I’ll Be Your Light

The abuse never stopped. Eventually, I remember moving to a small town called Woodridge in Virginia. I started school but was still in the process of learning English. The kids continued to bully me, and in the meantime, I still had an abusive dad to deal with, which only made things worse. Although I had become good friends with a neighbor, my dad limited our freedom and rarely allowed us just to be kids and go outside. One day I was walking home from where the bus had dropped me off. I saw Caleb on the way there. He wanted me to stay outside and play, but I couldn’t, so I told him I had to be back home before my dad got there. “My dad doesn’t let me play outside,” I said to Caleb. Caleb was curious as to why, so I told him everything about my dad being abusive and excessively violent toward my family and me. I would have Caleb come over to my house for safety reasons, hoping my dad wouldn’t beat me if he saw my friend was there. We were still incredibly poor and never seemed to have a set of clean clothes. I still vaguely remember waking up and having to get the roaches out of my shoes. My peers would often make comments about what I was wearing, and I eventually learned how to tune these comments out. Around this time, my dad started a wholesale business where he would sell gas stations certain necessary supplies. He forced me to go on these trips with him even though the last thing I wanted to do was be around my abusive father. One day, I missed my bus ride home, so I took a route through the woods to get home as soon as possible. I remember stepping through the front door, dirt and grime from the woods covering me. As soon as I saw my dad’s face, I knew that another beating was inevitable. At this point, my life was a never-ending nightmare that I couldn’t seem to escape. One day, my dad brought home this lady I had never met before. My mom questioned my dad about the woman, but he dodged her questions. My mom got the lady’s number, as she was supposed to take my sister and brother out. Then my mom asked me to call the lady to question the relationship between her and my dad. I did as my mom asked and gave the woman a call. Right after we got off the phone, the woman called my dad to let him know about me calling and asking her questions about their relationship. That day, my dad came home and screamed my name, telling me to come to him. I was scared and wasn’t sure why. As he started beating me, he started asking me why I called her and tried to pull information out of her. He told me never to call her again. At this point, I began skipping school as some sort of escape from my home life. One day, the school called my dad and told him I wasn’t in class. I got spotted by my dad on the streets near my school. He told me to get in the car and started hitting and yelling at me. After the repeated beatings and verbal abuse, I started feeling numb. Due to my absence from school, the district sent a social service person to question me. I admitted that my troubling home life was the reason behind my poor performance in school. The next day, social services and a police officer showed up at my front doorstep while my dad was at work. My mom opened the door and phoned my dad, saying social service was there and wanted to talk to him. He threatened my mom to keep quiet or else he would harm her and kill her family back home. She knew he was capable of doing that, so she kept quiet and denied everything at that point. When I heard my mom denying everything, my heart broke. I realized I had become the sacrifice so my mom’s family wouldn’t get killed. My dad told my mom to call him after they left so he could speak to me. I was so afraid that I was planning to run away from the house before my dad came home because I knew it was going to be a nightmare. When my mom found out I was packing to leave, she convinced me to stay in fear of my dad. My mom called my dad after the social services people left, and he told her to hand me the phone. I was petrified. He started cussing me out, saying, “You think I give a fuck about the cops? Imma beat the fuck out of you when I get home.” As he hung up, the time started racing by as I waited for him to walk through the door. When my dad came home that evening, he said to Caleb, “You can go home.” He was yelling at me and my mom in Urdu. Caleb didn’t understand what he was saying, and he acted like he was leaving and shut the front door but stayed inside to see what would happen. He went back to the living room where my dad was hitting me on the head with a hard plastic phone and a rubber shoe, but he didn't know exactly why or what he was yelling in Urdu. When Caleb saw my dad hitting me on the head, he realized the things I was telling him were all true. My father was physically abusive and violent. We were stuck in a vicious cycle and lived in a constant state of fear.