What Made Me What I Am

I was watching the beginning to The Godfather II and looking at the nine-year-old boy being shipped alone, to New York.

Well, when I was nine years old my parents shipped me alone, from New York to boarding school in England. Imagine being snatched away from everything you knew in a tropical country (India) and being shipped into a boarding school for boys in dreary 60s England.

My father's dead now two years gone but my mother's still around. And I'd just like to lash out at both of them, here, now in my 53rd year. Why? Why did you do that to me? Do you know what that did to my brain? Even I don't know. But it did something, something huge. I have a host of problems that I might never have had if you hadn't done that to me.

Do you think I could even conceive of doing that to my nine-year-old son? You bastards. You never got it, did you? I love you to death but you never, ever got what you did to me. And my brother. And my brother's brother. You sent us all into oblivion, you bastards. You never listened, never asked anything, when I said my teachers beat me. You fucking bastards. But you were/are my parents and I guess you've been atoning for your sins for a long, long time, drowning it in alcohol and making me and my siblings alcoholics into the bargain.

But I still love you, Mother! And Father, now long into your own final oblivion. Yes, I still love you! Somehow the twisted plant that became your son grew up and learned why it was twisted, but found the wherewithal to try to straighten itself, and not to blame the planters.

I forgive! But I will never forget.