The trauma of growing up seeing my dad abuse my mum made me a feminist

My earliest childhood memories are of my father bashing my mother’s head against the wall of our ramshackle Mumbai home. 

Thud. Crack. Bang.

The scene plays in my mind like a stuck record. Over and over again. I see it as if it were happening now. The blood dripping, meandering red and muddy down the wall. All our cries and shrieks are disembodied, distant. 

In the mornings, my two younger brothers and I would wake up, help our mother clean the bloodied wall, and off to school we’d go, in our crisp grey uniforms. Talking with our little friends, as if none of the night before had happened. 

We never told anyone – our experiences, coated with shame, kept us silent. 

This nightmare was my childhood, from the time I was a year old until I was about 12. And it happened almost every night. Or at least, that’s what it felt like because I have literally no other memories of my early years. 

My father was an alcoholic, but I didn’t know this as a child. I just knew that as soon as he got home from work, I’d sniff the air like a little animal. I’d know in an instant if this was going to be yet another violent night. Thinking back now, I was trying to smell the booze on his breath.

So my father drank a lot. And he hit my mother a lot. And he terrorised us with his temper. A lot. Each day, as evening and the inevitable brutality loomed, I disconnected from the happy, playful child that should have been, becoming quiet and terrified. 

But this isn’t just a tale of misery. It is a story of not just surviving trauma, but thriving because of it.

You see, my father’s violence had a surprising side effect: it turned me into a feminist. I had never even heard of the word feminist then, because we didn’t use those words in India in the 1980s. But the word eventually became core to who I was.

Seeing my mother’s life, subjected to my father’s alcohol-fuelled rage, made me reject the future I was being prepared for, as a South Asian woman. 

I was being raised to be an obedient Indian wife and a good mother. I was told by all the uncles and aunties I met, the magazines I read, the TV I watched that my ultimate value lay in the sort of husband I could find, the children I could have. 

As soon as I hit 16, things changed inside me: call it a combination of hormones and reading books. I decided that I would not have an existence like my mother’s. I decided to build a life where I wasn’t dependent on a man.

My mother had no choice; she was told by her parents to stay with her husband, because that was her ‘destiny’. Even when she tried asking for help from family, no one did anything because marriages and husbands were sacrosanct.

So I decided that I would make my own destiny. I rebelled, I fought, I went against everything I was being trained for. 

I refused countless offers of arranged marriages to ‘nice boys’, eventually found a job in advertising, and made my own money. It took me years to achieve this and my family weren’t happy. 

I finally moved out of home in my late 20s, from Mumbai to Bangalore. It felt like a blessed release, having my own place and no longer being answerable to anyone. 

And then, a few years later, I moved to London having met an English man whom I fell in love with.

I’d always been aware that making the choice to reject the life set out for me would negatively affect my relationship with my family – and it has been very strained. Things got even harder when my mum died in 2003 under horrible circumstances, which made me retreat from my extended family even more. 

Yet, my brothers are largely supportive of my choices. We see each other every few years but we don’t have the closeness I see in other siblings – something that I long for. Perhaps it’s to do with the trauma we experienced together as kids.

But, ultimately, it’s that pain I have to thank for spurring me on. Four years ago, I left my advertising career because I felt a calling to create a better world for South Asian women. I wanted my voice (and the voices of other women like me) to be loud in British media.

I started small, by running Masala Monologues writing workshops where South Asian women would come in and write stories about their experiences of cultural taboos: everything from sex, sexuality, periods, mental health, menopause and more. 

I began coaching participants on how to write compelling monologues and, through this, we connected, we shared, we gave each other support. After running a series of workshops, I transformed the monologues (working with a director, producer and professional actors) into two successful theatre shows in 2018 and 2019. 

The feedback was electrifying: women in my culture loved the performances and wanted more.

I wanted to reach more women from my community and started the Masala Podcast, so I could interview inspiring South Asian women and talk about taboos. 

And now, three seasons and over 60,000 downloads later, it is a multi-award-winning and critically acclaimed podcast, securing three British Podcast Awards in two years.

Creating safe spaces for women in my culture to talk about their experiences feels wonderful – it’s something that I never had growing up.

It hasn’t been an easy journey. I sometimes feel a deep disconnect to who I used to be as a young girl in India. 

Each night I spent fearing the violence that I knew was coming, I didn’t know if my family and I would live to see the next morning. My father never hit us kids, but the violence against my mother was so severe that we would sometimes try and throw ourselves in his path to protect her. Every night felt like a life and death battle to our family.

So, some days, when I’m living my happy London life, walking in the local park feeling the sun warming my skin and the birds chirping on the trees, everything feels unreal.

Because a life like this – full of safety, fulfilment and freedom – was one my younger self wouldn’t have even dared dream of.

As I write this piece, I feel the grief taking me over. I’ve worked with several therapists in recent years, but it feels like trauma lives in my DNA. It is as much a part of me as my dark hair and dark brown eyes. 

But here’s the thing that I’ve learnt about trauma: it doesn’t need to define your life. In fact, you can use it to help you reach for your dreams. 

My trauma pushed me to create my network that works with and for South Asian women. The innumerable grateful messages and emails I get from women like me is testament to how important it is to challenge cultural narratives.

This is not to say that my achievements have made me immune to the agony – I carry it with me.

My father died in early March 2020, just as Covid-19 started to rage. My intense grief was more for myself – the absence of a childhood that I didn’t get to have.

My relationship with my dad in his later life was intermittent, laced with pain. He was unwell but continued to be the bitter, angry man he always was, right until the day he died.

The combined toll of a pandemic and the hurt of my upbringing turned me into a mess not capable of functioning beyond just eating, sleeping and washing myself during lockdown. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t even find the words to tell people how much I ached. 

But during this terrible time, I kept getting messages from women all over the world about how much my podcast and my work was helping them. This encouraged me to pull myself together and get back to creating new, vital conversations and do something useful and helpful.

So here I am today. My father’s alcoholism, my childhood trauma, my mother’s suffering – I’ve channelled all of those into my work. I like to think that if my mother was alive today, she’d be bursting with pride at how much my work helps other women from our culture. 

Here’s the thing I want to leave you with. Life’s hard. S**t happens. But when we ride through the storm, when we decide to tackle those choppy waves, that’s when real magic happens. 

Yes, my past was painful. But my future is glittering with opportunity – and many women from my culture that I’m hoping to help.

Because ultimately, we as women who have suffered trauma emerge taller, stronger and more powerful than when we went in. More than we ever dreamed was possible.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing angela.pearson@metro.co.uk. 

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