Urmi Bhattacheryya - After I Was Raped: The Untold Lives of Five Rape Survivors

To Maa, Daddy and Di who are home, no matter where they are, or I am.

To Adi who is home, wherever the two of us may go.

And to all the women (and children) in this book who are creating and recreating their own constructs of home.

Dirty railway tracks and a scar deep, jagged; a laceration on the flesh of her right cheek.

Aamir Khan on a wall. The two-finger test.

A slipper by the tubewell flung with might at the man who raped her. Whispers of revulsion and a husband who near-disowned her. And the two-finger test.

A surgically sculpted opening on the tiny belly of an eight-month-old, for faecal eruptions. Gauze to wipe it all up lots of it.

Self-flagellation. Mostly for allowing herself to get raped. Some of it for still confusedly loving him.

THESE FIVE SEEMINGLY DISPARATE STRINGS OF WORDS are what I think of, when I think of rape; and of the five women I have written about in this book. Where does rape end? Where does it begin? Does it start somewhere between lulling oneself into a culturally conditioned haze one that legitimizes male entitlement and the actual seizing of someones flesh? Does one take dry runs at stalking before perpetrating tangible assault on a body? Are there markers and metres between the grabbing and groping, the fondling and fleeing?

In a 1993 PhD thesis submitted to Portland State University, Urban Studies scholar Yaeko Steidel found that dysfunctional parental relationships can be correlated with the acts of rapists. Steidel speaks, among other things, of parental alienation at a time when the rapists in her control group were children and consequently, they developed inferiority complexes and came to fear people, especially women. Steidels study is almost thirty years old, but some of her findings have stayed with me to this day. I find them epochal, almost, of a cultural conditioning that seems both frozen in time and place, and unmoored to one time or place. I think, therefore, of rape that is born in adolescent minds. An idea of rape that begins to crystallize through tacit observations of social mores and patterns of behaviour an idea that metamorphoses into action, watching grown men speak to grown women in rehearsed routines of condescension. The adolescent mind is prodded to think just as less of women, until finally, it thinks nothing of them at all. I think of rape that begins in impressing upon the crevices of the female body every infinitesimal male anxiety. I think of rape that is exhorted by watching others get away with it.

So thats where rape begins. But where does it end? Media messaging will tell you that it ends in the silhouette of a single frosted palm cutting its way down a glass pane. Itll tell you it ends in a news bulletin about a Woman, aged X, raped by men or a man, aged Y with aforementioned woman never to be heard of again. Itll tell you it just does end this way.

Theres so much more to the story after the rape. That story can be found in the banding together of survivors; in their disgust at and eventual disillusionment with courts and cops; in the long, interminable wait for justice; in the countless therapy sessions and the ceaseless nightmares; in the changed relationships with ones body and the transformed experiences of sex.

Ive set out to trace all of this and more in a book that asks, What after rape? I chose the experiences and stories of Nidhi, Meera, Ranjini, Pia and Smita (all names changed) to answer this question through accounts of their lives. They are by no means alike and their stories are in no way linear.

And why did I pick the stories of these five women?

Nidhi, an eight-year-old girl, was raped by a man she called bhaiyya, in an abyss by the railway tracks near her home; the sounds of her rape were drowned by the din of the train. She was four years old at the time.

Meera, a forty-year-old Dalit woman, lives in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. She was raped because she is a Dalit, by a priest, she claims, who scaled a wall to wage a war against caste impropriety and caste pool contamination by raping a woman who had dared to defy him. She was later subjected to the horrific, now-banned two-finger test that calls for a medical professional to insert two fingers inside a womans vagina to determine its laxity and whether or not she is habituated to sex.

Ranjini, a thirty-eight-year-old Dalit woman lives in a nondescript hamlet in a tiny oasis of land on the IndoreBhopal highway. She was raped, she claims, by a Gujjar chieftain in her village, while she was on her period, because she had refused to listen to his orders. She later chased her alleged rapist out of the village with a single soiled slipper, hurling verbal imprecations at him partly in an attempt to convince her apathetic husband that she had not invited the rape. Medical professionals blissfully and wilfully performed the two-finger test on her to confirm whether she was a virgin or not. In case you missed it, she was raped for being Dalit.

Pia was the eight-month-old baby who lived in reams of newsprint for longer than what was even her age at the time of the rape seemingly immortalized for the fault of a man who raped her; the doctors had to seal a perineal tear between her anus and vagina and carve out a hole in her stomach for urine and excrement to pass through. The accused is her twenty-eight-year-old cousin.

Smita, now twenty-eight, inhabits a strange dreamlike state for most hours of the day in part from antidepressants to quell the nightmares born out of two rapes, and partly from the ceaseless loop of reliving and forgetting, loving (him) and hating (him), that she subjects herself to. Smita soft-spoken, diminutive, self-deprecating was raped twice, she alleges, by a man superior in rank to her at her workplace, whom she was in a relationship with, and then blackmailed, coerced and shamed. That shame both for thinking of him, occasionally, and for causing her own rape continues to govern Smitas consciousness and the way she thinks of herself. Today, she calibrates her life by the bruises on her breast that refuse to fade and by the feeblest affections from any man who claims to love her.

Why did I choose these five women with apparently nothing in common except for the single unifying factor of their rape? Because they are united also in the fact that theirs are (c)old cases, with little thought expended on them anymore, since the sensationalizing and the voyeurism of the coverage of their rapes ended. The most recent rape out of these five cases happened two and a half years ago, and the oldest happened nine years ago. Yet, nothing has changed. Smitas bruises havent blended into the rest of her flesh which she now views as a canvas that men have used to notch up victories on. Pias parents havent been able to shake off the paranoia that a family member is coming for them like the cousin for their baby any time of the day or night. Yet, no one cares.

I have often wondered if we care only when theres a body. If the body is sufficiently brutalized. If there were enough foreign objects used objects that shouldnt have been stuffed into a womans vagina and, therefore, is enough to incite animalistic horror and pique voyeuristic interest. If there was more than one man, how many men, how many penises. If the words brutal and gang rape or murder are used many times enough times in a libidinous cycle of media messaging. If photographs are blurred just the right amount with enough hint of skin and flesh make the rounds on social media for people to know there was a rape.