Love & Courage

by Jagmeet Singh

  It was difficult to hear a word of it over my own thoughts. Some of what he said made sense because it appealed to my love of science. But why were we up in his room? Where was the old lady? Why did I have to take my underwear off? If this was normal, why were we alone? Then again, he had made it pretty clear to me that this was a “special program” that only the very best were allowed to participate in.

  He took his hands away after a few minutes. “It’s always better to do it with your trainer, but you can practise this at home, too,” he said. “It all helps with passing the program. Here’s what you do: any time you come over for practice on the weekends, you get points. Any time you get an erection, you tell me and you get points. Any time you rub yourself, you get points. If stuff comes out, you get points. Any time you get a wet dream, you get points. Most of all, any time you come for special training, you get points. We count all of your points each week and add it toward getting your black belt. Make sense?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I know you want to get stronger and fight better,” he said. “I know you want your black belt, so you really need to be in this program, Jagmeet.”

  I nodded. He told me to get dressed. As I reached into my bag on the floor to put my uniform on, he stopped me. “No, no. Get your pants on,” he said. “We’re done; I’ll see you next week.”

  “I don’t need my uniform?” I asked.

  “No, not for this program. But you know what? Always bring your uniform, just in case.”

  And that was it. The hour was up.

  It’s obvious to me now how much strategy Mr. Neilson used to manipulate me—not just to groom me, but also to make my parents comfortable with me going to his house alone. He made sure they always saw me with my uniform in my bag—the uniform I never actually put on during weekends. I think he may have also exploited a blind spot: while my mom was a little suspicious about the club being in the basement, she probably didn’t even imagine that a boy could be sexually abused, and I avoided giving any clues or hints about what was going on.

  Mr. Neilson knew my own insecurities and aspirations, maybe better than anyone else. He studied me as closely as I studied tae kwon do. He knew I was in a hurry to get my black belt, but he also knew I knew that the level progressions would slow down once I achieved a blue belt, and that the skills I would have to master to level up would get more complicated. His “points,” he promised, would help fast-track me.

  But most of all, he knew I wanted results. I wanted to be bigger. I needed to be stronger. Mr. Neilson tied his perversion to my performance, my primary motivation. And as the weekend sessions continued on top of my weekly training, I convinced myself that I was improving.

  It didn’t take long for the abuse to seem normal. I went over for an hour every Saturday afternoon, always while Mr. Neilson’s mother was out. He’d start each session by asking, “What’s your update for the week?” I’d report what “points” I’d earned, and he would tick lines on his clipboard chart and take a few notes. Sometimes, I’d lie to him, telling him I’d masturbated when I hadn’t or that I had a wet dream when I still didn’t know what that was. Finally, he’d ask me to “help” with his testosterone, then he’d help me with mine. He never removed his underwear; I always removed mine. He never went further than that.

  There was only one time when the program overlapped with the weekday club. We were stretching together, lined up by ranking, myself in the middle, facing forward as we tried to get into a low stretch. Normally, I could get down into a near split, but that day, for some reason, I couldn’t.

  “It’s not working,” I said as he came around to inspect our stretches.

  “Come upstairs, I’ll give you a hand,” he said.

  I went to his room, where we went through his program and he helped me stretch. When it was over, I got back in my uniform and returned downstairs with him.

  Eric was watching as I tried again to get into a lower stretch, this time dropping closer to the floor than before.

  “Hey,” said Eric. “How’d you do that?”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither did Mr. Neilson. This was “special ops.”

  Between Mr. Neilson’s abuse and my dad’s worsening alcoholism, I had a lot on my mind when I began sixth grade at Detroit Country Day School in September 1991. Very quickly, however, the demands of going to the new school busied me to the point that I could hardly think about anything but my academics.

  My school day started at 6 a.m., when I caught the early carpool with a handful of other Canadian kids who also went to the prep school. All of us were doctors’ kids, and we crammed into a minivan for a thirty-to forty-minute commute. After-school activities and sports meant I often wasn’t home until 4:30 p.m.

  The school made extracurriculars mandatory. In order to graduate from one grade to the next, I had to earn one “white point” for doing a certain amount of community service, a “gold point” for joining a club like chess or the school newspaper, and two “blue points” for sports (it could be an individual sport, like weight training, but at least one had to be a team sport). I now spent some evenings volunteering with elderly people at my dad’s hospital to get my volunteer hours, and I stayed after school for sports. All of that was on top of my assigned homework, routine reading of fantasy novels and Sikh spiritual poetry, and Sunday services at Gurdwara. I enjoyed the unique challenge each activity brought, and I appreciated the distractions they offered from my home life. Most of all, though, I liked that I didn’t have to fight anymore.

  For the first time in years, my identity and appearance didn’t feel like a major barrier. Detroit was a diverse city to begin with, but Country Day was exactly the kind of school that upwardly mobile immigrants desired for their kids. I was no longer the only one in class with a head covering—along with my patka, there were also kippahs and hijabs. Practising different traditions and observing different holidays was normal in class. The notion of mocking kids because of their identity was ridiculous. There was still ample bullying and snobbery to go around, all of it centred around your “coolness” factors—having the right or wrong brand-name shoes, or being helplessly dorky—but I was never bullied for the way I looked at school again.

