Being a boy

He does not call it abuse. At least, not in our presence. But even in private, he does not accept it as abuse.

He calls it ‘just an experience’. Like, perhaps, smoking weed for the first time. And then waiting to see the things people say they see after smoking. Then, nothing happening. Just hunger. Like a gigantic hunger that can make one eat a whole house – if it is made of slices of bread.

But this ‘just an experience’ is everything but that.

He says it started when he was young. How old? He does not remember. But he was in Standard 5. And, that was a long time ago when people were old enough to vote when they were in Standard 5.

He says, however, that he was a different person. Sharp and brilliant. He got into Primary school at a young age so to use that time measurement and capture his age will be in vain.

“Just know that I had not yet reached puberty by then,” he says.

And he did not really understand it when she first touched him. But, somehow, there was a reaction from him. And that was her entry point.

She made comments saying a boy could not have reacted.

That day, she just touched him. And stopped at that. She did not even tell him that he should not report to anyone. She understood that he was ‘grown’ and well behaved enough to keep a secret.

The other days – she had not done anything for the two days coming after that touching – she touched him again. And when he reacted. She took him through.

“How old was she?”

“I wouldn’t remember,” he does not say it with any regret, shame or sadness. He just says it. Like how you would say Lilongwe.

“But she was your aunt?”

“Yes, my mother’s sister. A younger sister. We called her aunt…” he mentions a name but it really is of no use. It is such a common name.

The two of them were sleeping in the same room – an unfinished house. She, the aunt, had once been married but her marriage had collapsed like some deck of cards. She had returned home. At parting, her husband had said he would build her a house.

When the house was at some level, although not fully complete, she moved in. She asked for him to be living with her ‘for the time being’.

“Our village was not really dangerous but still, you know, women.”

So, he moved in – or they moved in. Him being all manly. Locking the doors before going to sleep or making that cough when they heard footsteps outside. If, like that once, she would be pressed by the call of nature in the middle of the night – or early morning (there were no clocks in that house) – he would go with her to the latrine. Stand outside. Acting as if he was not afraid while busy thinking of grotesque creatures with three heads and five arms walking through the night while eating human flesh from the grave nearby.

The first days, nothing was amiss. Perhaps even for months. He does not remember how many.

“One day, she said she was afraid. She had been having nightmares. She wanted me to sleep by her side.”

And that was not the day the touching started.

For a period, which also cannot be remembered precisely, they just slept. He did not worry. He did not fear. He did not even care to go back to sleeping on his mat.

Then, she touched him.

“Like, how did it happen?” I am interested.

“You want the vivid details?”

“I could say so, like take me through the events that led to that. You were sleeping there each day, you were sharing that bed with her and nothing happened. What happened that day?”

They were talking. Her, about her husband. He was drifting off to sleep. Tired of her rumblings. Then he felt the hand inside his shorts.

“Why didn’t you report in the morning?”

“To who, and say what?”

He had been keeping company of people older than him. They had often bragged about the things they did with the girls. He was mostly the odd one out with no story to tell. He was young. Did not know how to approach the girls.

Now, when the touching started and moved to something else, he had the stories to share.

“But surely at that age it’s not as if the stories were really accurate…”

“I don’t think any of us in our group was accurate or honest. We were just lying to each other, you know boys?”

“And you told them you were doing it with your aunt?”

“No, so they could kill who?”

Incest, it appears, was something they were taught was wrong. Abuse? No, that never existed.

“Do you think that affected you somehow?”

He says no. That is why he cannot call it abuse.

“You know, abuse leaves scars. Dangerous marks. It haunts you. It is brutal. It is savage. It lives with you for the rest of your life. It is a shadow. But that, it was just an experience. I forgot it.”

I don’t express my disagreement although I feel like disagreeing. We just leave it at that. A few drinks and he disappears.

I ask a friend where he has gone to.

“Prostitutes. He can’t do without them.”

-- The end --

PS: This entry appeared in The Daily Times of April 12, 2019 on Mankhokwe's Wall. And all the stories that appear there are not fiction. There are additions and subtractions to the actual stories to conceal identity but certainly the actual story is reserved and told with little bias.