My glorious abode

"my heart woke me crying last night

how can i help i begged

my heart said

write the book" 

- Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey

This isn't a book. It's not even a chapter. It's definitely not a survival guide. I don't know what this will be till I am done writing it. For now, it maybe a refugee's paean to her lost home. 

Homesickness isn't a feeling that I could ever relate to. My cousin recently moved in with her husband and spent three days talking to her family on Skype. My friend, who is living abroad, complains that he misses his garden, his plants and his room. I have never missed anything. And I have always wondered if something was wrong with me that made me incapable of making meaningful connections to places, lived spaces, that so many people seemed to be able to make. Then, something happened that completely shifted my perspective of myself and home. On a flight to Canada from Bangladesh, I got molested. 

I was sleeping and the man next to me decided it was alright to grope me. It apparently went on for a while. I later recalled it in flashbacks. I thought I must have been imagining it at the time because I kept waking up and he kept taking his hands away. Finally, when he was trying to unbutton my top I woke up to find his hands on me. Shaking, I asked the woman next to me to switch seats with me. After trying to get my panic under control, I told the woman what had happened. She encouraged me to tell the flight attendants and I did. The pilot was informed and he came out and spoke to me. I called the man out and screamed at him and a whole scene played out, as though it was orchestrated.

I got off the plane, spoke to the police and they encouraged me to think before I filed a lawsuit against him. "You don't have any direct witnesses. Are you sure it happened?" I was thrown off. I didn't file a case then and went back to my apartment in a taxi, all the while thinking if the driver was taking me somewhere else. I was paranoid. 

The day after, I called the sexual assault survivors support centre on campus, the mental health clinic, my academic adviser and asked for help. Each number I dialled led to another number and by the time twelve hours had passed I was exhausted. I decided then, that I wouldn't file a case. Cases involving sexual assault drag on for months and sometimes years. I didn't have the energy, the strength or the time to pursue this. I had work to do, a degree to finish and a country to return to. 

I hated myself a little for not standing up for myself. I am an activist. I fight for the rights of women and girls. And here I was, cowering and shaming myself when something had happened to me. Nonetheless, I made my decision and spoke to very few people about this. Different people said different things. Some people were silent.

For six weeks after the incident, I kept waking up every few hours during the night because I felt someone touching me. I lived outside of my body because someone else was living there. My body had embedded memories that I couldn't get rid of. It was like my body wasn't mine anymore.

My relationships started changing. I started cultivating an unhealthy attachment in my friendships and relationships, clinging. I reached out to those who felt like home and expected them to provide the same comfort. And when they couldn't, because they can't; no person can bear that weight of being able to be there for someone constantly, like home does, I got angry and disappointed in them. I blamed them, internally, for not showing up for me and I slowly folded myself inward without realising what I was doing. Meanwhile, I meditated, took long baths, prayed and did everything I could to heal, but all from a place of anger, and pain and need. 

On my last day in the city, I had a strange feeling. I looked around my apartment and felt a fear of separation. A sense of nostalgia. Something I had never felt in relation to a place before. I never get attached to places. I didn't understand it, but I thought: I would miss this place. 

I came back to Dhaka and in a week's time, two girls were raped at a hotel in Banani and the social media erupted. My memories got triggered. I had that same feeling of nausea, helplessness and confusion that I had fought before. So I meditated some more, took some longer baths, and prayed some more. 

But all I had was anger which kept showing up in my body. Hands shaking, pulse rate rising, blood loudly pumping through my veins and thoughts moving faster than my tongue could keep up with. I kept looking for ways to channel my anger. But I didn't quite know what it was that I was so angry at. I didn't know why I felt lost.

Then, one sleepless night, I listened to Rupi Kaur say, "What happens, when your home, your body is attacked? What happens when you thrust something as dark as sexual abuse, molestation or rape, onto a person? It makes you feel robbed. Like you don't even own your body. They own it. And you're living in it on rent."

I understood. I was living on rent, in my own body. My childhood was spent moving around in different cities, across countries. By the time I was six, I had lived in five cities across two continents. So, I never learned what home was. My body was the only home I had ever known. Now that I had failed to protect that, I didn't know where to go, part of me feeling like I didn't deserve to keep what I couldn't protect.  

One month later all the huffing and puffing around the Banani rape case has quietened down. The news reports said there were no trace of sperm in the lab reports that were collected after a month of the rape. The assailants could not make a home in their victims' bodies. And somehow, society will make the victims pay the price, the rent, that is overdue. 

I don't know if there is anything I can do to move the case forward or if 'justice will be served.' All I can say for sure is this: Your body is, and will continue to be the only home that nobody can lay siege on, charge you rent for, that you don't have to earn, and you don't have to pay a price for. It is yours.

As I finish this, I rethink what this is. It's not a book. It's not even a chapter and it's definitely not a survival guide. But it is not a refugee's paean to her lost home either.

No. This is me, reclaiming my body. And my home. 

The writer is a survivor.