This I put on my Facebook timeline and tagged everyone in his neighborhood that I am friends with, and I also sent it as a WhatsApp message to everyone near him I’m connected to on WhatsApp. There is still little chance he will see it. I am not Tamil, and that makes the decisions around here. His mother tells people they cannot give him message of me, even mention my name to him, and people comply. They are not educated or cultured, are urban village, are the same crowd that watched his mother pour hot wax on him to punish him when he was a toddler. No one corrected her. I saw her light a match, blow it out and burn him with it when he was three. I really got onto to her for that, and speaking to Nithish about it some months back, he told him that wasn’t the half of it, and he told me of the hot wax and how the people on his street just watched his mother do things like that to him and say nothing. So it’s no surprise they say nothing now. It’s just tragic.

For those who have only seen this one post, two months ago tomorrow my little boy, Nithish, 12, was taken from my home by his mother because she had made a sex video of her younger son masturbating, and I did not want Nithish exposed to that. He was there when the video was made, and I wanted to make sure that stopped as far as he was concerned. So I took my advocate to talk to her about the schedule of parenting. At that moment, I had him on the week days, and they the weekends. His mother had informed me some days before that they wanted to change it to he would be with me one day a week. I only mentioned the video in the discussion of our differences in parenting, did not say anything about it at all because she immediately began screaming to get out of her house, out of her family, and that she would take Nithish, which she did about an hour later.

She has not allowed visits, phone calls, or, like I said, anyone to talk to the boy about me. She keeps repeating that she will not allow me to spend one second with Nithish, and here in India, she has that power. Parental rights override the welfare of the child. He has been able to call me in secret to tell me about the abuse he’s received since he was taken and to ask me for help to get him out of there. I have really tried, and today I was finally at court, but only in the parking lot talking to senior advocate who may help. I am a nigger here, and please do not get offended at that word because, although I am not enslaved or beaten, it does describe the level of discrimination I face here in trying to to just talk to my boy. Can you possibly imagine how it feels to not even be able to talk to your child in a photograph, and I was there the night he was born, began parenting him when he was three, have been the main parent since he was seven. The pain of this several previous poems attempt to give some picture of. Imagine how the boy feels. That hurts the most.