There are moments when life quietly collapses inside you.
I recently went to Calcutta to visit my mother. She is suffering from dementia now, and the woman I see today is not the same person who raised me. Dementia does that—it erodes memory, judgment, and sometimes kindness. But understanding that does not make the words hurt any less.
During this visit, she said things to me that were so cruel and so deeply wounding that something inside me broke. I returned to Bangalore the very next day.
For seven days after that, I could not get out of bed.
It felt as if someone had drained the life out of me. I couldn’t work, couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t even gather the strength to stand up. What happened during that visit didn’t just hurt in the present—it pulled me violently back into my childhood.
And my childhood was not a happy one.
Growing up, my mother never showed me love. Not the kind that makes a child feel safe or valued. Most days were filled with verbal abuse. There wasn’t a single day before I left home in Kolkata when I didn’t go to sleep crying. I remember lying awake at night, crying myself to sleep, wishing sometimes that I simply wouldn’t wake up.
One of the darkest parts of that time was something I rarely speak about. A man who was close to our family used to sexually abuse me repeatedly. I was terrified of him. I was terrified to even stand in front of him.
When I tried to tell my mother, her response silenced me forever. She dismissed it and said I could not accuse him like that because he was helping the family solve certain problems.
That was the moment I understood something very clearly: I was on my own.
After that day, I never spoke to her about my pain again. In fact, I stopped speaking to her about anything important in my life.
Years later, when I started working and earning money, things changed on the surface. I took her on vacations, bought her things, tried to give her comfort and experiences she had never had before. For a while, she treated me more like a friend.
But trauma doesn’t disappear just because time passes.
It lives somewhere deep inside the body, waiting.
This recent visit reopened wounds that I thought had long scarred over. Something she said cut so deeply that it brought back memories I had buried for years. The child who cried himself to sleep every night suddenly came back to life inside me.
And for seven days, that child could not get out of bed.
Eventually, I pulled myself out of it the only way I have ever known—alone. I have spent most of my life surviving without support from my family. Everything I have built, everything I have achieved, has come from my own effort.
I don’t have a partner. I live by myself. There is no safety net.
Which means something very important:
I have to protect myself.
So I have made a decision that feels both necessary and painful.
I will not go to Calcutta to see my mother anymore.
If I must go to the city for some reason, I will stay somewhere else for a couple of days and return. But I cannot put myself back into a situation that tears open wounds I have spent decades trying to survive.
Sometimes I ask myself if this decision makes me selfish.
Or cruel.
Maybe my brother will not understand it. Perhaps he does not want to understand it. And that is his choice.
But this is mine.
At this stage of my life, I cannot allow old trauma to derail everything I have worked so hard to build—my work, my dreams, my stability, my peace.
I am still struggling. I am still crying. And I know these wounds may never fully heal. Some scars become part of who we are.
But perhaps healing does not always mean removing the pain.
Sometimes healing simply means learning where to place the bandage, so that the wound does not bleed every day.
For now, distance is that bandage.
And for the first time in my life, I am choosing to protect myself.
