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

By Urmi Bhattacheryya

What happens after rape?

In After I Was Raped, we meet five individuals: a four-year-old girl, two Dalit women, an eight-month-old infant and a young professional. Through extensive interviews with them and their families and communities at large, Urmi Bhattacheryya reveals the stories of these survivors of sexual violence, as they recount how their lives and relationships have changed in the aftermath of assault. Shamed, ostracized and weighed down by guilt and depression, they continue to brave the most challenging realities.

At a time when only high-profile, sensationalized cases of sexual violence provoke a public reaction and many stories go unheard, Bhattacheryya’s sensitive portrayal of the lives of these little-known survivors raises difficult but important questions about our convenient collective amnesia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9789389109986

Urmi Bhattacheryya

Urmi Bhattacheryya is an independent journalist based in New Delhi. She worked as Gender Editor at The Quint, reporting – almost exclusively – on women and children who have survived sexual violence. She currently writes for national and international media, including the Boston Globe, Globe and Mail, Caravan and Women’s Media Center, on issues of sexual assault, women’s health and culture.

Book preview

Introduction

What Happens after Rape?

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 someone’s 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’. Steidel’s 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 that’s 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. It’ll 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. It’ll tell you it just does end this way.

There’s 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 one’s body and the transformed experiences of sex.

I’ve 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 woman’s 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 Indore–Bhopal 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 Smita’s 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. Smita’s bruises haven’t blended into the rest of her flesh – which she now views as a canvas that men have used to notch up victories on. Pia’s parents haven’t 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 there’s a ‘body’. If the body is sufficiently brutalized. If there were enough foreign objects used – objects that shouldn’t have been stuffed into a woman’s 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.

I chose Nidhi, Meera, Ranjini, Pia and Smita because there is nothing seemingly extraordinary about their rapes. Because they were the living, breathing receptacles of a crime, who were allowed to live. Who weren’t compartmentalized into the amalgams of ‘bravery’ we all know and love – the ‘good’ survivor; the appropriate survivor; the one easy to know and love.

Smita once said to me, ‘Most people, when they know I’m a survivor, want me to fight. They don’t care whether I’m happy or not. Why can’t it be the other way round – that I be happy, whether I fight or not?’

I chose them because they all also serve as important standpoints for the conversations we must have about rape.

What can we do to better protect our children from Child Sexual Abuse (CSA)? In more than 90 per cent of all cases, the perpetrator is known to the survivor (Nidhi) or often a member of the same family (Pia).¹

Atrocities against Dalit women (Ranjini, Meera) – their sexual assault – are often treated by the perpetrator as a weapon of war; a means to show them their place or the caste difference. These atrocities have become ‘par for the course’ in every Dalit geography: decades of popular indifference eventually leads to stunned recrudescence – cue the Hathras rape. At the time I am revisiting this introduction, a faction I support and stand with, is up in (intangible) arms against the systemic violence against Dalits, particularly the sexual assault against Dalit women, after a young Dalit woman in Hathras was gang-raped and taken to a hospital, where she died an ignominious death. She was then snuck out quickly and, by every horrified eyewitness account, set fire to in the dead of the night – against her parents’ wishes – by a police team eager to escape dominant-caste ire over what a detailed examination of her body would evidently have revealed. What level of complacence over the country’s caste status quo and the confidence that no one would dare shake it up could possibly have prompted this? What cold-blooded indifference to the powerless and eager appeasement of the powerful could have led to this? Even as I write this – even as a faction outrages against the ignominy – another faction protests against the targeting of the four dominant-caste men accused of raping the young woman and rejects the ‘politicization’ of Hathras (read: calling it what it really is – a case of dominant-caste violence against an oppressed caste group). Could there have been a better time to write this book than now?

Ranjini and Meera’s rapes are many years old – they’ve endured the ignominy. But why should they have had to? And why, despite guidelines issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and a stern Supreme Court reprobate, does the two-finger test continue to be used in tandem in many clandestine medical circuits across the country, in the hope to disprove rape by placing honour in a hymen?

And what of survivors who do not ‘fit the mould’; who do not serve the purpose of appearing as media tropes for good survivors – feisty, bold and at war with their rapist? What if, instead, they’re torn between a love lost (for a man who first seduced them) and a self-hate so deep, so puerile that they’re never able to recover from it (as is the case of Smita)?

