When Something (Unspeakable) Happens

One week ago, on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 19, I was assaulted by an Indian-American musician, a man I’ve considered a friend, and a member of my South Asian diasporic family.

*

The Artist showed up to my apartment, unannounced, erratically banging on the door. I had just sat down to meditate. Within that first note of the bamboo flute’s hum, I heard a crazed knocking, and immediately—I knew it was Him.

I quickly put my glasses back on, and pulled on a shirt, undressed and unprepared for what was awaited me on the other side. When I opened the door, he grabbed me hard by the shoulders. He looked disheveled, eyes glazed, and his breath reeked of alcohol. I wondered what drugs he might have been blasted on.

He slurred his words. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you two, but you never answer my calls. I’m homeless, I just need a place to crash for two weeks.”

“Babe, you can’t stay here for two weeks,” I said, trying sound firm, but somehow light-hearted, at once, a tactic I’ve used when I’m afraid. I called for my husband, Mojo, who was about to leave the house for his weekly private session at the Muy Thai gym. “I need your help, babe, he says he has bags in the car?”

Mojo ran down the street with him, and he grabbed The Artist’s bags from the trunk of a Punjabi Uber driver’s car, and brought them into our home.

The Artist wandered off down Bedford Avenue.

I said to Mojo, “I got this, you go, go to your boxing class, I’ll handle it.”

This was our first mistake. Huge. One that we will never, ever make again.

*

For forty minutes, I was trapped with The Artist in my apartment, struggling to keep him calm—and clothed— in my living room. His demeanor changed as soon as Mojo left and it was just the two of us alone. He took his shirt off, then started to pull his pants down, exposing his dick. Somehow I didn’t feel afraid, at least no apparent physical signs of fear were present in my body.

“Put your pants on! Mojo will be upset! I’m his wife! Put your shirt back on! I don’t want to see your dick! You’re violating me with all that! I’m your sister!” I chided him in a strict sisterly tone, trying to summon anything that would instill a protective boundary between us.

He chuckled and started yammering lines, as if to get a rise out of me. "Isn’t my penis so small? I wanna fuck you, and then, I’m gonna fuck Mojo in the ass. Kiss me. Come here, give me a kiss. Mmmmm.” He childishly licked his lips and pulled me towards him. I pushed him off. I pleaded with him to put his shirt back on. He manically paced around the living room, pants half-down, penis exposed. I kept pulling his jeans back up to cover his dick and his butt crack. He lay down heavily on the couch, and I rubbed his head and shoulders, trying to soothe him, summoning the maternal energy dormant within, when all I wanted to do was run. I searched his eyes for the glimmer of a friend I cared for. I couldn’t find him. The person in front of me was repulsive, monstrous, scary.

Something unspeakable must have happened to him. Something so terrible he’s gotten to this place. I kept thinking this. I’m not sure if it’s true or not. I felt empathy for him, as if he were a hurt little child trapped in this broken man’s body. Maybe I needed to justify why he was doing this.

The Artist gripped me between his legs, tightening them like a vice around my hips, pinning me down onto the couch, against his body, so I couldn’t move. I kept pushing him off me. He was hurting me with his pinching grabs, but I barely felt anything except this strange calm, focused on making it through the hour Mojo was away. He kept calling a confused drug dealer on his broken phone, which he hurtled across the room every few minutes. He called his sister several times, but she didn’t pick up. When I picked up his tossed phone, I scanned the calls to find her name and number.

I dialed her number, and she picked up right away. “I am so, so sorry,” she said, her voice serene, and firm, much like my own. “But this isn’t safe for you, and I’m so sorry, but I’m not in the country. I’m so sorry you’ve been dragged into this, but you have to call the police.”

“Oh my god. I can’t,” I said, spiraling at the thought. “I can’t call the police on my friend.”

Police brutality, and ICE’s brutality during the Trump regime, the daily violence against Black, Indigenous, Latine and Muslim people in NYC has made the very idea of calling the cops, even in a life or death situations, something that I can’t let myself even consider. My work in college as a domestic violence counselor-advocate flashed in my mind. I remembered seeing firsthand how terrified survivors of domestic violence felt when confronting their abusers in Family Court. As much as no one wants to say this in leftist, abolitionist spaces, sometimes the only protection survivors of domestic violence have in an emergency is the system. First responders, the police and EMTs, work in tandem with prosecutors and judges. I need to acknowledge that I have also seen firsthand the genuine compassion first responders, and prosecutors, have shown survivors of sexual violence.

