I first tasted deep shame in 10th standard, delivered personally by a girl’s mother, who kicked me out of their house like some neighbourhood pervert. The irony - I had never touched the girl. We were just friends. Soon afterwards, my friends in her school, some gleefully to cause hurt, others as a word of caution, filled my ears about she was caught with some boy in the school toilet. They faced disciplinary action.
While, I inherited the silent disgrace.
The second blow came when I confessed to a friend’s girlfriend, who thought I was a Casanova, that I never had a girlfriend, or touched a girl, and that I was completely inexperienced. In contrast, she had been sleeping with her coach since school, followed by a relay race of men, eventually devirginized my friend, then when he left for higher studies, helped his best friend become a man. A few more years and bodies later, she married a gold digger from the back end of nowhere - that's decades before Social Media and OnlyFans normalized such behaviour.
Probably without malice, and to get back at my puns, she once tried to make a joke of my confession in front of a group of guys. None got it, but her betrayal burned cleaner than acid. Her defence - “I was only joking” and “you have an inferiority complex.”
It wasn’t just breach of trust, I saw it as mockery by someone whose sexual history raised eyebrows for years to come. Her husband would become the MD of her father’s organization until her sisters ganged up and threw them both out over financial irregularities. Now they are locked in permanent legal warfare, a feminist Mahabharata. She keeps chanting “my husband, my husband” like a devotional mantra while he plays across town.
Incidentally, one of her sisters became my first girlfriend - A reverse caveman romance that lasted two-three months. I bailed at the first chance due to her projections, wish list, guilt, condescension, and the refined Brahmin art of polite contempt by her family. She is now divorced, allegedly after being caught in a roaring affair with someone 14 years younger. Forgiven once, booted the second time. The sisters now brand each other sluts and tear the other apart in court.
I met them after decades, when their mother died, one of the very few elders who had treated me with genuine kindness, so I went to pay my last respects. That was when their perpetually uptight father surprised me, all smiles, stroking my head, saying how lucky my parents were to have a son like me. I first assumed he’d mistaken me for someone else. Then I realised he knew exactly who I was - he knew about my life, my caregiving for parents, being a widower and estranged from my child.
Soon after, I learned about their family feud. It must have been vicious, if it pushed their father to elevate me to near-sainthood. He died not long after.
Continuing the saga - or the telenovela - a common female friend asked about my then angst. When I told her, she laughed, saying I hid behind the excuse of “waiting for love” when I simply couldn’t get laid. It stung, making me wonder if there was truth in her words.
Nonetheless, I still rescued her from molestation at a rock concert, after thugs beat her boyfriend unconscious. Since none of his cool, tough, gym going and steroid and weight pumping friends were ready to get involved, being reasonably drunk and stoned, I stepped in lifted her, threw her over my shoulder, and walked out. No one interfered. I only heard: “Abe Russianok jabo de” - let the Russian pass. His ego bruised, her boyfriend forbad her from interacting with me, and she faithfully complied.
The gossip mill kept me updated about her - sleazy men, pregnancy, late abortion, breakup. Years later, she again started calling me almost daily to cry about her life. One day, when I was utterly frustrated and low for being unpaid for months, she called again, and I invited her out for coffee, for a break and some friendly banter. She flatly refused - she was now a college lecturer and worried that her students seeing her with a man might get the wrong idea. Besides, her family was hunting for a groom.
I felt dirty, the echoes of shame tingled again.
She is now a well-off, faithful housewife, in karmic continuity her deeply religious husband also forbids her from interacting with any male. So she throws lavish parties for her female friends. I was told she still asks about me. Nostalgia is cheaper than accountability.
Back to the woman who joked at my inexperience. Once, while talking about human decency her by then ex-boyfriend reminded me, “Have you forgotten how, despite not talking to her, you still dragged her out of a party when she was dead drunk and about to throw up in public?”
I had really put that sordid episode behind me. Yes, I shoved her into the toilet, holding her over the pot while she retched, but she also wanted to pee, and couldn’t untie her pyjama knot. To stop her wetting herself, I cut her string with a razor. Then with nothing to hold it up, the pyjama got stapled so that it didn't fall off.
I didn't know, but rumours, flew right away. Not that I ever cared, confirmed, denied or contested them. Soon, her sex-crazed male classmates all knew how the “Crazy Russian” dragged her to the toilet and had his way for over an hour. My alter ego may have been a sex maniac, but reality was way stinkier. That night I had to escorted more girls to the toilet as their boyfriends were sozzled or not bothered. One, reeking of fresh vomit, tried to hug and kiss me, while I slithered away faster than any snake.
I was told that after I left the party, a couple - one of the most beauty-deficient women I’ve ever known and her surprisingly decent looking boyfriend - had an incident in the garage, when the host’s mother's gargantuan and equally psychotic Alsatian bit his naked bum. Thankfully I was gone, otherwise I would have been drafted to bandage that too.
I swore never again to attend any drunken party if even a single woman was present.
But it wasn’t over. Last year, while strolling through Chiang Mai on a much-needed solitary break, I got a LinkedIn request ping, surprisingly from the woman whose mother had shooed me out years back. Curious, I engaged.
She claimed she searched for me, missed our teenage conversations, saying she hadn’t realised what a gentleman I was until life and multiple affairs made her see the light. Her marriage was arranged and hollow, children fled the nest, and she yearned to be loved. She also demanded to know if I ever loved her, asked why I didn't try to touch her and sent me her selfie (totally unrecognizable- a euphemism for ugly as sin), then a photo of her freshly painted toenails.
Next, she told me she had started writing a blog and shared a web link, which contained a rambling monologue about her dissatisfaction with her marital sex life with graphic descriptions and how her husband refused to go down on her.
On my part, I only asked if her parents didn't approve my dropping by, why didn't she as a good friend tell me about it or at least drop a hint?
She just replied, "I didn't want to look bad!"
I had all the closure I needed and blocked her everywhere. I long knew that her mother did me a great favour without intending. But do I say thanks? No way, not only was she a nasty evil bitch, but she also laid the genesis of how I felt around women the rest of my growing and most of my adult years.
Decades of shame without knowing why...
PS: The boy fooling around with her in the school toilet, was a tea planter's son, who never bother to finish high school. Whom I met as an adult and who not knowing my backstory narrated laughing how in a karmic twist, his mother kicked out that girl from their place when she came over and smartly tried to build up a rapport with her. His parents later got burned alive by a frenzied and inebriated mass of tea garden labourers fed up with years of brutality of the owner. In the only case of cannibalism ever recorded in the state, not content just murdering him, some ever took a bite of his flesh.
Schadenfreude?? Nope, just grotesque trivia to ornament an already ugly, cathartic tale.
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