24 December 2012, 03:18 PM IST
It's like a winter chill that sets on you, leaving you numb. In this cold they threw out the boy and the girl naked around 10.15pm as a living system throws out its refuse. After they were done, they dumped the two like disposable waste. The white Chartered Bus should have stood out as it's not a bus that plies on the busy and posh Olof Palme Marg every day. Yet it managed to encircle the area from 9.15 to 10.15pm on Sunday night. The FIR was lodged in the Vasant Vihar police station. This then was their idea of an ideal Sunday.
A bleak first week after the act has come to an end. How is she is a national question. Time has been halted and defined: Stable but Critical. The act was out on the Monday that has just gone by and the blood-splattered newspapers were out on Tuesday morning when outrage could be felt more easily than an earthquake in the capital. It was as if the city was mutilated. Office was horror-struck and a colleague who sits nearby was much more candid than the parliamentarians. He spent the entire day boiling and fuming. Capital punishment, its uselessness, chemical castration, lynching on city roads, hanging, and life imprisonment accompanied by torture, all were discussed. The women could convey with words, with silence, with indignation, with sardonic rage. A woman colleague during a conversation put forth an earnest thought: What was this? What is this? Her question is the complete definition. It is necessary to ask questions to which there are no answers. This crime has no name, it is indescribable, and it goes beyond the sections defined in the IPC. I can't even begin to describe it as it is much more twisted than the human intestines.
It was somehow difficult to feel from a distance or perhaps I didn't want to write from a distance. So after I finished work on Tuesday, I reached Safdarjung Hospital around midnight. I knew the OB Vans would be outside the entrance to the Emergency so I reached there and found myself alone with huddled groups of TV crew scattered around the 8 to 10 vans. I walked in to feel the earth beneath my feet. If you've done time in hospitals then you can sense the atmosphere. It was a quiet night, a rather busy Emergency, and there was no mistaking that someone 'important' was battling to survive. I just had to be there and someone would have talked.
Two nurses outside the Emergency slowly opened up after realizing that we were on one side of the border. They were, obviously, much more shocked than I was because they knew more. The matron loosened her face mask and pulled it till her jaw as she wanted to speak from inside. The other nurse had it hanging around her neck. The act came out in hushed and hissing voices as if it was concentrated Sulphuric acid. I read somewhere that the doctors described it saying they haven't seen such a case in four decades.
Must have been a hard-earned Sunday for the 23-year-old girl and she had the idea of roaming around in a popular mall with her 27-year-old engineer friend, then watch a recent movie, The Life of π, and reach home by 10. That in hindsight was her crime because as it turns out you can't do that in this city anymore. This is an indicator of one extreme of our culture. Of what is going on out there. This story from the Wednesday edition of the Times of India in profiling the main accused tells you about how un-mad and cool-headed he was.
Then on Thursday I went around 6.30pm and this time the response was outside the gates of the hospital where hundreds of candles were lit with dozens of students, working professionals, lecturers from DU and JNU, and individuals who had come to the hospital gates commuting from long distance to express solidarity had gathered. And then began the horror stories.
I was pointed to a study in Tihar Jail of around 900 rape convicts showing that by the time the law catches up with them it is usually their third or fourth time. This can be gauged by seeing the manner of the main accused—he brushed aside the risk with an air of casualness, asked his partners to lie low for a while, on being caught he refused a test identification parade, and in the heat of the crime had planned to keep the clothes of the victims to destroy any DNA evidence. He was known as 'mental' in his neighbourhood. This cannot be his first crime and he should have been behind bars much before, and that tells you that there is a need for effective and intelligent policing.
There is something that makes this girl special. I don't know what it is exactly but I can try. It has nothing to do with the act, the crime, with her being the victim. She symbolizes whatever little is good about us as a society. She has two younger brothers and yet her father sold a piece of land to educate her and not save the money for her dowry. In a country notorious for selling the girl child short, this is as shining an example from the other side of the border as you would ever get.
I feel another thing; the tragic irony of the act also makes her special. This pain was reserved for someone who had such a deep relationship with it. She was a 23-year-old physiotherapist interning with a city hospital. To elevate pain you have to feel it extremely-sensitively even though you are not having it yourself. If you don't have the passion for it, then in my view, it's among the world's most-boring jobs. It takes a physiotherapist months and months of work for minor improvements in a frozen shoulder and for spinal injuries it could take years of sessions. You need loving hands to do it.
I just hope she survives and gets justice because that will help her live. Justice is the only prosthetic for an amputated soul. And justice is not just a court verdict. It means that our culture gives her the space and the silence to heal. It means once she recovers, we die for her. We make no attempts to breach her privacy, no drama to refresh her memory, and it means that our response is human and not political. It means that even from a distance we are able to feel.
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