“He had a lot of women and used to brag about it to my mother.  I knew that my dad slept with my mother’s best friends and I knew then that he was going out to see other women.”

“He used to bring presents home that he bought for girls he was going to meet that night.  My mother would be ironing and he would show her these presents.  Yet if she left a single crease in his cloths when she had ironed them, he used to hit her so hard and make her mouth bleed.”

Mike interjects, “What upsets you most – that he was going out with other women, or that he beat your mother?”

Ruth sitting on a low seat with her bare legs tucked up to her hugs her knees and wriggles long brown toes as she ponders the question.

“I always wanted him to go off with one of the girls and leave us alone.”  She answered eventually.

Both Mike and I are aware that she has side-step the question, but she continues.  “If that man had had his way, I think to this day I would have been an ageing spinster.  But I ran off with my husband at 17.”

“When I was younger – 12 or 13 if I so much as looked at a man, my father used to hit me and call me a little whore I had to keep my eyes down all the time.

Sex with her husband was always a duty, she says, like washing the dishes, and he used to abuse her.

“Even now I feel that no man in his right mind would want me. “ she says.

Ruth is pretty.  She is wearing a swirling cotton skirt, and her lemon jumper with matching lemon earrings off – set the darkness of her skin.  Her voice is soft and the accent delightful sounding more American than Eastern.

Mike asks about dreams, and she tells him about the devil dreams.  “I actually saw him, felt him.” She says.

On another occasion she has felt someone touching her, or stroking her, or moving the bedclothes.  She even knows when it is about to happen.

“I can actually sense the atmosphere in the room change.  Something forces my eyes down and my body freezes.  It’s spooky.  I can hear music in the background.  I say the Lord’s Prayer and sometimes I can feel something trying to stop me from moving my mouth.

Ruth voices her fears to Mike.  Perhaps what she has blocked out is that she saw her mother being killed by her father.  She used to sleep next to her mother she recalls, and woke on that night to find her ill.  Ruth was sent to sleep in another room.

“She was shaking her head from side to side, choking.” Ruth says “He was standing at the end of the bed, arms folded.”

Her voice trembles. “What’s killing me is the thought that maybe he was doing something to me that night, my mother woke up and he killed her.”

Ruth goes on to relate the incident when she was 15 and her father tried to get into her bed.

“The next morning I told my stepmother what had happened, and she said, “It’s a good job he didn’t try that with one of my daughters because I would have killed him.” I had turned to her for help.”

“I sometimes think about my childhood, how everyone I have loved and respected has turned round and kicked me in the teeth and how my marriage worked out, sometimes I think I must be evil.  All of my life it’s been like that.” She pauses….

“I remember when I was 16 I had to put on a sari, I hated it, but I had to parade in front of my father in this sari.”

“He looked at me …he could never look me in the eyes, and turned away and said to my stepmother, “Just look at her.  She’s just like her mother.  Look at her hair.  Look at her forehead.”  He couldn’t look at me because I reminded him of my mother.

There is a silence; Mike breaks in by talking about the procedure of psychotherapy and hypnosis.  He will see her for an hour a week, for about 8 weeks.  By the end of that time, Ruth will tell him what the problem is, and not the other way round, he stresses.

Ruth looks anxious. “Can I just ask….I'm not mad, am I?” she appeals.

“No” Mike reassures “No, no. Far from it.

“And I haven’t committed a murder or anything in my past have I? “ She is barely five feet tall, and the suggestion seems faintly ridiculous.  But Mike answers the plea in her eyes with more reassurance.

“You see. “  She adds. “I know I’m not qualified to say, but I’ve always like to think of myself as sane.”

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