  The one time I did get in a scrap, the experience was night and day compared to my days at school in Windsor. I can’t remember the exact reason this boy was picking on me, but he was pushing me and acting aggressively. I tried to get him to stop but he wasn’t interested in talking. He was a lot bigger than me, too, so physically, I couldn’t avoid him. He kept on getting in my face, blocking my way and trying to intimidate me. Finally, I’d had enough. When he pushed me again, I threw a burst of rapid punches to his abdomen. Instantly winded, all of his aggression deflated.

  I scanned the faces of students that had gathered around us. Had we been at Oakwood, had any of them been Walid or even a random bystander, I would have earned their respect and maybe a couple of pats on the back or a high-five for standing up for myself. But the response I received was the furthest thing from praise. People looked at me like there was something wrong with me.

  “That’s kind of violent,” a girl said, totally appalled.

  “But he was picking on me,” I tried to argue back, to no avail. The kids watching all dispersed as if they had just watched a horrible car crash.

  Country Day was like a separate society that I was driven in and out of each day. While I had a lot of acquaintances there and the kids were generally friendly, I couldn’t break through the already established cliques, so I didn’t make any close friendships for a while. But I didn’t mind—I already had a lot of friends in my completely separate world in Windsor, as well as a best friend, Walid.

  As close as I was to Walid, I never opened up about what was going on with me during that time. I never complained about stuff at home. I remember one summer day when we were about eight or nine years old. We were hanging out in the backyard by the pool. My dad came outside. He was clearly really dr
unk. Walid said hi politely. And before my dad could engage with him, I went toward my dad and said, “Get back inside.”

  Dad didn’t listen, so I started pushing him toward the garage and then up the stairs that led into the house, yelling at him the whole time. At some point, my dad yelled, “Up yours!” back at me.

  When I came back outside, Walid looked shocked.

  “Why were you so rude to your dad?” he asked. He liked my dad and my dad liked him.

  I explained to Walid, for the first and only time as a child, that sometimes my dad drank and was difficult to deal with. We never spoke about my dad’s problem again until we were thirty-nine years old.

  Maybe it never came up again because I was worried that to Walid, my dad seemed perfect. To Walid—to most of my friends—Dr. Dhaliwal was like a sitcom version of a dad. When in public view, he was sober, charming, charismatic, well-dressed, and eager to share many wisdoms. It would have been nearly impossible for Walid to match up the dad I knew behind closed doors with the one who bought us the best video camera on the market and let me and Manjot film mock television shows and news reports that we would star in together.

  And I definitely didn’t want to tell Walid about Mr. Neilson. That’s the thing about abuse—it can make the victim feel an overwhelming sense of shame, a shame so disabling that one suffers in silence. I somehow blamed myself for what had happened, and while I knew what had happened was real—I didn’t imagine it—part of me didn’t actually believe it. And if I didn’t believe it, how was anyone else going to? So I carried the shame and stigma; I buried it deep. I told no one, and I told myself not to think about what had happened. In a way, I prevented myself from actually accepting the truth. But here, now, is the truth of the experience: abuse doesn’t just go away, even after it ends. The consequences linger. They take a toll, even if it’s invisible for a while. By not speaking up, by convincing myself that nothing had happened, I got through—in the short term. But in the long term, I would have to face the truth. I would have to unearth it, bring it to the surface, and examine it. I would have to face the fact that I was the victim, not the perpetrator. I was not to blame. I would have to accept that the abuse really did happen and that it had taken a devastating toll on me.

  When I started sixth grade, I was too tired on weekends to go to my special training anymore. With school starting up, tae kwon do was going to be hard to squeeze in with my new academic demands. And, honestly, I’d been losing interest in it ever since I started Mr. Neilson’s “special program.” I was a few levels from earning a black belt, but my passion for martial arts had been stamped out by conflicting feelings about my training. The other sports I was playing and my new school were better ways of building my confidence, and the feeling of specialness that Mr. Neilson initially groomed had slowly faded. Without it, his testosterone training didn’t feel like “special ops” anymore. It felt like a chore that I dreaded having to do and that made me feel uncomfortable with myself afterward. It also didn’t seem to get me any closer to a black belt, as he’d promised.

  I don’t know if I was consciously avoiding training, but one day my mom asked if I wanted to go and I said, “I don’t think I have time anymore.”

  That was the end of it. She never asked me again. I never saw Mr. Neilson again. And I never heard from him, either. But I did hear about him.

  About a year later, I was hanging out in our backyard when my mom called me in for dinner. When I went inside, the table hadn’t been set yet. My mom sat alone at the table and seemed a little on edge. My mom was a lot of things, but she had never come across as uncomfortable toward me. Whatever was up, it was serious.

  “Jagmeet,” she said.

  “Yes, bebey-ji,” I said, standing at the doorway.

  “Sit with me,” she said. I did. “This probably didn’t happen, but did Mr. Neilson ever show you any pictures?”

