The Light Left On

In most Indian homes a grown child is never quite grown. They can be thirty-four, with a job in another city and a child of their own, and someone will still wait up when they come back late from a wedding function. The kitchen light stays on. A plate sits under a steel lid in case they are hungry. The first question at the door is always the same, khana khaya? or saapteengala? Did you eat?

On one of those nights, in the middle of a cousin’s wedding week, the grown child does not go to bed. They sit down across the table from the parent who waited up. Slowly, sometimes in pieces, they say that when they were small, a relative sexually abused them. That relative is coming to the wedding. He has a chair near the front and a name the whole family says with respect.

What comes out first, in many homes, is one of a few sentences. Bhool jao. It was so long ago. Why now, in the middle of the wedding? He is old now, what will this achieve? Every Indian language has its own version of these lines.

If you have said one of them, you are not a cruel parent. Most parents who say it are frightened of the wedding falling apart and of what the relatives will say. Underneath that is a harder fear: that this happened to their own child and they did not see it. Some parents went through something similar as children and were told to keep quiet themselves. The sentence comes out before they can think. But a person who harms a child very often tells that child to keep quiet. Bhool jao asks for the same silence, this time from the people the child trusted most.

Why it comes years later

Almost nobody tells at the time. A French national commission heard from nearly 30,000 adults who had been sexually abused as children. Among those abused inside their own family, fewer than 1 in 10 told anyone when it happened, and more than 6 in 10 waited over ten years. Men waited longest. Surveys in the United States and Canada point the same way: about seven in ten people who were abused as children waited at least five years, or had never told anyone before the survey asked.

So why now has an ordinary answer. Children usually have no words for what is happening, and they are often afraid of breaking the family. Many only fully understand what was done to them once they are adults. By then the person is a respected elder, and telling feels like setting fire to the house.

When grown survivors do tell, they mostly tell family. In the French findings, the person they told was most often their mother, then a partner, a brother or sister, and then their father. Asked why they finally spoke, most said they hoped it would help them. Among those abused inside the family, more than half said they spoke to protect a child. Only about 1 in 6 said they wanted the person punished. A wedding brings everyone into one house, including the youngest children in the family, and that can be the moment it can no longer stay unsaid.

This is not rare in India. A global study in The Lancet in 2025 estimated that about 3 in 10 women and more than 1 in 8 men in India experienced sexual violence before they turned 18. Across a large extended family, it is likely that someone is carrying this.

What the first answer does

Most families do believe the grown child. In the French testimonies, fewer than 1 in 5 of the people told did not believe the adult who told them. The trouble came after the believing. More than a quarter of the people told believed the adult and still asked them to stay quiet, or put some of the blame on them. Four in ten did nothing at all. Only about one in four suggested seeing a doctor or counsellor. And in three cases out of four, the survivor’s ties with the person who did it were never cut.

That pattern has a cost. Researchers who combined 51 studies of people who had told someone about sexual or other violence found that hurtful replies were linked to worse mental health afterwards. Taking over the person’s decisions and changing the subject were among the replies most closely tied to distress. In that research, a hurtful reply seemed to do more harm than a kind one did good. That is a reason to get the first answer right, and to repair it if it went wrong.

In a small study in India, researchers who spoke to women abused as children heard the same fears. The women worried their parents would dismiss or blame them, and some worried that telling would hurt their parents. When they did tell, some were met with dismissal and blame. Others found acceptance, often from the women in the family. In one family the man who had done it was simply kept on as a friend, because everyone thought of him as a good man. And none of the women had been encouraged by anyone in their family to see a counsellor.

The old saying

Almost every Indian parent has said it at some point: maa-baap ke liye bachche kabhi bade nahi hote. For a parent, a child never grows up. Most Indian languages have a saying like it. Grown children roll their eyes at it, and it is the reason the kitchen light is on at midnight.

Take the saying at its word. If the thirty-four-year-old at your table is still your child, so is the small child they once were. Nobody stood between that child and that relative. The blame for what was done belongs to the person who did it, and only to them. You cannot go back to that year, but you can stand beside your child now.

