A sunny day in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. A young man comes up to me and hands me the beautiful turquoise Indian edition of my book to sign. I look up at him: “You’re the guy who kept grinning at me when I was on the stage!”

“Yes, Mam, I was really appreciating you,” he said, grinning again. I grin happily back at him and think, you’ve come a long, long, long way, baby.

No, you’ve come a long way, Mam. At 17, I was gang-raped. At 20, I wrote about it in a women’s magazine in India, the first Indian survivor ever to speak out. At 49, I got a fright when that old piece resurfaced and I was thrust into the spotlight again. I wrote a “30-years-on” piece that went globally viral, and then proceeded to go back to my non-rape-oriented life. At 55, I’ve unleashed the book that’s been waiting all these years to be written, and now I’m zooming around the world with it. The prospect of a world tour was thrilling, but the prospect of the India part of it was frankly terrifying.

I love my native country with a mad passion, but I am well aware of how horrifying it is – for women, for Muslims, for Dalits, for just about anyone who is not a kingpin in our current malignant climate. And I have watched from the sidelines for almost four decades and witnessed disgusting attitudes to sexual abuse: from intense hostility towards victims, who are traditionally considered better off dead, to every excuse for abusers, from denial to justification to explicit approval. Now that I look back, I realise that writing about it long ago wasn’t so much an act of bravery on my part as one of bottomless naivety.

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Given all this, I was rather daunted at the thought of facing uncurated audiences at the Jaipur literature festival. I found myself waking up at 3am with morbid visions of the people who raped me lying in wait for all these years, waiting to get me … and, more realistically, derision, judgment and nastiness from other people.

Eek.

And then I went to Jaipur, and was amazed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sohaila Abdulali: “Time and history have conspired to turn me from a weird teenage aberration into a Mam with something to say.’

The same thing happened in Delhi, Mumbai and Kerala – fascination, trauma, even scepticism, but no voyeurism, no overt hostility. Somewhere along the line, time and history conspired to turn me from a weird teenage aberration into a Mam with something to say. Maybe it’s the streaks of grey hair. Maybe it’s some of the dramatic events of the past few years – the Jyoti Singh rape and murder, the seemingly unending stream of repugnant rape stories in the press. Whatever it is, I sense something new.

It’s a hunger – for knowledge, for understanding, for something better. I saw it in the faces of the young grinning man, and in so many other young people.

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I know rape is entrenched, quotidian, epidemic. I know many people are clueless, malign, brutal. I know all this because I have seen all this. I see the trolls on Twitter, and roll my eyes at the newspaper headlines unable to sing a different tune, that insist on making me a sad downtrodden victim. But I also see some other things, things that would not have been possible when I wrote my first piece: My 80-year-old uncles and aunts showing up at my book launch radiating support and love, after almost four decades of not saying a word about the subject. My mother’s driver, hearing about my book, casually asking, “Have you mentioned your own rape?” The woman in Mumbai who wept while asking what to do about her father who loves her but is smothering her for her own protection. The hundreds of people in Jaipur who broke into spontaneous applause when I talked about rapists being ordinary men. The young man who stood up in the audience and said, “What can we do, Mam? What can we do to make it better?”

I got off the plane in Delhi with terror in my heart. When I boarded the return flight, I did it filled with that most foolish, most fragile, most wonderful of feelings: belief that some people truly want to open their eyes and hearts and ears and understand, and change.

Mam is grinning all the way to the next continent.

• Sohaila Abdulali is the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape. She will appear at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House on 10 March.