I love to dance, I always did. I grew up watching a lot of bollywood movies, and often fantasized being like Aishwarya Rai in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's next blockbuster. Dancing made me feel as beautiful and as graceful as the actresses I watched in movies. It boosted my self-esteem by providing an escape from reality for me. In my fantasies, I was the star of my own movie. In reality, I was insecure about everything – my looks, my intelligence, my familial roles, my capabilities, literally everything. However, the way I presented myself may have said otherwise. Not showing my emotions is a skill I’ve perfected over the years.
I was in the eighth grade when my insecurities gradually started taking over me. Before I knew it, my inabilities and flaws became my priority. My head was consumed with a million negative voices screaming, ‘you’re not good enough’. I wasn’t beautiful enough, I wasn’t smart enough, I just wasn’t enough. Being neglected, bullied, and comparing myself to the people I knew I could never be added fuel to the fire of insecurity in my head. This fire was getting stronger as the years progressed. I started self-harming to distract myself from my disrupted inner peace. But physical abuse was only a temporary cure for the mental and emotional abuse I was putting myself through on a daily basis.
I started coaching the school’s bhangra team to keep my mind occupied. If I wasn’t working on choreography for the team’s next performance, I was working on assignments or studying. Self-harming and suicide were no longer on my mind, and my insecurities started becoming the least of my concerns. I graduated high school with a positive mentality, ecstatic about the new experiences post-secondary would hold for me. After five years of being in the same environment and an unhealthy state of mind, I was ready for a fresh start, to build a bright future, to rediscover myself, to make a new group of friends, and maybe even meet ‘the one’.
First year of university, I joined the UBC UTSAV Dance team. I made some wonderful friends and also got a different kind of attention from my teammates. A feeling I wasn’t familiar with. My teammates found me beautiful, bollywood level beautiful. Something I’d never considered myself. They kept saying I looked like Deepika Padukone, who is currently one of Bollywood’s finest actresses. It was one of the first things my teammate Taran said to me on icebreaker day for the Dance Team. He’s about six feet tall, with a tan complexion, a good build, a fairly full beard and always sports a black turban. We were all sitting in a circle in a corner room on the second floor of the old SUB on campus. Taran was sitting on my right. After I’d introduced myself, it was Taran’s turn to go. However, instead of talking about himself, he turned to me, squinted his dark-brown almond eyes and asked, Do you watch bollywood movies? Because you look like my favourite actress Deepika Padukone. You have the same big, dark eyes, sharp jawline, body, hair colour, complexion, and the same smile minus the cheek dimples. The icebreaker suddenly went from a self-introducing activity to talking about there being a Deepika look-a-like on the team. I tried not to let my expressions show my emotions, though I’m sure if not my eyes and smile, my pink cheeks gave it away. I feared my heart palpitations could be heard by my teammates as more of them agreed with Taran’s opinion. This was the best compliment I’d ever received. Before leaving for home that day, Taran asked to take a picture of me. My insecure self, was never a photogenic person so I refused. We later settled for a snapchat selfie together. He captioned it ‘found Deepika at UBC’ and sent it off to his friends. Needless to say, I felt like a celebrity that night.
With each practice, Taran and I got closer. He added me on every social media platform and talked to me every day. He also took pictures of me every single practice, sometimes snapping them to his friends. I didn’t think much of his actions. His instagram was filled with ‘Woman Crush Wednesday’ posts of various female friends. I figured I was another one of them, and I was ok with this. Taran was like another brother to me, a lot of what he did parallelled with what my brothers were like with me. The big hugs from behind, always looking out for me. But he soon started getting clingy. He didn’t like when the other guys on the team tried to get to know me, he didn’t like them flirting with me. His behaviour started making me feel uncomfortable. But I kept my emotions bottled up inside me and tried to maintain distance instead of saying anything. Whenever we were together I’d make sure to mention he’s like a brother to me, at least once during our conversations to let him know where he stood. This didn’t change anything.
Eventually, I found myself running to my car to get away from him after practices. But every time I tried, he’d come running after me to give me one more hug. I soon became his obsession. So I decided to leave the one thing that was helping me build relationships and stay connected to campus, the dance team. Shortly after, Taran quit the dance team too. On Valentines day, he spammed me with messages on every social media platform because I wasn’t responding to his texts. He then resorted to spamming my campus best friend, and our teammate Pooja, asking her where I was. The next morning, I woke up to tons of facebook notifications for a UBC Crushes post. He wrote one for me, calling me the most beautiful girl he’d met in his life. I was flattered, yet uncomfortable again. I told him I spent Valentine's Day with my high school crush. His feelings for me still didn’t dissolve, neither did his efforts to pursue me.
He started stalking me with his wingmen. It didn’t matter where on campus I’d be, Taran and his friends would always find me. One spring evening, I was studying on the fourth floor of Irving K. Barber with my sister, when a tall british guy with nice hazel eyes, and dark brown hair, dressed all in denim asked if he could sit at our table. We gladly invited him to join us, thinking we’d make a new acquaintance. After spending a few minutes on his phone, he asked if his friend could join us later. We had plenty of seats at our big, round table so we gladly agreed. Little did we know, the friend he was referring to, was Taran. There were plenty more instances like this on different locations around campus, with different people. It created a paranoia in me, that every person who approaches me, already knows me because of Taran. Taran made it difficult for me to involved on campus. At the UBC Formal I went to, he tried to forcefully build relationships with my family members. My brothers unaware of the situation at the time, became his friend. After the formal night, he spammed me with pictures of me that he’d cropped from dance floor pictures with hundreds of faces. He spent hours going through them, looking for my face, just to send them to me and start talking again. I ignored them all. Soon after he started verbally, sexually harassing me while I was studying at the library, and when I stopped staying on campus to study, he started messaging me the same stuff, he didn’t stop even after his friends and I told him to. I blocked him again and I refused to join any campus club or attend any events thereafter. I knew he’d find me, he always did.
Now in my last semester at UBC, I have regrets. There’s so much I could’ve done, so much I could’ve experienced had I taken a firm stand for myself and spoken up sooner. The boundaries I set meant nothing to Taran, but that didn’t mean he could do as he pleased. I loved dancing, it made me feeling amazing, it let me be around people like myself, but I let it go. I loved studying on the fourth floor of IKB, the big beautiful windows provided the perfect amount of light, and the view of trees, mountains and students rushing to class was always a pleasure to see during study breaks. But I let that go too. He limited my experiences, my relationships, my connections and instilled a paranoia in me because I let him. He took me away from the things, places, and people I loved being around because I let him. All of this happened, and got this far because I let it.