In the beginning was the word. But ours came without a tongue. And this is an effort at resurrecting the tongue.

This is deeply personal for me. Not because I was taught anything clearly, but because I never was.

I remember visiting a temple and seeing the shivling. When I asked my friends much later what the lingam stood for physically, they were shocked. Offended. Laughing. This, in a culture that worships it every day. Everyone knew the extended metaphors: creation, infinity, god’s essence. But no one had the courage to say it’s a penis. A sacred one, yes. But part of a body nonetheless.

Another memory. I was a child, visiting my grandmother. I had a knack for drawing, so I drew a man and a woman representing my uncle and aunt. The woman said, “I love you.” That’s it. A simple image. But what followed was pure silence, then backlash. My grandmother complained. My mother lashed out at a child who thought of love as tender.

I still remember the cheap crayon smell. The heat of my grandmother’s lap. But the same grandmother who was scandalised by my sketch spent hours every day glued to serials that drip with manipulation, sexual innuendo, and twisted power games. This hypocrisy sank into me like a curse.

And then came the internet.

I was sexually educated through pornography. I admit it not to shock you, but because it’s true. Porn became a coping mechanism. A replacement for rebellion. Anytime I felt overwhelmed, stressed, gagged, there it was. A click away. A quick fix.

Later, while searching for pornography in films, I stumbled across the French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I broke down crying as Vivaldi played at the end of the film. My chest trembled as I sobbed with Adèle Haenel.

For the first time I did not consume nude bodies. I watched the bodies. With tenderness, just existing. And I painted them life-size. Then pinned the canvas to the wall of my room. My mother called me a disgrace to women and told me she felt like her skin was peeling off just looking at the painting. She complained to my father. My father reacted differently. He said, let him do whatever he wants.

I didn’t thank him. I just painted. Louder. Larger.

I think something shifted for my younger brother too. Now he grows up with the paintings hanging there.

We live in a country where a ten-year-old can access hardcore pornography in seconds. Uncensored, graphic, algorithmically recommended. But that same ten-year-old will never find a single honest sentence about consent, anatomy, or desire in their schoolbooks. They’ll never hear adults speak of sex without a smirk or a slap.

They are fed brutality by the screen and gagged by culture’s silence.

What happens when a child’s first lesson in intimacy is a moan from a stranger on a screen? When there’s no one to explain what it means to touch and be touched with care?

Porn becomes pedagogy. The screen becomes mother and father.

And while the nation gags the child, the child responds. With violence and silence.

And our mother tongues?

They fail us first.

In Malayalam and Hindi, our everyday vocabulary is split down the middle: clinical formality on one side, coarse slang on the other. Affection gets lost in translation, either embalmed in ceremony or dragged into the gutter.

So let’s examine this argument using Malayalam, my mother tongue.

Let’s say I wanted to tell my dad: “I have pain from my penis and testicles radiating to my lower abdomen.”

It’s not a thought experiment. It is a real experience. Maybe I have small kidney stones.

There are two ways I could express it.

The first is Sanskritic:

“എന്റെ ലിംഗത്തിൽ നിന്നും വൃഷണത്തിൽ നിന്നും വേദന ഉദ്ഭവിച്ച് അദിവയിലേക്കു നീങ്ങുകയാണ്.”

(Pain is arising from my penis and testicles and radiating toward the lower abdomen.)

I didn’t even know the Malayalam word for testicles. I had to Google it. The words taste sterile, like they were written by someone who never had a body.

Then there’s the other version, the one that would make my mother twitch:

“എന്റെ അണ്ടിയിൽ നിന്നും കുണ്ണയിൽ നിന്നും വേദന മേലോട്ട് തരിച്ച് കയറുകയാണ്.”

(Pain is rising up from my balls and dick.)

I’ve only heard these words, അണ്ടി and കുണ്ണ, in audio pornography or exchange of abuse. There’s no tenderness in the tongue that raised me.

And it doesn’t stop at Malayalam.

