My Haunted Years: Chapter 1

ABODE

Written by: Gurpreet Dhariwal

The following episode contains descriptions that may not be suitable for younger readers, including discussions of physical abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

In the 1990s I wasn’t a happy child. I was growing up in Delhi, India, and seeing things falling apart in my abode. Like any kid, things were pretty unusual to me and my siblings.  We did play out in the evenings with our friends in the neighborhood, but coming back to my abode was always scary. 

My father’s anger was unpredictable. We used to get beaten up without any reason and were scared to ask questions in return.

Being with him on the weekends was equally risky. One small commotion of holding the glass of water from above and not beneath the glass could awake a monster in him. Such unusual things made us depressed, anxious, and scared. 

Once I wasn’t at home in the evening and went for a bike ride with my two friends without informing anybody. When I came back, my father beat the shit out of me and I never dared to go out for a week.  

I didn’t know the meaning of domestic violence during those days. The first time I heard the commotion I was speechless, and instinctively knew to safeguard myself from his beatings.

I could easily recall this incident when we were returning home after attending the marriage of one of our neighbors, and my father was standing on the road with a fierce look in his eyes. I was 10 years old at that time and my brother was 12 and my sister 14. He hit my mother so badly that she fell to the ground. My siblings and I were super scared and we started running towards the home in haste. It didn’t end there.

After reaching home, my father started beating all of us one by one. My mother was trying to stop him, but he wasn’t listening to her. While hitting my brother, my father asked me to bring the cricket bat from the first floor and without using my head, I went upstairs. When I came back, he was jumping on my brother’s legs. That scene hasn’t gone out of my memory till now.

I was about to hand him over the cricket bat when my mother shouted “Don’t,” and I stopped. She came in between the fight and it was she who was struck with the bat instead of my brother. My sister was crying on the floor in another room. Her hair was all dismantled and she looked like a tortured animal. We were a broken family living in the same house in fear of the devil.

The next day we were about to go to school. My mother woke up at 4 am and prepared our lunch with whatever strength was left in her. In school, my mind never stopped working after seeing last night's nightmare. Even while attending the classes, I was consistently bothered with how my mother was coping at home with my violent father.

I kept on thinking, “What if she was dead by now?” My anxiety level was at its peak and I wanted to take the bus back home. It wasn’t an easy task to concentrate on what teachers used to impart while consistently living in fear. Later on, it gave rise to my depression. 

I wasn’t a confident kid then and lacked self-esteem. I wanted others to give me complete attention to hear my thoughts, but then was equally ashamed because I lived under the impression that nobody else was going through this domestic violence traumatic cycle except me. 

Unfortunately, my school was 18kms away from my house and I wasn’t allowed to travel alone. After school, while walking towards home, I asked my siblings, “What do you think? Will we get beaten up again? Or he would have been done with our mother by now?" My siblings didn’t say a word and when we reached home our devilish father was drunk and sleeping carelessly in his room.

We couldn’t swallow the lunch peacefully. We were worried about the night and the days ahead. It was a story of every day in my house; getting abused and waking up the next day as if nothing had happened. I didn’t see any love between my parents, and I often used to wonder what made them marry each other.

But then again, it was an arranged marriage fixed by their families. My self-doubt grew stronger when I started telling myself that I was conceived out of societal pressure, not love. It made me question my identity as a person and how my relationships would turn out if I ever considered someone.

And I dated all the wrong men for all the wrong reasons that were degrading, belittling, and abusing me emotionally and mentally. I related all my relationship failures with my father’s domestic violence, but now as an adult, I understand the reasons behind my wrong decisions. Hence no more blame game. 

Seeing my siblings going through the same hell wasn’t acceptable to me but what choice did I have? I once saw my father attack my sister so violently that she got injuries on her body. He was teaching her mathematics all day and none of us were supposed to go to his room else he would have beaten us too. The next day, my sister appeared for the exam and scored the highest.

But I saw her smile was gone and she was mentally and physically exhausted. All three of us were bright students and never needed beatings to study hard in life. 