For a grown child, standing beside them does not mean taking over. They decide what happens next. Your part is to believe them out loud, and then to ask what they need. Something like this:

I believe you. It was not your fault. You were a child. I am so sorry this happened to you, and that nobody stopped it. What do you need from us now?

In Hindi: Mujhe tumhari baat par poora bharosa hai. Tumhari koi galti nahi thi, tum toh bachche the. Mujhe bahut dukh hai ki yeh tumhare saath hua, aur kisi ne roka nahi. Ab tumhe humse kya chahiye?

Then mostly listen. Leave silences alone. Do not ask what exactly happened; if they want to tell you more, they will. Some things, said even gently, land as doubt or blame:

• Why didn’t you tell us then?
• Are you sure? You were very small.
• Why bring it up now?
• What will people say?
• He has changed. Can’t you forgive him?

Do not tell other relatives without their permission, and do not ring the relative that night to confront him. What happens to him is for your grown child to decide with you, in their own time.

You may remember, sitting there, a day long ago when your child would not go to that house, or cried when that relative came, or tried to say something and was told to stop being difficult. If so, say it aloud: You tried to tell me once, and I didn’t understand. I am sorry. If you knew something then and did nothing, that is harder to say, and it matters even more.

You will also feel your own grief, and often guilt. Those feelings are real and they need somewhere to go, but not across that table tonight, where your child will end up comforting you. Take them to your partner, a close friend, or Tele-MANAS on 14416, the government’s free mental health helpline, open at any hour.

If it is your sister, your nephew or your cousin who tells you, the same words work. Many grown survivors tell a brother or sister, and some tell an aunt or a cousin instead of a parent. You can be the one in the family who believes them, and who stands next to them if they choose to tell the others. In some families, the person who hears it says that the same relative hurt them too.

At the wedding, and after

The hardest test usually comes at the next family function, when that relative walks in. Ask your grown child, before the day, what would help, and then make it happen. Perhaps they come late and leave early. Perhaps they sit at the far end, or skip the function altogether while you make sure nobody turns their absence into gossip. Nobody should push them to greet him or to sit beside him for a family photo. Some families decide, in time, to stop inviting the relative. Whatever your family decides, decide it with your child, and in their favour.

Families guard their peace for good reasons. But if the peace depends on one person staying quiet about being harmed, that person has been paying for it alone, sometimes for twenty years. And he is old now changes nothing that happened. You can be ordinarily polite to an old man and still keep him away from your child.

Your child may want to go to the police. For the most serious abuse there is no time limit, under the old law or the new, and in 2018 the Ministry of Women and Child Development said a person can complain at any age. A few lesser offences do have a limit. A lawyer can tell your child which applies. Women, and people on low incomes, can get one free through the District Legal Services Authority.

Let your grown child lead on whether to go to the police about what happened to them, and tell them you will stand with them whichever way they choose.

One thing is not only theirs to carry. If the person who did this could still be near children, in your family or anywhere else, those children come first. Talk to your grown child about that worry, and then call 1098, the national child helpline, or a lawyer about reporting. Tell your grown child before you act. 1098 is free, at any hour, and it will connect you to the police. The law requires anyone who knows or fears that a child is being sexually harmed to tell them, and it protects anyone who reports in good faith. If a child is in danger right now, call 112.

And keep going after the first night. Healing from this is slow and it rarely runs in a straight line. Your child may not want to talk about it again for months, and then may need to, at a strange hour, because of a news story or an old family photo. Ask now and then how they are. Offer to help them find a counsellor, and to pay if you can. The counselling line at the end of this page is free.

If you are the one who told, and your family said bhool jao, you were not wrong to tell them. A first answer is often fear talking, and some families find a better one later. Some never do, and that says nothing about you or about what happened to you. You can get support of your own, from a counsellor or a helpline, whether or not your family ever comes round.

And if you are the parent, and your first answer that night was bhool jao, it is not too late to give a different one. Go back to them, and start with I believe you.

If a child is in danger right now, call 112. If a child has been harmed, or you are worried about one, call 1098, the national child helpline, free, any time of day. For emotional support, iCALL offers free and confidential counselling on 9152987821. This is a hard subject. If it is close to you, you do not have to carry it alone.