One of my friends, while working with an NGO, was sent to a village to conduct a health survey. He had to ask women about their sexual wellbeing, a task already loaded with discomfort in a country where silence is the default dialect of the body.

One survey question was about genital health. But how do you ask that in working-class Hindi?

It came out something like:

“आपके चूत में कभी बीमारी हुई है क्या?”

(Have you had any disease in your cunt?)

It became a joke among us that even care sounded like assault.

And this wasn’t the fault of the boy asking the question. It was the poverty of vocabulary. There is no way to speak about a woman’s genital health in rural, working-class Hindi without sounding either clinical, Sanskritised, or pornographic.

And this is why even health work, when routed through English, never really enters the body. It stays in the form, never the flesh. One has to point to the genitals to refer to them. Address them with disgust and shame in the same culture that religiously reveres sexual symbols like the lingam and yoni.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I was afraid of women.

Not because I hated them. But because I had no idea how to be around them. And in that fear, I did what many boys do: I masked fear with mockery. I didn’t talk to women, but I talked about them. Often. Loudly. With cruel conviction.
I commented on women not for what they did, but for who they were with, or how they looked, or how they laughed. I said things I now regret deeply. I was the kind of boy who mistook contempt for coolness. And I was surrounded by others just like me.

Then something broke.

After my first year in college, I spiralled downwards. I stopped using my phone. I began to reflect. And what I saw in myself was revolting. I had become everything I now look at with disgust in others: a mouthpiece of casual violence – trained by silence, internet forums, and inherited cowardice.

But here’s the real horror: many boys never get out. They don’t pause. They don’t spiral. They go deeper. Their misogyny gets rewarded. Reinforced by algorithmic filth, locker-room glee, and the applause of men who mistake dominance for identity.

When men commit sexual violence, we have mothers who say, “We don’t know where he learned all this from.”
We learned it from what you didn’t say. From the silences we inherited, not questioned. From your comfort with obedience and shame, and your fear of truth.

I now know this: to speak from a position of patriarchal privilege and belittle women is not just ignorance. It is betrayal. I’ve tasted the ugliness of my own thoughts, and I’ve seen what they do to others. If I could go back, I wouldn’t just shut my mouth sooner. I’d listen. I’d unlearn.

I’d say to every boy like me: the real strength is not in mocking the body you do not understand. It’s in confronting the darkness you’ve inherited and choosing not to pass it on.

And I hope, genuinely, that more boys spiral. That they shut their phones, sit still, and bleed their ego out. Because that spiral, that reflection, may be one of the few hopes we have left to interrupt the epidemic of sexual violence in this country.

Marriage, in the world I grew up around, often felt less like intimacy and more like endurance.
And what happens when a woman is brutalised inside marriage?

In India, marital rape is still not criminalised. Many women remain in in-laws’ houses where gods hang on every wall, but no one listens.

I am reminded of a scene from The Great Indian Kitchen. The woman has just finished scrubbing the sink for the third time that day. Then night falls. Her husband calls her to bed. He mounts her wordlessly. She lies there numb. Breathing. Her hands by her side. And in that moment, the only thing she feels is the faint scent of dish soap rising from her fingers. She had washed them with force, as if to exorcise the smell. But still, her body smells like the kitchen sink.

That’s how quietly marital rape can arrive. Not as bruises. But as residue.

In parts of India, men say, “Women get raped because of the kind of clothes they wear. They provoke men.” These men mean it. They’ve been taught to. No one told them a woman’s body is not a threat. That lust is not destiny. That consent is not optional. They were never given a language for desire, only a script for domination.

We do not teach boys to ask. We teach them to take. We do not teach girls to feel. We teach them to hide. And then we act surprised when they grow into strangers afraid of their own bodies.

Maybe all I really want is this: that one day, when a boy mouths the word for his body in his mother’s tongue, the tongue will not gag him – it will hold him.

Image credit: Oil on canvas, Sreeku, 2026