*

He kept frantically entering and exiting my apartment. He didn’t know our address, but he knew the color of our door, which I left open to make escape easier. I wanted people on the street to hear me if I screamed.

Unsure of what to do, I took a video of him standing at the bottom of my apartment steps, shirtless and barefoot. Anytime he saw a Black person on the street, he rushed toward them, calling them my n-word, getting in their face. He yelled at me, fuck you, bitch, I’m from the streets. I apologized to every single stranger he harassed on my street. They were so nice about it, albeit irritated, as I stood there, feeling mortified, wanting this nightmare to end.

I texted two of my close Indian-American artist friends the video of him and wrote: He’s drunk and homeless. He’s in my living room. I don’t know what to do. He keeps trying to flash his dick. I can’t deal with this shit.

I didn’t mention that I was alone, which in retrospect, was another huge mistake.

No one texted me back, so I texted my sister, who called me. “Sis, are you OK, do you want me to come over?”

“I’m OK, I’m just…trying to get him to…put his shirt back on.”

“What??” She sounded horrified, and scared for me. Her partner heard my strange tone, realizing I wasn’t OK, and said, “We need to get over there right now.”

When they arrived, I felt a rush of relief. I wanted to cry. Saved by my by sister, my flesh and blood, and her love.

*

Things escalated, quickly. He started getting aggressive and agitated and lunged several times to grab my face. My sister’s partner pushed him against the closet hard enough to break the door, and snarled, “Do not touch her.”

In response, he started hurling disgusting transphobic insults at them, until we got him out of the house to smoke a cigarette.

Each time he left, it bought us time to regroup. My sister and her partner sat down, trying to convey what they were witnessing. I remember staring at them, feeling like fourteen-year-old me realizing I’d been raped. Since that first experience, throughout my life, I’ve been assaulted. Fondled, slapped, spat on, scratched, cursed at, kissed, hugged, humped—without my consent. At first, I couldn’t grasp anything they were saying—was I actually in danger? I was handling it, wasn’t I? He wasn’t hurt, I wasn’t hurt. He hadn’t come near my crotch, or managed to land a kiss.

They told me, “You’re doing an amazing job protecting yourself. But you can’t see what we see. You’re in total shock, you’ve been assaulted by this man for an hour, you’re trying to help him, but he can’t be helped—he needs to leave. You need to get his bags out of here, and he needs to get the fuck out of here. Now.”

*

At some point, one of my friends called me back. We chatted for a bit, brainstorming ideas that all seemed ill-suited to the situation. “I texted a social worker friend to see what they say. We definitely shouldn’t call the cops.” they said.

We? You mean me. It’s all falling on me. I didn’t say it out loud, and I didn’t have time to feel bitter about it right then, but I felt abandoned. I wanted my friends to offer their presence, I wanted to share this wretched burden, but I didn’t ask for help, I just conveyed calm, like, I’ve got this.

I’ve been replaying all of these moments in my head, assaulted in my own home, manhandled, forcibly groped, flashed a penis several times, yelled horrible names at, and pinned down against my will by a man much bigger than me—a man I once called my friend.

I wondered later:

Am I —is my life, mental health, safety — worth sacrificing, to protect the belief that all cops are bad, a belief that is both fundamentally true, but also fundamentally useless right now, in the face of immediate mortal danger?

*

From the boxing gym, Mojo had texted and called me several times, regretting that he’d left me there, and checking his phone every few minutes to see if I’d text him back, but I had stopped checking my phone. When Mojo finally got back home, he was shocked to find the front door wide open. My sister and her partner informed him that the situation had gotten really scary and bad.

“Yo, man, what’s up? Let me take a shower, and then we’ll go to the waterfront,” said Mojo, chuckling, trying to dodge the tenth attempt of forced kissing and caressing his neck and cheek.

They left together, to walk the main drag in our neighborhood, and he harassed every person they saw on the street, in sexually and racially aggressive ways. When they arrived back at the apartment, just after sunset, the urgent need to kick him out before dark took hold. I had finally reached my tipping point. This needed to end.

“You can’t stay here, you have to find a hotel,” I said, feeling anxious, and still awful, that I was putting a “friend” out on the street. Was letting him fend for himself in the dark, without a wallet and a broken phone, better than calling 911? I was exhausted, reeling, confused.

