With no end to my suffering in sight and no outlet, I was a bomb ready to explode at any moment. I started acting out. At my high school, students who smoked cigarettes and weed, or drank alcohol, weren’t hard to find. Many went behind the bikesheds or in the alleyways near school to have a quick fag between classes. Many were experimenting with intoxicants and each other. Leaving the penny sweets behind, I stepped up my game; I found my sweet fix in other things.
In my first year of high school, I started going to the Hare Krishna temple in Watford, and I joined their youth group. My mother seemed happy about this, but my father’s side of the family was worried that I’d run away and become one of them. They obviously didn’t approve. They needn’t have worried, though, as I wasn’t going for God so much as to hang out with my friends there. The youth group seemed to get each other, and there was none of the childish jealousy I got in school. Singing and dancing Kirtan together was a joy, and we found purpose with each other, campaigning to keep the temple open.
Perhaps it was too little too late, though. I’d already been exposed to the enticements and distractions of the adult world: sex and drugs. With makeup on, I looked older than I was. Getting into nightclubs was a breeze. Many a time, I’d be sitting in a park or a friend’s car, or at someone’s house, smoking weed and drinking alcopops, strong cider or whiskey and lemonade. (I’d been working since I was fourteen, I had a weekend/school holiday job as a cold caller for Diamond Free Ads, a local advertisement newspaper, so I was independent with my own cash.) In a drunken and high state, I began having casual hook-ups.
Soon enough, I stopped going to the temple completely, and I began drinking every day, even during my school lunch hour. Sometimes, I’d get picked up by friends in their twenties, and we’d go to the pub and drink beer and play pool. I got pretty good at it.
One of my first boyfriends was at a university on the south coast of the country. He was a student-slash-small-time drug dealer, mostly cannabis and pills. I once stole a gold chain from my mother and sold it so I could buy a train ticket to go down to see him. I missed the start of my Religious Education GCSE exam because I was still on the bus back from the jewellery shop. I later found out that my grandma had given that necklace to my mother; it was an heirloom. Not one of my proudest accomplishments. (Mr Litchfield, now you know why I was late to my exam that day!)
A lot of the time, my parents didn’t know where I was or who I was with, and whenever I was at home, my parents were either fighting or I was getting beaten anyway because I’d bunked school, was coming home late, or they’d found cigarettes in my room, something like that. And it wasn’t just my dad anymore, the stress my mother was under sometimes spilt over onto me too, so I’d rather be out as much as I could be.
Many a time, I’d be coming home late at night, and I’d see the figure of my mother standing at her bedroom window, peeping out through the parted curtains, looking to see if the sound of the car or the motorbike she’d just heard was me being dropped off home. I knew exactly what kind of welcome awaited me then.
I was fourteen years old the first time I held a gun. In England, they are illegal for civilian ownership. Some friends had gotten hold of one, and during Diwali one year, we used the sound of the fireworks to mask the sounds of the blanks we were firing into the street.
I was also fourteen when a stranger offered me money for sex. I’d run away from home in the evening, in the middle of a fight. It was getting dark, and I was hiding behind some dustbins in an alleyway behind the local shops, crying. A car full of Middle-Eastern men pulled up to buy some cigarettes and saw me. They asked if I was alright and offered me a ride to the city. I jumped in, and we drove to Piccadilly Circus. We listened to music, and I told them I’d had a fight with my dad. They asked if I was hungry, which I was. I’d run away without dinner, and so they bought Burger King meals, and we all ate. One of the men in the back of the car with me, then, as politely as possible, asked me if I’d have sex with him if he paid me. I don’t remember feeling scared, but I said no and told him that I hadn’t had sex before. He just smiled and nodded, and we carried on listening to music and drove around the tourist landmarks of the city for a while. At the end of the night, they dropped me off at the same road they’d found me.
The night could have ended up dangerously differently, I know this.
I was clearly reckless and impulsive; I’d jump into a car or on the back of a motorbike with anyone at a moment’s notice, even at night, to the seaside or some location hundreds of miles away.
Try as I might to mask the pain with my teenage sex and drug antics, I couldn’t erase it completely. When the highs came down, the pain came back uglier and more intense than before.
I have no idea if my brother was around. He seemed to disappear from my memory for these particular years. At home, he spent a lot of time in his room.
Around this time, my mother was admitted into hospital with a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs. She nearly died, they told us, and the man who was our family’s spiritual guidance counsellor at the time (an Englishman who claimed to have psychic abilities, whom we had met through our weekly bhajans circle) told me that it was my fault.
He also told me that I was vain, which I assume was because I made an effort with my appearance, perhaps because I wore sarees and makeup to the bhajans. I made such an effort because I didn’t like the way I looked. I wore makeup to try to look better. I was taller than average for my age; I’d hit my full height of five feet and six inches at twelve years old. And no matter how much I ate, I was still skinny and constantly teased about it at school. I had thick, frizzy hair, cut short in a bob-cut, that I couldn’t tame. They called me ‘earmuffs’, ‘mop head’, and ‘golf stick’, and because I was flat-chested, ‘pancake’ as well. For years, I’d worn trousers to high school, and the first time I wore a skirt, they taunted me, calling me Olive Oyl, the cartoon character Popeye’s girlfriend, because of my skinny legs. My teeth and nose were too big for my face, I thought. I’d worn braces for years, but my two front teeth still stuck out slightly. And I knew for sure that I was ugly because in my final year of middle school, when our end-of-year photographs were taken, my parents bought my brother’s photo but refused to buy mine, because I was smiling in it and my teeth were showing in all their glory, also, my hair was particularly frizzy that day. It was an ugly photo – and it wasn’t me who said it. My father said he didn’t want to waste money on it. I was mortified and kicked up such a fuss, crying so much that they had no choice but to buy it in the end, but I never truly believed I was beautiful after that.
The old man, the violence, the bullying, the taunting, losing my childhood friends, losing my connection with my brother, becoming a stranger to my parents, feelings of rejection, neglect, feeling ugly, worthless, useless, a waste of skin, a waste of space, the effect of the drugs and booze on my still developing brain, it was all too much.
At fifteen years old, I climbed on a chair, reached on top of the fridge, took down the biscuit tin full of my parents’ prescription medications, and swallowed as many tablets as I could.
(Originally published on os.me on February 9, 2021)