The next day, Gray and I set out early, our itinerary chock-full of cultural landmarks and old haunts. Haji Ali, a mosque on an island only accessible by a mid-ocean walkway three feet wide, was where Gray first came to face-to-face with a beggar with leprosy. On that first day, he nearly cried; by the end of our fortnight in India, he would no longer react to them.

Later that day, on our way to a temple, he laughed as we scooted past a sidewalk colonized by cows. "India is like Kansas in many ways," he said, nodding in their direction. His hand on the small of my back, though so familiar, suddenly felt scandalous. I pushed his hand away, laughing also.

"We're in India, Gray. White boys can't touch brown girls around here."

We flitted from air-conditioned malls that smelled like Prada and parks that smelled like jasmine trees to hotels with English-speaking waitstaff and U.S. dollar prices on their menus and bazaars where 6-year-olds vended wares while their parents napped under trees. We ate lunch at Leopold Cafe, a colonial leftover now essential to Mumbai's tapestry, and in my own. My father frequented it when he was a college student here, way back when it was Bombay.

We sat on a wall by the Gateway of India, dangling our feet over the Indian west coast, slurping coconut water straight out of coconuts that we had watched a man cut open for us at his makeshift sidewalk eatery. We blinked to dodge salty flyaway drops hurled at us by the Arabian Sea.

As we watched boats come in to dock, I told Gray about a memory that had been playing on my mind. I was 15 years old. It was lunch hour at school. My four best friends and I were sitting on the periphery of our school's soccer field, shaded by palm trees. It was a hot summer day in Chennai, but a salty sea breeze offered some respite. We tugged at our cotton checked shirts and rolled up the legs of our uniform pants to keep cool as we talked.

Somehow, the unusually heavy topic of abuse had come up and we began exchanging incidents, all of us taken aback by the sudden knowledge that none of us were alone in having horror stories. I had only vague recollections, now, of the specifics. One of my friends was grabbed at a movie theater in a brief moment of separation from her family, and hands were rubbed on her in ways she was too young to understand, a mouth on her mouth, an unsolicited first kiss. Someone else had a tormentor at her early-morning tennis lessons who would follow her around the YMCA, shouting lewd threats. She told her parents, but they didn't believe her. Another was pinned down by an older boy, whom she knew and loved, and was stripped of her right to consent.

We had known one another for over a decade and still, we'd kept these stories secret for reasons none of us know for certain. Still subject to the childlike tendency to laugh at things that are truly terrifying, we broke into uncomfortable and inexplicable giggles several times that hour, at a loss for how else to shape our emotions. As with sitting around a fire telling ghost stories, the horror became a shared activity, delivered on purpose and, no matter how twisted, reassuring still to share.

I know now that the stories we told one another that afternoon were only our first ones. Most of us have been made victims again, a second time; some of us, a third.

I was 8 years old when I was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of my own screaming. I had run out of breath because the weight of a grown man was collapsed on top of my 4-foot frame. I remember noticing that my pajama bottoms were gathered about my feet, round like a good Indian woman's dance anklets. My shirt was lifted up over my chest, draped over my shoulders like a sari, catching on my neck like a death sentence. There was writhing and there was panting and, for as long as I could manage it, there was screaming. This is what I had been taught. If a man touches you and you don't like it, my mother told me often, you scream and you keep screaming until I come get you.

True to her word, my mother was with me soon, pajama-clad and pale, papa at her side. Papa was shouting things at the man and the man was getting up and he was zipping up and he was running out of the room carrying his shoes in his hands. Mama held me and told me it's OK, told me it isn't my fault, told me I'm safe now. Mama told me the pain would go away.

But there was no pain. There was nothing.

The details have been repressed into shapes and sounds and silhouettes in a dark room but, as far as I can remember, I was not raped. Sometimes I wonder if I'm remembering it all wrong. Was it nighttime, or was it afternoon? Did my mother run to me, or did I run to her? The memory, left dormant most days, shifts shapes every time it wakes up. All that's for certain, the only detail I cling to, is that I was not raped.

When I finished telling the story to Gray, the sun had nearly set over the Arabian Sea, and Gray, as he does, said all the right things. His eyes were softer than I had ever seen, and I realized, for the first time, that he had never heard these stories before. Suddenly, my attention shifted from my own emotions to his. What must it be like to hear that someone you love, someone you yearn and promise and want desperately to protect, had already fallen prey to forces too far back in the past for you to reach now? Too far back for you to avenge?

Later that day, he mentioned in passing that he had read somewhere that some activists and writers were looking to expand the definition of the word "rape" to include more than it conventionally did.

"If it felt like rape, you're allowed to think of it as rape," he said slowly, gingerly. "You're allowed to process it however you need to. Use whatever words you want."

While I could admire, academically and objectively, the fruitfulness in reevaluating the semantics of assault, I avoided the conversation we could have, should have, had. I was wholly unprepared to think of myself as a victim — or survivor — of the r-word.

On more than one occasion, I have eavesdropped from my room while my parents talked outside, made loud by whiskey or wine, about how I was "almost raped." Papa's voice would speed up with rage as he talked about "that bastard," and mama would tut sadly. I would hear them refer to me as brave for having been unaffected by the incident, and I would feel awkward and undeserving of the compliment, armored as I was by my selective amnesia.

I would find out later that the man was a cleaner we had hired who was, at the time, staying at our house. He was sent away immediately. I have never asked my parents if they pressed charges. I have never talked with them about it at all.

I have never talked about it because I was never taught how.