At the end of each of these five stories, you will find a section that lists out the laws that could have helped – or would help in a court of law – that particular survivor, and in this way, this book could perhaps serve as an arsenal of knowledge for you. These include relevant Acts under the Indian judicial system and Sections of the Indian Penal Code that can be harnessed for your protection as a citizen, just as they have been for Nidhi, Ranjini, Meera, Pia and Smita.

I chose these five stories to be part of this book also for it to serve as a mnemonic device – to help bring them back into public memory and facilitate change. By refusing to let their voices die quiet deaths, I’d like to believe that documenting their lives will bring both, awareness (to you) and much-needed public attention (to them). ‘For example, the Nirbhaya case that shook the entire country built international pressure on the government to amend our criminal laws. It is a case that is still relevant in the activist and academic space. Making noise about a case of sexual violence, documenting it, writing it, can bring it back into the public discourse,’ says Megha Kashyap, Gender Justice Specialist and former Programme Coordinator, Gender Justice at OXFAM India.

I met Nidhi, Meera, Ranjini, Pia and Smita during the course of my reporting career. Each of them had featured in documentaries, short mood pieces or long-form articles on their trials, at various points over the past five or six years. This book is the sum total of a series of mornings and evenings spent playing hopscotch with Nidhi or her sister, on roughly drawn chalk circles on discarded concrete slabs near a train track. It is the compilation of many years’ worth of phone calls with Meera and Ranjini between my home in New Delhi and Madhya Pradesh, attempting to piece together the disparate aspects of our lives to the rhythmic cacophony of car horns in my life and the cowbells that backgrounded theirs. It is the product of coffee dates with Smita, where I counselled her, over and over again, on why sex isn’t a bad thing and how she can begin to absolve herself of the years of residual guilt. It is also the result of lunches and birthday dinners at Pia’s – often preceding or following trial hearings at a POCSO courtroom (aka one that is designed specifically to hear cases under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012).

In October 2018, I called out my own abuser during the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in India. I wrote of the time he lay down next to me in my bed, uninvited, and groped my breasts and buttocks, as I was too intoxicated to protest. I wrote of the night at a dinner at his place, when he clambered on top of me and attempted to enter me. I fought him off that time, but I did ‘nothing’ back then, overridden by the shame of having ‘done nothing’ between the two molestations, having ‘allowed’ its occurrence, convinced that no one would believe me – or that everyone would disparage me, instead, for being the ‘kind of woman’ who got drunk; for being the ‘kind of woman’ who left herself in a vulnerable position; for being a woman who invited or signalled rape. I cried as I wrote about it and heard, in the bewildering haze that gathered over the next few months, the accounts of multiple women who had been abused and molested by the same man in years past, who were all determined to tell their stories. It was years past the three-year statute of limitations on sexual harassment, but I complained anyway, compiling my story and theirs, and presenting it to the man’s workplace, demanding he be made to answer for his crimes. I’d like to believe that these five women I already knew from before that time, and multiple others, emboldened me to change the narrative that I had fed myself. I also understood something beautiful, changeless and omnipotent – that when one woman speaks up, countless follow; similarly emboldened to speak of the time that they, too, lost bodily autonomy.

I kept in touch with these five women over the years, investigating the tiniest aspects of their stories, following up on their legal journeys and asking after their mental health. After I Was Raped picks up where most news reports about survivors leave off – it enters bedrooms and courtrooms, and picks up the threads of their lives today, years after their rape, and in the midst of their continuing wait for justice. It does so through the friendships I cemented with them, over the years. Therefore, you will notice that the book is in the first person; I write of these five survivors ‘in real time’ as I visit and interact with them, and I have done so to help facilitate relatability with the reader.

I chose these survivors because, in their own unique way, each of them gave me an insight into their psyche that I never had before. How does rape change you? It changes you in imperceptible ways – the tantrums Nidhi throws at her mom by reminding her of her rape, if she doesn’t get her way; the laughter in Ranjini’s eyes that help steel her against her assailants and the inadequate partnership of her husband; in the crumpled shape and form of Smita’s shoulders, sinking under the weight of the world’s mistrust.

There’s no telling how rape can change a survivor – but it is certain that the story of a survivor doesn’t end at an illusory line drawn around the circumference of their rape. If they’ll tell you – and in this book they do – their stories have many unusual and particular facets – in that they are survivors. How do they navigate a society – the community they live in; sometimes, even their own family – who are