then we can eat it: the cone that is called Pop Cone and comes half in yellow and half in pink. But the real treat is the Cornetto, which you eat until the very end and find a tip full of chocolate.

At my other grandparents’ we eat Hico. They like the flavour that is called Praline. When we are served it I try to put the picture of people mixing ice cream with their feet in a tub out of my mind.

One day my aunt takes us to the ice cream factory. We drive and drive and drive out of the city and come to the factory. The building is made of brick and we are taken inside and given a tour.

We will remember this for the rest of our lives. I know it at the time.

We are treated like adults. No one talks down to us. Through glass windows in a clean corridor of marble and light we see the machines that mix the ice cream and I think to myself that my aunt might be lying to us about the people mixing ice cream with their feet.

The silver metal hands of the machine turn around a white tub and churn the ice cream into the thing that we love to eat.

At the end of the tour we are taken to a conference room and someone brings a box on a tray and in the box are all the ice creams we love to eat.

The box is full and our eyes are bright like never before. The contents of the box are as follows:

- Paddle Pops and Cornettos and Feasts of all flavors.

- Kulfi and Cups and Jet Sports and new flavors.

- New flavors and types, white chocolate and banana and rainbow and nuts.

We sit in big chairs and have as much as we can. We are allowed to eat as much as we like. No one hurries us. There is no rush. Time is not at a premium and there is air conditioning in the room and ice cream that drips into our stomach. Slowly but fast. Leisurely but urgent.

I remember the box when it is full and I remember my plate when it is empty. I remember the carcasses of ice creams we have eaten sitting on the plate before me and I remember the feel of the steel handles, the leather chair beneath my hands.

Time does not stop when I am having the time of my life. Time goes by too fast. Time slips away. Time that I find hard to recover. Time that is stolen from me.

There is a flavour to the mouth that kisses me. There is a flavour to this memory that takes time to recover. I know it and I don’t know it. It doesn’t come to me. Not yet. It will. The mind does not want to release it. I coax it out. It resists. I wait.

Time stands still then. And I linger in it like a ghost. Time is suspended. It does not stir. Outside in the garden, where I am with the flowers, there is no wind that blows. I am in a painting. I am in a reality that is not real.

There is a flavour to this memory that is not the flavour of the happy times. It is not the flavour of lemon Calypso that I buy through the bars of the gate in the apartment complex where we live before we come to Lahore. And find more room.

It is not the flavour of ice cream in my mouth. On my tongue. And in my stomach. Those flavours nourish me. This flavour destroys me. It is like poison and it never fades.

I am out of time for today. I must stop. Thank you for reading. For acknowledging. For making real by your presence that has felt unreal for 25 years.

I go gently now. In the beginning I went too fast and too strong and the mind recoiled. It forces me to listen to it. And I decide to respect it. To respect myself. To go at a pace that works.

I am 14, not 12, when I start smoking. Or perhaps I am 15 or 16. I am not sure. I try to pin down the exact age, the exact time, but context clues: what class would I have been in? How tall am I when I lodge the stub of the thing between my fingers and watch myself in the mirror.

Maybe I am 7, not 6, when I am raped. But I am definitely not 9, because 9 is the year of my life we move to Lahore and leave Karachi, the city of my early years.

I put my memory in the witness stand and question it. I am a lawyer, after all. That is what I decide to become later. And that is what I am.

How old am I, tell me. What do I look like, I need to know. What happens here, answer. And what happens then, you must recall. And what does it look like, smell like, taste like, sound like. Remember. Remember. Remember. And quick. We are running out of time.

You cannot treat your brain like a criminal in the dock. You cannot catch it out. It is not hiding things because it wants. It is hiding things because it thinks it must. To protect you. To save you. To help you. To help you survive. To live in some version we might call peace.

This is not peace. It is just the absence of memory.

What does it matter how old I am, precisely, to the day, to the year, to the minute. What matters is that it happened. What matters is that you were too young when it did. What matters is that it is now past.

My wife’s nephew, who is now also my nephew, is 4 and curious. He asks her to calculate how old he is in seconds. How many seconds has it been since I was born, he asks. This is a new game. He giggles at the answers.

How many seconds has it been since I was born? The answer is in the millions. How many seconds has it been since the time when time stopped? How old was I, in seconds, when it happened?

How many seconds of my life have I lived? How many seconds from my life were not lived?

The violence is the theft of time. The violence is the theft of life. Life that is not lived. Life that is lived in the past and not in the time of my present.

What does it not touch, something like this. You continue living but it interrupts you. It trips you up. It wrenches you out of the present. It structures your life. The way you are. And the way you will be. There is no going back.

You are not in a court of law. You do not have to prove everything beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not how this thing works. That is not how the world works. If we are being honest. If we are respecting ourselves. If we are respecting our memory.

What is beyond doubt, now and finally, is that the thing happened. The thing which has a name. The thing which we must name for ourselves.

I am 6 or I am 7. I am 12 or I am 14. It does not matter. We make sense of ourselves in ways that interrupt the ways we measure our lives. The world of trauma is not a normal world. It is a world of bent time, time gone astray, time stirred. I am 6 and I am 25 at the same time.

I am 31 today and 5 in the afternoon and 19 tomorrow. I am myself and I am not myself at the same time.

With that, I end for today. This is an affirmation that makes me weep. Thank you for listening, for hearing, for continuing to bear witness to a life that is not a crime.