I was scared for him, but if he stayed overnight, I was more scared for us.

I didn’t call 911.

Mojo grabbed his bags and brought them to the end of the stairs. “I’m sorry, man, you can’t stay here.”

The Artist struggled against us with his entire body. He had completely reverted back to a child-like state, whining and pushing our boundaries. but we both pushed him out the door, until finally, he stopped protesting and acquiesced.

He left, to try to find more drugs.

*

I started sobbing, finally releasing the torrent of pain trapped in my body. We ordered—what else?—Indian food. Miraculously, the food arrived when he was nowhere to be seen, and for that half hour, we all sat around a table and ate, in relative peace, until the bright, flashing red lights of an ambulance filled our living room.

“Fuck. Did someone call the cops?”

“Someone must’ve called the cops on him!”

We inched toward the window. There was a person filming whatever commotion was happening on my stairs, and as soon as they saw us, they shook their head and held up a hand, as if to say, don’t open the door, don’t come outside.

Through the peephole, I saw him standing outside our door, resisting a conversation with a redheaded EMT or a cop, I couldn’t tell which. She asked him, “What’s your address? Do you know where you are?” We heard him say the wrong street, which he’d been doing the entire afternoon while trying to meet his drug dealer. Relief flooded every part of me, someone had called 911 for a medical emergency, not to arrest him. (If I had called myself I would’ve realized that this was an option!)

He banged loudly on the door one last time.

“Sir. This isn’t your address. This isn’t your house,” said the officer, “Can you please come with us? Sir?”

I crawled toward the window, terrified he would see me. I felt guilty not opening the door, but we needed to let him go. I peeked through the leaves of my houseplant. My last image of him: paramedics strapping him onto a stretcher, as he yelled my husband’s name, scared and confused. Stunned, and haunted by the echoes of his voice, I watched as the ambulance took him away.

*

Afterward, Mojo said to me, “You’re the strongest person I know.” He hugged me tight, and I started crying loud, racking sobs into his chest.

“I don’t feel strong,” I told him. “I feel like I just know how to survive, I just know how to hold other people’s pain, and not let it submerge me.”

*

I am crying.

*

What unfolded that afternoon is part of a pattern of insidious forces at play: the communal violence of open secrets, the way men’s sexual pathology and predations are ignored by a community focused on excellence, to protect image, wealth, power, status. It brought up uncomfortable feelings around being a diasporic Bangladeshi femme artist in relationship to well-known, diasporic, upper-caste Indian peers / lovers / nemeses, and how our intellectual, emotional, political and aesthetic labor is often taken for granted. We live in a time of being glued to our phones, obsessed with our careers and creative pursuits, how we are seen, while slowly becoming detached from one another. We are versed in the language of social justice ideals, but struggle in real-life relationships that force us to confront sexual desire, shame, repression, as well as personal, familial and ancestral trauma.

*

Truthfully, I suspected this day would come, as he’d tried to contact me and Mojo multiple times over the last few months.

I heard a secondhand account of a disturbing incident, not from the survivor directly, about how The Artist allegedly sexually assaulted a young person. After hearing this, I felt unsafe to engage with him alone, but ruminated for months on how best to approach this with him, as a community. But whenever he reached out to Mojo or me to tell us that he’s in our neighborhood, I’ve told him I was busy working on my book, or out of town, which was true. I wanted to protect my mind and energy from his instability. I did not want to become entangled in his tortured, toxic existence.

I look back on the excuses I made to myself—I’m writing my book. I don’t have emotional capacity. I don’t have the energy. It’s not my job, it’s up to all the rich Indian artists who enable him. These sentiments all felt true, but now, I see how it would’ve been wiser to initiate a community-led intervention to prevent more harm.

This one man’s untended trauma has been powerful enough wreak havoc on friends, family and strangers alike.

No matter how much we may try to outrun the truth, it eventually catches us.