Living with my father made me think of all the fathers in this world in the same way. That’s what traumatized childhood does to you. I felt isolated while being in the company of my friends because my mind used to play tricks with chaos back at home. 

It became difficult dealing with my emotions and I would become angry in a fraction of a second. Only shouting and scowling used to calm me down. But later on, I realized it wasn’t calming me down, it was damaging me. It affected my adulthood when I repeated the same pattern in my relationships. 

There was a time when I used to visit my school friends who sang jingles of praise about their parents to me. I was considering their abodes far better than mine.

But when I visited them and witnessed it with my own eyes, I came to terms with the fact that their fathers were abusing their mothers more verbally and emotionally than physically. I saw these fathers threatening the mothers over the smallest incidence like pre-heating the food.

That was an end to my happy father’s day ideology. I used to become aggressive if others shared happy moments with their fathers to me. My heart never wanted to accept that some pretty good fathers were out there, feeding and nurturing their children most perfectly. I wanted to deny that reality because mine was far from it. 

I avoided sharing my views about my father because I never had any moment worth remembering with him. I felt guilty, lost, and punished by God.

Amidst all the domestic chaos, I was stopped from attending school and a week later my siblings weren’t allowed either. I was in the sixth standard merely 11 years old and my siblings were 13 and 15. Day by day, week by week, and month by month, we were put under house arrest by my father. My mother wasn’t strong enough to come to terms with the fact that our name was removed from the school. This lie was fed to us by my father.

Later on, we discovered that our name wasn’t cut off and the principal himself approached us through the class teachers. We were asked to rejoin the school immediately. When I went to my classroom my teacher said, “You don’t have to be afraid of me. My husband used to do the same shit your father is showing you at home. And we can find a way. You are a bright student, and I want to help you.”

She did help us along with my sibling’s class teachers. Meanwhile, my mother invited my father’s friends to our home to have the conversation about how he was tearing our books and not allowing us to be educated. His friends came and tried to make him understand, but nothing ever worked on him. He used to treat us as we were his worst enemies in this world.

While dealing with all this bullshit, my mother invited her cousins to save us from his beatings. But that didn’t last either. Who could we have asked to stay with us throughout our growing-up years? We had to suffer whatever life was bringing to our doorstep. My mother was stronger than ever before, and she made sure we didn’t miss our classes. We certainly never missed them again, but she took everything on her to guard us like a shield.

When my father saw us studying in the evening and scoring good marks, he started inviting his friends over to party late at night. We all used to be on house arrest again from evening till the next morning on the first floor where there was no electricity in the initial phase. Seeing the level of stupidity and cruelty by my father, we all started detesting him.

There was this incident when my father soaked all the crackers he brought us for Diwali Festival in the water and listened to the loud music on the TV by playing the video cassette by Gurdas Mann (One of the Famous Punjabi Folk Singers). He threw all our belongings outside the house and drank a lot. We didn’t dare to go downstairs to collect it and requested the neighbors to keep it in their abode.

I never saw my silver lining and started analyzing the kind of filth my elder siblings would have been filled up with. I was still playing puzzles in my mind, but my siblings were terrified of the idea of being around my father. We never failed any class. We didn’t ask for money. We didn’t do anything that would have made my father angry. Then why were we facing that shit? I used to question myself like this innumerable times.

Summer holidays used to be a big relief. Those eight hours in the school away from our mother crushed our feelings and made us sick because we never knew about the chaos happening back at home. We tried to safeguard her with whatever capacity the three of us had when we could keep an eye on her for the whole day. 

Over the holidays, I cleaned my almirah and study table and my siblings requested me to clean theirs too. I happily used to follow their orders because I was a greedy kid and getting a reward in return made sense to me. While cleaning and setting up the things, my mother asked me about our previous report cards and after looking for them everywhere we couldn’t find them.

My siblings searched theirs too, but it turned out to be a futile effort. Later in the evening when my mother asked my father, he said “I have burned all of their certificates.”

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Gurpreet Dhariwal is the author of “My Soul Rants: Poems of a Born Spectator”. Domestic Violence Survivor, Sketcher, Dog Lover, and Poet.