He came into my life when I was 12 and he was 53, a close family friend in a country — the United States — where my family had few relations. Childless himself, married to a mystery woman, he became my uncle in the routine way I was taught to call Indian men “uncle” and Indian women “auntie.”

He was also a progressive voice in my conservative household, sympathetic to the “Americanness” in me that my mother viewed as dangerous, especially regarding sex. While my friends were getting birds-and-bees talks, my mother prohibited tampons. I did not know what a menstrual period was until I got mine. Womanhood was far-off, a state of emergency that befell other people. We operated as if men did not exist.

But I had curiosities and crushes, and I came to confide these to my uncle over the handful of day trips and conversations it took him to secure my trust, and for me to love him, as briefly I did, as a girl can come to love a man who is like a father to her.

Under the false pretense of his wife joining us, he turned our day trips into overnights. On weekends he drove us into Manhattan, delivering me to acting classes and then picking me up for dinners and Broadway plays.

Although I was taught to accept nothing from anyone, he bought me a wardrobe of risqué women’s clothing and warned that rejecting his gifts would be ungrateful. At an age when I considered myself invisible to men, he found gratification in pointing out when a man on the street looked at me. I gazed at myself in the mirrors of the ritzy hotels where we stayed in rooms so extravagant that I was self-conscious about taking up space. Manhattan hotel rooms became Boston hotel rooms became Connecticut hotel rooms became seaside resorts and other locations I have worked diligently to forget.

I did not acknowledge that the cost of his care was molestation. To acknowledge that would make it true, so I accepted his explanations that what he did to me was either universal or imaginary, and that my pain was a product of my own tearful hysterics.