The
room is in dark with intriguing silence; the laptop is on, blinking and
emitting snippets of light. We get our breath hard, blood chilled when my wife
and I watch the monitor, languorously re-enacting scenes of a gruesome rape
being perpetrated by a group of goons in a moving bus. The voice that shrieks
for help belong to a teenage girl who gets raped because she is out of home
after 9 pm; murdered because she resists the thugs’ attempts to get their
cardinal desires quenched. The BBC documentary has many loose ends and overtly
biased. Instead of condemning the heinous crime, it gives amplifiers to Mukesh
Singh and his cohorts to justify their acts and the subsequent murder of a
gullible girl. “What I’ve pulled out of her body, I threw it away,” the
juvenile’s bizarre voice slaps my ears and make me recoil. My wife gets into
her feet, races over to the sink and throws up. I still sit frozen, gazing
helplessly at the ceiling mired in cobwebs and piles of paint peels.Mukesh
Singh, one of the rapists, continues to drone. His grading of Indian girls – he
says only 20% of them is good – coupled with his lawyers’ gibberish on Indian tradition
vs Indian women make my wife feel nauseous again. ‘My god! Who made this video?
Was it by Leslee Udwin or by those misogynists who had snuffed out a flower and
thrown it in the gutter? For the documentary puts the victim in a poor light
and shows how circumstances lead a group of guys become rapists’, I say to
myself, suddenly remembering the ‘boys-are-boys’ statement I heard from a
senior politician, months back. ‘Is the
world too, like our country, not kindly disposed to women? Does it treat them
as chattels?’ my wife asks, her voice is in shards. I get a numbness. I’m in no
mood to speak, leaves her questions hang on fire. I take a peek into the FB. It looks saintly.
No verbal explosion is let loose there because of the British documentary. Only
a few gets agitated over the video and vent their injured expressions. As for
others, they’re still in the comforts of their cocoons either writing
eloquently about their upcoming books or displaying heartwarming quotes or
presenting recipes for new stuff.’ Why people are what they’re?’ a question
confront me. Now I hear someone or something begin to speak from inside me: “The
darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in
times of moral crisis.”
RIP
Nirbhaya.
