?I found myself in the victim syndrome?

As an eight-year-old boy, an occasional sleepover at your maternal grandmother?s is not an uncommon practice. A 19-year-old male cousin living there took it upon himself to sexually initiate me.

As an eight-year-old boy, an occasional sleepover at your maternal grandmother’s is not an uncommon practice. A 19-year-old male cousin living there took it upon himself to sexually initiate me. I remember the seduction manifesting itself as excessive pampering that gradually led to him showing me pornographic magazines and films and, finally, his own genitalia. Not having been told by my parents that certain kinds of touch might be dangerous or harmful, my sexual abuse was, paradoxically, pleasurable at the outset. Ignorant of the effects of physical intimacy, I became more and more curious of what this relationship had in store.

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Almost a decade and a half later, I vividly remember these encounters. My cousin never sought to inflict pain and dealt with me and my body in a manner that can only be described as tender. He explained that all that transpired behind closed doors should remain there because others would not be able to understand the love that we shared. Funnily enough, I remember feeling scared that it was he who would let our secret out.

I was sure I was indulging in something morally incorrect and would spend hours in front of the images of many a deity, asking them for forgiveness and praying that I was not caught. I can, however, remember one instance when I was. My affluent cousin had a car when he was 20. He would take me out for drives and ask me to orally satisfy him. Once, a policeman banged at the window of the parked car and demanded that we come to the police station. I burst into tears and was inconsolable. The inspector seemed pleased at emptying my cousin’s wallet and let him off with a warning.

I was probably acting out the role of a heterosexual woman, as I had to in other acts of sexual abuse for four years. Having been part of an all-male sexual relationship, there were times when I was convinced I was homosexual, transgender or, at least, bisexual. It was only in my late teens that I was able to come to terms with my sexuality, which surprisingly turned out to be heterosexual. Till the age of 12 and even a few years since, I lived in an isolated and silent shell, overtly sensitive to any variant of emotional stimuli and always feeling the need for excessive affection and care.

Once I was about 15, I grew familiar with terms like paedophilia and child abuse and started to realise what I had been through. This too had a downside. I found myself in ‘the victim syndrome’. I started using this incident as an excuse to endear myself to people and constantly looked at myself as victimised in relationships and emotional circumstances. This persists even today but I try to rid myself of this misery.