Child sexual abuse: Reading PB Shelley’s 'Ozymandias' in the season of deaths

• I met a traveller from an antique land
• Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
• Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
• Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
• And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
• Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
• Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
• The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
• And on the pedestal these words appear:
• ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
• Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
• Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
• Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
• The lone and level sands stretch far away.
                     
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

It has been a season of deaths.

My grandmother passed away just over a week ago. Then a friend I knew just six days later. He was only 60 years old. And then the mother of another friend a couple of days back. He had grown up in an orphanage in an unforgiving part of the world. He had found his biological mother, only to lose her again.

The loss hit him hard. He is 15 years old.

Coming across Shelley’s “Ozymandias” on Sunday felt literally like being struck in the face: the imperious tone, that heartless sneer.

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

One felt almost compelled to obey such a dubious command. Except that I have not come this far to buckle down now.

Grandma’s passing was especially difficult because growing up, I had blamed her for my abuse.

“If only you had done your duty and served grandpa, I would not have to do his bidding!” I screamed silently, all of ten years old. Although truth be told, I still cannot remember when the abuse began.

It still rankles me that my culture forbids our talking openly about sexual abuse – or any abuse, for that matter. If the walls could be torn down, and the perpetrators brought out of the woodwork instead of being protected by one’s own family members, perhaps those of us who have been abused would have had a better stab at growing up, at living.

Still, I have no regrets. What has happened has shaped me. I am a shadow of what I was once was: an overly shy toddler, I have no qualms now to stand my ground and call a spade a spade.

I made my peace with grandma. I was sad to see her so ill.

And leaving her was hard because I knew that the end was near. When the call came, all I could do was just curl up in bed and cry while thousands of miles away, in a different time zone altogether, my family members hurried to put together the funerary arrangements.

Just imagining her visage: pale face, wrinkled lip. Lifeless now.

Goodbye, grandma, goodbye. 

Also read: On grandma and photographs