Her Eyes Uncovered

You never forget the first time…or do you?

Jk Mansi
Jk Mansi
Aug 31, 2018 · 6 min read
Baby Juhi at 15–18 months. This photo, and all others during my childhood, were taken by my father. Giving photo credit where photo credit is due.

I wrote this essay in 2009 in a workshop with D’Lo, and performed it at the Southern California Library in October of that year. There was much more to uncover, unearth, and undo which has taken these last 10 years. The journey continues….


It all started with Jeff Spencer. He came into my empty thirteen year old life in reruns of a defunct show called 77 Sunset Strip. Even writing this, I can hear the staccato melody of the opening bars of the credits in my head: 77 Sunset Strip, snap snap. It used to make my heart flutter, but today it gives me a headache as well, the memory of first loving Jeff Spencer.

When I first started watching it in fall of 1966, it had already been off the air for three years. It was not until today that I have discovered that the show originally ran (1958–1963), or that the debonair exceedingly handsome Roger Smith who played him was only twenty one years my senior at the time. This description is from the International Movie Data Base, and I agreed with them wholeheartedly. Roger Smith* was and is even now married to Ann Margaret, but I digress.

I sat alone after school watching him at 4 o’clock on WTTG Channel 5 in Chevy Chase, on our 17 inch black and white TV, the first we had ever owned. I have understood from sweetly portrayed Tom Hanks’ movies that being thirteen is never easy. But I was thirteen post typhoid with new weight gain from my illness, my long hair newly shorn to prevent further hair loss from the medications from my illness, new dark framed unfamiliar glasses on my newly acne decorated face. And I had arrived in DC laden with these gifts from Delhi, from an all girls Catholic school to the depravity of a public eighth grade in 1966, hippies and protests and Vietnam all around me on my new 17 inch TV. So Jeff Spencer was also my hero, my rescuer from all things unfamiliar, although there was always something uncomfortably familiar about him. I loved Jeff Spencer unconditionally.

Next there was Ashok. Ashok, all through high school, sitting tantalizingly close in most of my classes, always a desk or two ahead of me, the triangle of his dark haired head as irresistible to me as a centerfold is to a pubescent boy. One of only perhaps three brown boys in all of Woodrow Wilson High School, Ashok stole my heart with his mere existence. Big saucer eyes, thick straight hair that needed pushing back off his forehead several times an hour, the circle of his white tee-shirt showing at his neck under who-the-hell-cared-what-else-he-was-wearing shirts, his sixteen year old buns in some generic jeans: Ashok was the complete package. Although at that time I didn’t think I was aware of his package. I told Margie I liked him, Margie told Janet, Janet told Vidya, and within weeks, Vidya had kissed him. In front of me! at my first boy-girl party!! on my birthday!!! Bitch. Turned out he was a month younger than me, so it wouldn’t have worked anyway!**

I returned to India, started college. Flunked. Twice. Traumatized, I left in disgrace. Ever the reprobate, I joined a Bachelors program in Literature at a women-only residential school, and had my first taste of living amongst strangers. Had I been awake, they would have stayed strangers no more in any sense of the word.

A stream of girls over the next three years: Sonia, Roopa, Nandita. Hmmm, Nandita. Skinnier than a 2 by 4, no taller than 5’2”, flat as day old lavash bread, and twice as dry humored. Small square face, wide forehead, flawless almond skin. Thin lips that never smiled. It was all I could do to not follow her around from class to class. Someone would have noticed, though, because she was in the Economics program. Did I mention her hair? Straight, long down to her butt, past her knees by senior year. I hated her best friend, and loved her hair. Her demeanor was so calm, her quiet made the sparrows outside our dorm windows sound like wailing banshees in the morning. But I was fast asleep, and did not even know it. Nandita went unexplored, as had Sonia and Roopa before her. Roopa and I have been close friends for over thirty five years, and she lives openly with her lesbian partner in Delhi now. Sonia did not fulfill her promise, but sought safety in marriage. But Nandita was the one who got away.

I met Rohit in 1970, when I was sixteen and just back from the US. Nothing about him looked good, from his skinny hairy body, to the gap in his teeth, to his almost desperate need to like me. I went to college, did my flunking, and the guy resurfaced just as I was about to join the new school of Arts & Letters. I met him again, and bells went off in my head. I have spent my life telling that story, the bells always sounding like the heralding of angels. But the truth is, they were loud clamorous bells, like alarms that I could not respond to. That summer, within three times meeting with him, I found my naked virgin body lying next to his in his dorm bed, having him explain the anatomy of a penis as he held his 21 year old erection in his hand. The shaft, the frenulum, the glans; the prepuce, magical in its retractability. I remember myself not really paying attention to any of it, because all of it seemed so familiar.

For forty years I have made assumptions about my knowledge coming to me from some eighth grade gym and sex-ed class. Not having had brothers, I also had no personal knowledge of male genitalia as far as I knew. Yet I knew everything about the penis of this lover of mine: how to touch it, how to hold it, what gave it pleasure. And I sailed through this long marriage, skirting the rocks and the shallows, the high winds of neglect and the undertow of abuse, in just my ability to know his penis. I sailed through much of that life not knowing that my boat had been shipwrecked and submerged in a storm long ago. Long before I met him, long before I loved him. When I finally did see the rotting wood of my lost childhood, it came as little surprise that my adult daughter guessed just days afterward, “Did you remember something whack your Dad did to you?”

In these last two years, I have discovered so much of my unknown past, so many of the eight missing years of my childhood kept secret for me by all my little Juhis who lived within me. And now I know why tree stumps make me cry, what the chicken killing man was warning me to not tell, and why Jeff Spencer looked so oddly like the picture of my dead father that no longer hangs on my hallway wall.


Recovering memories through Art Therapy

She won’t know what she can’t see. Text, picture, and photo by JkM. 2010

When I first saw this picture in 2010, I did not know the significance of it, even though I was the one who had drawn it just days before. But one of my progeny knew exactly what it was the moment they saw it. A face with a hand over it’s eyes. My face with my father’s hand over my eyes. That is why there are scant memories in my vision but that live on behind my eyes. His covering my eyes so he would not see my complete face when he did what he did. His covering my eyes to not let me see what he was doing to me. I didn’t know then what it was because I had no words to articulate it at that age, between 18 months and 3 years, but which went on until I was 10. Now I can only surmise. Now I see the untold mind/boggling truth when I look inside my eyes.


*In writing this epilogue, I found that Roger Smith had died last year. It did not, for some reason, make me sad.

**Also looked up Ashok, who is in a rather prestigious federal position since the mid 1990s. But old, so very old, even his eyebrows are white. How is this possible? He’s a month younger than me, and I’m still cute as a button!

©JkMansi Juhi Kalra 2018. All rights reserved.

Thanks to Darren Stehle at Th-Ink Queerly.

Th-Ink Queerly

Think Queerly is a LGBTQ+ thought leadership magazine and podcast that challenges the hegemonic status quo, disrupts prejudice, and demonstrates our vital role in society as queer leaders to improve humanity.

Jk Mansi

Written by

Jk Mansi

To know where you're going find out where you've been. Not here for the fame game. I read. I write. I’m grateful.

Th-Ink Queerly

Think Queerly is a LGBTQ+ thought leadership magazine and podcast that challenges the hegemonic status quo, disrupts prejudice, and demonstrates our vital role in society as queer leaders to improve humanity.

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