Nirbhaya

I don’t know her name. I know her as Damini or Nirbhaya, the name media has given her. She was 23, as old as me and maybe similar to me in many ways. And now her battered and tormented body is a testimony to all the faceless and nameless women who were raped and left to die, who are nothing more than mere footnotes in the left-hand column of the newspaper.

Often when we talk about the women in India, we speak in shorthand. The Park Street rape case in Kolkata, The Gurgaon gang rape, The Bhanwari Devi case, Pallavi Purkayasth murder case. Each of these women and places, map a geography of pain, of unspeakable and unimaginable damage inflicted on women’s bodies, on the map of India, where you can, create a constantly updating map of violence against women.

For many of these tormented women, amnesia becomes a way of self-defence: there is only so much darkness you can swallow. And then the tipping point comes, and there’s that girl. For some reason,  she got through to us. My heart shrivelled in the face of what she had to go through. The mental agony, the trauma she had 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 towards a loss of words, 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 wanted 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.

 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 medical 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 despatched 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. 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 in 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. 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.