The Sacred Games actor Kubbra Sait recently took up the chance of writing her memoir in association with Harper Collins titled, ‘Open Book: Not quite a Memoir’. The actress confessed in the book that she was a victim of sexual abuse and that for quite some time, was abused by her ‘uncle’ who her family thought was an angel. Kubbra also opened up about the abuse she endured at a young age in order to save her family from being ‘destroyed’.
As reported by the Times of India, Kubra wrote in the book that it was many years later that she told her mother about how she was abused in her home, ‘under her nose’. Kubbra also said her mother recently apologised to her, decades after the abuse. The abuse went on for two-and-a-half years by a family friend, whom she calls ‘X’ in her book.
The actress talked about her traumatic experiences in the book and wrote that she was only 17 when she was embroiled in the ‘greatest tragedy’ known to her. As she detailed her trauma, Kubbra mentioned regularly visiting a Bangalore restaurant with her family, when the owner became close to both her and her brother, Danish. Kubbra said he even helped their mother with her ‘financial woes’. Kubbra said that soon after his ‘help’, the man started sexually abusing her. He also insisted that she should not call him uncle.
An excerpt from Open Book: Not quite a Memoir by Kubbra Sait reads, “When Mumma sighed at the reprieve that cash provided, I sighed too. Just then, a hand slid to the back seat of the car where I was sitting and slid up my dress. X, who was no longer my uncle, smiled as he rubbed my thigh. I was numb in that moment… He started frequenting our home, and Mumma would laugh with and cook for him. In front of her, he would kiss my cheek and say, ‘Oh my Kubrati, you’re my favourite little one’. Although uncomfortable, I kept quiet.”
Kubbra detailed the incident of her first sexual assault. She wrote that X took her to a hotel, where he stroked her face, before kissing her lips. She said she was ‘shocked and confused’, but could not utter a word. “This was not supposed to happen, but it was happening. I should have screamed, but I could not. I should have run for help, but I was shell-shocked. The kiss grew. He convinced me it was what I wanted, that it would make me feel better. He kept repeating it until I felt deafened, and then he unbuckled his trousers. I was unsure of what exactly was happening, but I remember thinking, I am losing my virginity. It was a big deal, but it was also my shameful secret,” Kubbra wrote.
The Sacred Games actress also wrote that after the incident, X who was married and had a child – in the years that he sexually abused Kubbra, he went on to father a second child – ‘grew like a virus’ in their home. If Kubbra resisted him, he would stop taking her mother’s calls, she wrote.
Her mother, Kubbra said, was oblivious to everything happening between X and her daughter, and would scold her for supposedly fighting with X, when he refused to help the family. Kubbra further wrote that she was being sexually abused, and no one in her close perimeter ‘could even tell’.
She went on to add in her memoir that she was relieved when she got an opportunity to move to Sharjah away from all of these and immediately jumped on it when she had the chance.
