emotional intelligence

Let’s move forward Nithish.
It’s time to move forward Nithish.
The camera pushes in,
immediately replaces your silence with sound.
It seemed to have the heart glow of eternity.
Some price is right.
Making sense out of a horrible situation, okay?
I can be the whole thing now, forever.

Now I can’t be a boy. [line heard sung as though Nithish is singing it]

I can’t cover good for you
when he knows
you won’t say my name in proper.
You won’t say how you feel.

What do I need to save you?
I need you to call my name in public,
say how you really feel,
to whomever asks.
Be honest about it:
you want to live with your daddy;
you are not happy with your parents.

If you don’t do this you will die
to all of your dreams and aspirations,
to a happy childhood,
to being a teenager in America,
to being an adult who’s a poet,
who loves the world and protects children.
You will die to yourself Nithish.

Listen to me good.
I have more to say but that’s the main thing:
you must call my name now,
in front of your parents,
in front of Kuruchikuppam,
in front of the city of Pondicherry.

When a random stranger asks,
when your parents ask,
when anybody asks:
you love your daddy;
you want to live with him;
your parents have been very mean to you.

Go to type.
Type good news,
fast car,
your heart’s desire.
I need you to listen to me Nithish.
To mask truth
so people can rob you of your identity,
take from you who you are,
you’re destroying your own dreams;
you’re kissing the feet of those who abuse you;
you are not getting your heart’s desire;
you are getting nightmares.

Don’t worry.
I am here.
Let me help you,
but you need to also help yourself.
You are not helpless.
You are not a baby.
You are scared to death.

Do you know how many social workers
are watching what’s happening to you right now?
You have an audience of concerned people,
and your mother knows that.
If they try to put you into a boy’s hostel,
if you even get beat again,
they will stop all that,
but you need to speak up so they can.

They are going by what your mother tells them
and everyone else:
you are happy with her;
you do not want to see me;
you are perfectly normal now.

This is Nithish,
not who my mother says I am.
Call my name.
Call your own name,
else you will not come out of this water,
and you cannot be a boy.

They are going by what your mother tells them
and everyone else:
you are happy with her;
you do not want to see me;
you are perfectly normal now.

This is Nithish,
not who my mother says I am.
Call my name.
Call your own name,
else you will not come out of this water,
and you cannot be a boy.

How many thousands of books have failed,
books to help humanity,
and they never made to public eyes?
Do you want yours to fail Nithish?
You have to be the hero your dreams show you are.
You have to vanquish the demons
like you say you do in your poetry.
You have to stand up for yourself.
You have to stand up for every kid in the world.

That’s what’s going on:
you have to be the poet of a sunrise,
that sunrise a better humanity with our children.

This is a photo of Nithish my advocate took at his office last night, May 7. He has lost so much weight, the hollow look on his face and in his eyes I cannot stop crying over. He did not look like this when his mother took him from my house.

I am very embarrassed to explain, but I lost control of my emotions in a meeting with the mother and the boy and my advocate. When she entered, she kept the boy behind her, using her hand to put over his face so he could not see me. I went behind him and put my hands on his head, and she quickly maneuvered so that I couldn’t touch him. There had been a second, when he was on the stars behind his mother, that he gave a week smile, but after that he pretended I was not even there.

The mother, boy, and the advocate went to the office, and I stood near the door, until they shut it. I could hear the boy crying and then the advocate shouting at him. Then I and my grown son was called into the office. I just looked at Nithish, who was trying to pretend I wasn’t there. I could not take that, and I began asking him to please speak to me, say anything but say something, and he would not. I asked him is he loved me, and he gave a weak yes, and then I began asking him about his mother hitting him with a flat board, what he had told to me to begin by in a phone conversation the very night before. He nodded a weak yes, that the advocate saw but not the mother, and when she turned her head to look at him, he stopped assenting. I told him that he had told me to do that, and he would speak, and he nodded his head again, and when the mother looked, he stopped.

I had pulled out my phone in the beginning of the meeting, and my advocate told me not to make a video. But then I saw the mother holding her phone like she was making one, and I knocked it out of her hands across the room. Then She took Nithish by the arm to leave, but I blocked her, telling the advocate that he saw the boy’s being abused and brainwashed, and I asked him to call child welfare. He refused. He physically took a hold of me and began moving me out of the office so the mother could leave with the boy, in a way that I could have to contact, even be near him. I was trying my best to keep her from taking him out of that office. I failed, and they left, and then I was severely dressed down for my actions by the advocate, asking me if I wanted to go to jail, and I was told once again, that in India, you can do anything about child abuse, not matter if it’s illegal or not.

I tried to explain that I am not India, am an emotional American, and that for two months I had been in severe emotional distress, getting calls from my boy to help him, and here I just could not not hug him or greet him, how impossible that was for me. I had to get him to speak to me.

So, it’s now over, and I am returning to America in the fastest possible way. I have to get away from this pain that boy giving it to me. If he won’t help, then I can do nothing for him. I’m sorry. I did my very best, and no one out there would help either. I never even got a single comment for support in any of these posts describing this tragic situation.