*

In a white supremacist patriarchal world, the men most vilified are Black, Indigenous, Dalit, Muslim, Palestinian men—and the artists among them channel their people’s powerful resistance to oppression in their work. What about caste-privileged artists imbuing their work with the sociopolitical cachet of the aforementioned groups, taking the cool influences of rap, jazz, soul; and resistance movements, while receiving the lion’s share of opportunities, awards and press? As a community, we protect these Golden Boys, regarding them as soulful poets, thinkers and musicians, as representatives of our collective dreams. If their creativity is anointed under the dominant culture, it’s a sign that we can make it too, inching us all towards success. So, when these men are sexually violent, predatory, creepy, time and time again, the community has protected them. Often, by turning away their gaze. We choose to believe the myth, clinging to their brilliance, while denying the truth.

These men are not revolutionary—they’re hypocrites.

When survivors of sexual assault say something, there’s so often a massive cost. Becoming an outcast, ignored, vilified.

But staying silent costs more.

*

Deep down, I had feared that the task of this broken man would somehow land on me. I’m a strong, vocal person. I’m versed in confronting sexual violence, which I did with my own abuser, an Indian-American young man. I didn’t want to take on The Artist alone, as a Bangladeshi femme why shouldn’t my peers who are Indian men be as committed to this person’s healing? Why should the emotional labor be my sole responsibility? If his peers, mentors and collaborators didn’t want to absorb his trauma, I thought, why should I?

This is a theme in our community, be it during an election, where Bangladeshi immigrant women lead the charge door knocking, or in a romantic relationship, where a Bangladeshi femme is treated like a sexualized Other, alluring yet antithetical to everything South Asian men are conditioned to desire. Too often, our community sees Bangladeshi people, both immigrants and diaspora, as powerful in the labor they provide, whether it’s emotional, political, social, aesthetic. We are expected to do the hard work, without mutual respect and care.

*

Writing the unspeakable wrests it out into the open. This end-of-summer violence has shaken me. My home, my sanctuary, feels tainted. I feel tainted. When I replay the events that transpired, I cry. I am too tender, too raw, and still unready to name names in this essay. I am protective (as I can be, without compromising my truth) of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives—and myself.

Writing all of this down is naming my truth, not to shame, and not to ruin, even though that’s a natural reaction to reading this.

I am writing this to initiate healing.

I am forever indebted to my sister and her partner, a queer and trans couple, for showing up, the only ones who instantly comprehended the gravity of danger.

For femme and trans masc and nonbinary people and women, who’ve been forced to fight for their lives and safety from cis male violence, we know that suppression of one’s innate nature and desires is dangerous. We know that toxic men are jealous of our freedom, our beauty, our capacity to love and heal and transmute our suffering, our constant striving for liberation, our expressions of intimacy. When a suppressed cis man like The Artist confronts a trans person or a femme with such vitriol, as my sister’s partner put it, “he just shows doesn’t want to give up the entitlement and the privilege his gender affords him.”

*

In my inter-South Asian relationships, I crave communion, joy, intimacy and art. Despite our inherited historic wounds and differences of class, country, caste, religion, I yearn for kinship that dissolves borders. When we’re making art together, or party together, it feels like radical, gorgeous love. Being an artist in community rooted in our “shared” culture is still susceptible to a sort of narcissism when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

Are we associating with each other as artists on more of an aesthetic, clout-based level, as my relationship with The Artist has always been?

Are we using our art to bypass our personal, psychological and spiritual evolution, which is messy, difficult work?

Are we invested in each other’s liberation, as much as our own?

*

I will never be friends with The Artist again. I’m not sure if I’ll even see him again, but I wish him healing. I wish for him to trace back to the origins of the immense pain he carries. I wish for him to transmute this pain into being able to give and receive love. I wish for survivors of his harm, and for him, too, to experience transformational, reformative justice—by way of an intervention, or community confrontation—followed by sustained rehabilitation. I’m not sure who among “us” has the capacity to take this work on.

First, he has to choose to live.

As we near 2 years witnessing the barbaric, heart-shattering U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians by Israel, we’re consumed by the depths of our collective heartache—drowning in the ceaseless stream of tragedy. We live in an era where wicked, fascist men rule the world, where they enact genocide, steal and occupy land, build concentration camps, torture, murder and arrest innocent people, slaughter children in the most unimaginably horrible ways, all the while protecting each other, as they commit and sanction sexual violence.

We have no choice, but to keep breaking open our hearts, spilling our open secrets, and being brave enough to say the unspeakable aloud.

Love,

Tanaïs

P.S. Thank you for reading, for witnessing, and for being here with me. As always, my Substack will always be free. The best way to support my livelihood directly is by purchasing a perfume.