Shishur Sevay

Rehearsing for a performance of dance and song, everyone.

I’m Stuck!  I keep starting posts and deleting them, at least six times over the last few weeks.  Fear stops me.

The picture I posted is not what I imagined I’d pick.  I was thinking something sad, related to what I haven’t said yet.  The picture is of a singing rehearsal for the Movement, Dance, and Song program we are putting on next month. At Shishur Sevay we have Dance & Movement three times a week, and Singing & Harmonium twice a week.   We have dances now that include everyone.  One dance is a train, with the older girls pushing along the chairs with the girls who cannot walk.  In other dances, we have harnesses that the older girls use to swing the younger ones as they dance.  Most of the time we dance and sing to the songs of Tagore.  I want to get someone to film the small event.  The picture above is reflective of what it is like at Shishur Sevay these days.  We are no longer living crisis to crisis.

So how do we talk about sexual abuse without “spoiling the atmosphere?”  It is so incredibly easy to ignore.  Like others, I was shaken by the gang rape in Delhi, and then the rape, mutilation, and death of the five year old.   Both these events galvanized the country.

But I also started thinking about what happens every day….  I thought about what one of my girls said of her life before Shishur Sevay, “You beg in the day; then the men use you at night; then you beg again in the morning.”  I thought about the sexual abuse in orphanages…. and I thought about our experience with one of the girls sexually abusing another, in fact, abusing the children with disabilities who cannot protest and cannot tell.  I thought about the pacts of silence around abuse, here, there, everywhere.  Shishur Sevay has become Zero Tolerant with regard to abuse.  There has to be a safe place.  The victims have to come first.  Still, you can’t be zero tolerant unless you can find out what is going on.  All the doors in our house have glass panes.  We have CCTV with cameras all over.  Nothing is ever enough.  Evil has its way of seeping through.

I wrote a book, “The Preteen’s First Book About Love, Sex, and AIDS,” published in 1995 by American Psychiatric Press.  I wrote, “The crossing of sexual boundaries between people, whether in word or touch, seems to cause deeper wounds and greater shame than any other kinds of abuse.  The person who commits the crime of sexual abuse seems to pass on the shame and humiliation to the victim.”

What then do we tell the children?  Do we “normalize” abuse as something that may happen, but isn’t their fault?  What are we saying then about our cultures, and I use plural because these problems are universal.  This is not an India problem except that it has attention now, and because I live here with children who have been abused, and may very well be abused in the future as women, women alone, women as wives, women as cognitively or physically impaired.

I looked again at the picture I posted above, and posted it again.  It’s the same picture but having talked about sexual abuse, it’s not quite the same because we are not quite the same when we see behind the wall.

Rehearsal for a Performance of Dance and Movement, and Song, Everyone

At Shishur Sevay we are also starting tabla classes.  I bought two sets, so two girls could take their lessons at once.  I unpacked the tablas yesterday and then I started tapping the daya and soon I was far away, not thinking about anything, tapping to ancient rhythms that took the troubles out of my mind space.

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I read that tabla is an ancient language, “Everything that is to be played on tabla can be spoken; in fact, everything that is to be played must first be spoken.”  So here are some spoken words I hope one day to be able to play in the language of the tabla.