#abuse – the shiny diaries

📍 Ireland 🇮🇪

It’s Christmas of 1985 in the town of New Ross. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant toiling away feverishly to provide for his wife Eileen and five daughters. The Catholic Church is very influential in the town and Bill regularly supplies coal to them. The nuns know Bill well and admire his work and the commitment towards his family. There’s also a Magdalen laundry attached to the church which is believed to provide shelter to young girls, especially unmarried girls who are pregnant. Rumours abound about the clandestine activities at the laundry and also about the girls who are sheltering there. Most of the townspeople know the workings of the Magdalen laundry and how the church is tacitly involved in its iniquitous affairs. Eileen, doesn’t want to affront anyone; she believes that being a mute spectator would protect her daughters from any future troubles. One day, Bill while dropping off the coal at the church, stumbles upon a young girl who has been locked up in the freezing coal shed without food, water and covered in her excrements. Even in her indisposition she pleads Bill to rescue her and her child who has been forcibly taken away from her by the nuns. As Bill confronts this predicament, he has to simultaneously decide between antagonising the church and his church loving wife, and doing the right thing.

The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, also known as Magdalene asylums, were institutions usually run by Roman Catholic orders, which operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. They were run ostensibly to house “fallen women”, an estimated 30,000 of whom were confined in these laundries. Given Ireland’s historically conservative sexual values, these were a generally accepted social institution well into the second half of the 20th century. They disappeared with changes in sexual mores and a loss of faith in the Catholic Church due to repeated revelations of scandals. Ireland’s last Magdalen asylum imprisoned women until 1996; it’s only in 2001 that the Irish government acknowledged that women in these laundries were victims of abuse and much later in 2013, that a formal state apology was issued.

Claire Keegan, is an Irish writer known for her short stories and the recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature among various other awards. Small Things Like These won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and was the shortest book to be shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. In December 2024, it was Oprah’s Book Club pick. It has been adapted into a film of the same name starring Cillian Murphy.

This novella is a crisp, succinct take on how human beings falter, ponder and ruminate over doing the right thing even when faced with obvious wrongdoings. Most of us don’t want to disturb the status quo. We are ready to be consciously blind to such scenarios and even to wonder if the victim/s rightfully deserved what they endured. Our hypocrisy becomes jarringly evident in our chosen silence. Our activism and our fights are very conditional, provided they don’t cost us our peace and don’t disturb our lives. This is the advice Bill is subjected to from Eileen and others who had his best interest. If you look closer home, the rising Islamophobia and the general intolerance for criticism, though a different issue from what happened in Ireland, hasn’t prompted the majority of us to take a stand, because of the fear of being ostracised by the increasing number of zealots which may include our friends and family, and also the overbearing fear of an almost autocratic, authoritarian government that is trying its might to police secular voices. It is the acceptance of Small Things Like These that lead to big things like xenophobia, genocide and totalitarianism.

The book ends on a cliffhanger moment. Even Oprah, in her podcast, wondered what would happen next. So Claire, please let there be a sequel to Small Things Like These.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🥺

Tara, is a reticent and docile girl, who grows up in Mangalore with her grandparents and a schizophrenic uncle. Her parents along with her younger brother, move to Dubai during her formative years leaving her with her grandparents despite her disapproval and reluctance. She grows up to becomes a journalist, works for the local newspaper and has an arranged marriage with Sanjay who lives in Atlanta. After the marriage, he leaves her behind in Mangalore and Tara is only able to meet him after three years once she herself goes there. Undeterred by the abandonment and the questionable intentions of Sanjay, Tara hopes for a blissful life in the US. However, all her hopes come crashing down, as Sanjay continues to ignore her, remains non communicative and disapproving of her likes, behaviour and even her friendship with a Russian girl, Alyona. Tara continues to tolerate his mercurial temperament, his gaslighting, his passive aggression which gradually morph into physical and verbal abuse. When her parents dismiss her concerns about Sanjay and instead ask her to compromise, she feels betrayed. One day, after a particularly violent incident, she leaves her house and Sanjay, and with the help of friends manages to start her life from scratch. Later on she meets Cyrus, who develops feelings for her, as does Tara; but her unresolved past issues come to wreck havoc in her new oasis and she doesn’t stop short of self sabotaging everything that is loving and deserving of her.

Purple Lotus is an intense meditation on abandonment and shame. Through Tara, the author has portrayed how these emotions overpower our lives until a resolution is achieved. Brushing them aside, never makes them go away, rather they always come back with a vengeance in the most vulnerable of times. Tara is made to feel guilty by her parents for choosing her freedom from an abusive marriage. She carries this shame and countless other moments of shame from her growing up years, till it snowballs into a disaster that is ready to upend her life. Unbeknownst to Tara, others’ disappointment in her for her actions, and her constant longing for their approval, makes her tied to them in an emotionally calamitous way. However, through her self-actualisation which is indeed painful and unpleasant, the author shows us all that, there is always the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Veena Rao’s debut work, Purple Lotus, is a poignant and urgent read on abuse, domestic violence and its unsettling impact on the victims. Though the language is easy to read and engaging, the story does hit you hard. Through this book, she highlights the various ways in which abuse can present itself and it necessarily needn’t be physical and torturous. She also makes an emphatic case for gross emotional abuse that is often disregarded not just by the victim but by the people close to her. The narrative does a sharp commentary on how Indian parents especially ignore their daughters’ call to distress and instead of comforting and supporting them, often reprimand them for even having such thoughts.

2024 is coming to an end and Indian women are still fighting off abuse and striving for an equal stance in a marriage. Indian men are very easily given the benefit of doubt, let off the hook even in grave circumstances and celebrated for just being in the relationship. The fact that nobody questions them and challenges their innate chauvinism and misogyny, sometimes deceptively disguised as feminism and hence difficult to decode, has created this dictatorial monster that is soon becoming a monolith of unwavering patriarchy.

That’s why we need to read this book, Purple Lotus.

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🪷