That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose
battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose
rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the
newspaper.
Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in
shorthand. The Mathura rape case. The Vishaka guidelines. The Bhanwari
Devi case, the Suryanelli affair, the Soni Sori allegations, the
business at Kunan Pushpora. Each of these, the names of women and
places, mapping a geography of pain; unspeakable damage inflicted on
women’s bodies, on the map of India, where you can, if you want, create a
constantly updating map of violence against women.
For some, amnesia becomes a way of self-defence: there is only so much
darkness you can swallow. They turn away from all the places that have
become shorthand for violence beyond measure, preferring not to know
about Kashmir or the outrages in Chattisgarh, choosing to forget the
Bombay New Year assault, trying not to remember the deaths of a Pallavi
Purkayastha, a Thangjam Manorama, Surekha and Priyanka Bhotmange, the
mass rapes that marked the riots in Gujarat.
Even for those who stay in
touch, it isn’t possible for your empathy to keep abreast with the scale
of male violence against women in India: who can follow all of the
one-paragraph, three-line cases? The three-year-old raped before she can
speak, the teenager assaulted by an uncle, the 65-year-old raped as
closure to a property dispute, the slum householder raped and violently
assaulted on her way to the bathroom. After a while, even memory
hardens.
And then you reach a tipping point, and there’s that girl. For some
reason, and I don’t really know why, she got through to us. Our words
shrivelled in the face of what she’d been subjected to by the six men
travelling on that bus, who spent an hour torturing and raping her,
savagely beating up her male friend. Horrific, brutal, savage—these
tired words point to a loss of language, and none of them express how
deeply we identified with her.
She had not asked to become a symbol or a martyr, or a cause; she had
intended to lead a normal life, practicing medicine, watching movies,
going out with friends. She had not asked to be brave, to be the girl
who was so courageous, the woman whose injuries symbolised the violence
so many women across the country know so intimately. She had asked for
one thing, after she was admitted to Safdarjung Hospital: “I want to
live,” she had said to her mother.
We may have not noticed the reports that came in from Calcutta in
February, of a woman abandoned on Howrah Bridge, so badly injured after a
rape that involved, once again, the use of iron rods, that the police
thought she had been run over by a car.
We may have skimmed the story of
the 16-year-old Dalit girl in Dabra, assaulted for three hours by
eight men, who spoke up after her father committed suicide from the
shame he had been made to feel by the village. Or some may have done
something concrete about these things, changed laws, worked on gender
violence, keeping their feelings out of it, trying to be objective. But there is always one that gets through the armour that we build
around ourselves.
In 1972, the first year in which the NCRB recorded
rape cases, there were 2,487 rapes reported across India. One of them
involved a teenager called Mathura, raped by policemen; we remember her,
we remember the history and the laws she changed. (She would be 56
now.)
Some cases stop being cases. Sometimes, an atrocity bites so deep
that we have no armour against it, and that was what happened with the
23-year-old physiotherapy student, the one who left a cinema hall and
boarded the wrong bus, whose intestines were so badly damaged that the
injuries listed on the FIR report made hardened doctors, and then the
capital city, cry for her pain.
She died early this morning, in a Singapore hospital where she and
her family had been dispatched by the government for what the papers
called political, not compassionate, reasons.
The grief hit harder than I’d expected. And I had two thoughts, as
across Delhi, I heard some of the finest and toughest men I know break
down in their grief, as some of the calmest and strongest women I know
called and SMSed to say that she—one of us, this girl who had once had a
future and a life of her own to lead—was gone, that it was over.
The first was: enough. Let there be an end to this epidemic of
violence, this culture where if we can’t kill off our girls before they
are born, we ensure that they live these lives of constant fear. Like
many women in India, I rely on a layer of privilege, a network of
friends, paranoid security measures and a huge dose of amnesia just to
get around the city, just to travel in this country. So many more women
have neither the privilege, nor the luxury of amnesia, and this week,
perhaps we all stood up to say, “Enough”, no matter how incoherently or
angrily we said it.
The second was even simpler. I did not know the name of the girl in
the bus, through these last few days. She had a name of her own–it was
not Amanat, Damini or Nirbhaya, names the media gratuitously gave her,
as though after the rape, she had been issued a new identity. I don’t
need to know her name now, especially if her family doesn’t want to
share their lives and their grief with us. I think of all the other
anonymous women whose stories don’t make it to the front pages, when I
think of this woman; I think of the courage that is forced on them, the
way their lives are warped in a different direction from the one they
had meant to take.
Don’t tell me her name; I don’t need to know it, to
cry for her.
* * *