  I shifted in my seat a little, immediately flushed with shame about myself and worry for my mom. I believed I’d done something wrong, something about to make her already stressful life worse. I knew where her question was leading, but I felt she had enough on her mind with my dad’s addiction, so I played dumb. “What do you mean?”

  “Any pictures of men and women together in magazines?”

  “No.”

  “They’re saying that . . .” She trailed off. She was so uncomfortable it was hard for her to say the words. “The police called your father. Apparently there have been complaints of Mr. Neilson behaving inappropriately with children, so they’re checking in with anyone who took classes with him.”

  As my mom spoke, I immediately understood what Mr. Neilson had been doing to me. I just hadn’t had the words for it until that moment. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to use them.

  “Mom, nothing like that happened to me. Don’t worry,” I said, trying my best to calm her worries.

  “Okay,” she said, reaching the limits of her comfort. “It’s just about suppertime.”

  And that was that. She’d tried. She’d asked, and I’d said nothing. Why? I was worried about how she’d take it, worried that she would feel like she’d let me down. I was worried that maybe she would think I was tainted or dirty because of what had happened. And, of course, part of me wondered if it had all been my fault. Maybe I’d let this happen. Maybe I should have prevented Mr. Neilson from doing what he did. The swirl of guilt, shame, and blame took hold, and it made me turn to stone.

  The next day, Walid was waiting on his front porch when the carpool driver dropped me off at home. He’d started taking classes with Mr. Neilson a few months before, and now that I could see clearly what Mr. Neilson was doing, I knew I had to warn Walid.

  “You have to stop going to Mr. Neilson’s classes,” I blurted out as I ran across his front lawn.

  “What do you mean? Why?” Walid asked.

  “He got in trouble for doing something with students,” I said, purposefully trying to be vague.

  “Did something happen to you?” Walid asked.

  “No,” I said without a millisecond to spare. I couldn’t admit to it. The way I saw it back then, I had done it to myself. I didn’t stop Mr. Neilson, I thought. I let him do this. I didn’t want Walid to think I’d let that happen—I just wanted to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to him.

  “Did he do anything to you?” I asked.

  “No,” said Walid. “He offered me private lessons, but I didn’t want them. I guess I’ll have to find a new club now.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  We hung out a little longer and talked about other things until my heart rate returned to normal. I was relieved that nothing had happened to Walid. If anything had, Walid would have told his parents and he would have told me. I felt a little reassured, and the feeling of guilt and shame momentarily subsided.

  I never heard anything more about Mr. Neilson or a police investigation. It would be another fifteen years before I talked to my family about what happened. That’s how long it would take me to understand it wasn’t my fault and to come to some self-knowledge. It took me even longer to work through the trauma he caused. Mr. Neilson’s abuse would affect my self-esteem, my self-love, and my ability to be intimate. That night, all I could think about was how ashamed I was for continuing to go back to his club. I’d always thought of myself as a mature kid, a bit of an old soul who had a lot of control. I had agency over my academics and the bullies I successfully defended myself against—so how could I have let this happen if it wasn’t my choice?

  I wish I could go back and tell my younger self, “It’s not your fault.” But at the time, I never heard those words. So my coping mechanism was simple: don’t think about it. Whenever I felt the shame or the guilt creep up, I would have a conversation with myself.

  All right, Jagmeet, something happened and it was messed up. I’m not sure how to fix it or make it go away. We made it through, that’s all that matters. Now don’t think about it.

  I carried out the same con
versation with myself that night in bed, trying to push the sound of Mr. Neilson’s voice and the feel of his touch into a black hole of amnesia. The shame was too much. One thing was certain to me: I couldn’t ever let anyone know about it.

  Chapter Seven

  THE LAND OF FIVE RIVERS

  Weekends were the worst. My dad would either be stumbling around the house drunk and out of his mind, or passed out on the couch. He was very particular to hide his bottles and his actual drinking, but whenever he drank too much, he ordered pizza. If we came home to a scene of empty pizza boxes strewn about, we knew that things were going to be bad. Empty pizza boxes and bottles are the image permanently etched into my mind of things being bad.

  My dad’s behaviour, as unfair as it sounds, also appeared to have an impact on how people perceived us. As in any close-knit community, the rumour mills were in full effect. Word got around that my dad had a drinking problem. Even though I was considered a good kid, we were tainted by my dad’s alcoholism. We started to get the feeling that people wanted to avoid us.

  After my dad had gotten his residency in St. John’s, my mom stopped working. She volunteered for community activities every now and then, and became a full-time mom. Once my siblings and I were more self-sufficient, she started helping out as my dad’s office manager, but that job obviously depended on him having a practice. She got so wrapped up in trying to take care of him that she didn’t think she could do anything else.

  Each time my dad finally sobered up, I would sit down with him and deliver a long lecture.

  “Dad, we have to talk,” I’d start.

  “Sure, beta, what is it?” he replied.

  “Dad, when you drink, it’s scary for everyone. You’re not yourself. You get angry and you break things. I know you don’t want to do that.”