‘My sister lost her voice’ L

ife came to standstill for Shipra (name changed) some 14 years ago when she saw her father sexually abusing her one-and-half-year-old baby sister Prathma (name changed). Barely 14 years old at the time, Shipra pleaded with her father to stop but she was thrashed and pushed out of the room.

After going through the trauma for almost 10 years, Prathma finally lost her voice and became mentally challenged.

As she recounted the tale of horror, tears rolled down her eyes that left the audience both aghast at the brutality of a father and moved at the trauma faced by the girls and their mother. “We feel that we are the safest with our parents. But that’s not the case with everyone. For us, the biggest threat was our own father,” said Shipra. Incidentally, her father was a bank employee and mother was a housewife.

“I would see him doing dirty acts with my sister every morning. I often tried to pull her from his clutches and would get beaten for it. I did not know what my mistake was, but he would thrash me every time I made efforts to save my sister,” she said as tears rolled down her eyes that moved many in the audience.

The girl pleaded with her mother not to leave Prathma alone with their father but in vain. Their mother did not understand Shipra’s request as fearing more beating she could not give any credible reason behind her plea.

By then the situation had literally gone from bad to worse as Prathma, who was silently undergoing the trauma, finally lost her voice and her mental balance. “My sister was all alone with my father when we heard a sudden shout. When we went to the room, my father was moving out of the room and she was all alone. That was the last day she spoke. She became mentally challenged after that and stopped speaking,” recounted Shipra.

Even then the girls’ mother could not understand her daughter’s state till one final day in 2012 she saw her husband sexually abusing Prathma. “One day my sister was in the washroom and my father too went there to (sexually) abuse her. This was the first time my mother saw him indulging in the horrific act. I remember that day my parents had a big fight,” said Shipra. The man said he would leave the family and did exactly that. He never came back home.

Thereafter their mother filed for divorce, which was finalised some two years back. Today, Shipra, who is a college dropout, works as a domestic help to sustain her family as her mother stays at home to take care of the ailing Prathma. Life has indeed come to a standstill for Shipra, Prathma and their mother who are picking up the pieces one by one.