By: Inisa Jaliwala

I was told the house I grew up in was a hundred years old.

I’d repeat this to my friends at school proudly, relishing the mystique of living in a century-old home.

I later learned this was a hyperbole – a story told to describe the decrepit state of our building.

The roof was caving in, a leak tip-tipping like a metronome, the soundtrack of a monsoon.

This was the first lie.

An innocent one.

An anecdote I tell my friends now as an adult.

Betrayal hadn’t entered my home yet.

When I was about eight, my dad got us animal-shaped soaps.

Mine was an elephant, my sister’s a lion.

I remember being careful not to disfigure the little pink elephant while lathering.

It had a prized place in our tiny shared bathroom: above the water heater, just beside the mirror that always fogged up.

My mother would be careful not to drop it while cleaning, gently placing it on the shelf while she wiped away the persistent mold on the ceiling.

We were careful with each other then.

One morning, I was upset; the elephant’s trunk had been smudged.

My sister must have used it.

I went teary-eyed, complaining to my mother.

She consoled me with a promise:

Let’s get ice cream.

You can skip school.

Dad will take us.

It was a Monday.

The thought almost made me giddy.

That’s how betrayal arrived in my home, with the promise of a sweet treat.

I was taken to a lady doctor.

She applied a red serum on my hand with a cotton bud and asked if it burned.

It did.

Then she told me to lie down.

“It’ll be over in a minute,” she said, holding a scalpel in her hand.

There wasn’t much bleeding.

I don’t remember the pain.

I remember the smell of antiseptic, and my father waiting outside.

I remember feeling like something invisible had been rearranged inside me.

That day, an important part of my womanhood was taken from me.

That day my body was changed without my consent.

I stopped asking questions then.

We didn’t talk about it, not once.

The house went on leaking through the ceiling, and I learned to mop in silence.

Years later, when I thought of betrayal, it wasn’t the act itself I remembered.

It was the quiet that followed, the silence that filled the house like smoke.

When I grew older, I found words for it.

Articles, survivor stories, laws that didn’t yet exist. I realised what had been done had a name.

Female genital mutilation.

A ritual disguised as care.

I felt anger, but more than that, I felt recognition: a return of a voice.

I began to write and to speak. To make sense of what this silence had cost me.

What I wanted to do then was to turn what was taken from me into language, to reclaim my body through words.

Justice took the form of telling my story.

That night, when we came home, I bathed. I took my pink elephant soap and held it under the running water.

I watched it lose shape: the trunk, the ears, the small, round body melting into foam. For the first time, I didn’t care.