Four days before the un-named woman boarded what she thought was a bus that would take her home, I got off a plane that had taken me to mine. Twenty-six hours earlier I’d been in Mumbai, and twenty-three hours earlier I’d been sitting outside the airport while men passed me by with leers and rubbed their crotches at me with smiles. I threw a couple curses their way and went back to my copy of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata. And some sympathetic Sri Lankan women bought me a chai. Three months earlier I’d arrived in India, thinking I was ready for the on-coming war.
So when on December 23rd in my home in Philadelphia I heard about the gang-rape in Delhi I was surprised. Not that it happened, but that I was hearing about it at all.
Over the past three months I had read plenty about such crimes in the Indian news. Especially in the north, where gang-rape is used as a form of cast-warfare against untouchable (known as ‘dalit’) girls and women, these stories were horribly ubiquitous. Just as awful were the responses: politicians advocating that the marriage age should be lowered to sixteen to combat the crisis, and of course often not much response at all. Apart from the rape were the suicides of young women, who kill themselves in a far greater ratio to men than in most areas of the world. And apart from the articles, there was my and the women on my trip’s experiences, which ranged from stares to rape attempts, and many things in between.
Two months before this young woman took her final Indian bus ride, I took my first. But unlike hers mine was a full bus, not an empty one, so when the man next to me started masturbating at me I was able to draw enough attention to get him thrown off.
I asked a sympathetic woman if I should bother reporting the incident to the police. She gave a head wobble of negation. “Nothing will happen,” she shrugged.
Which was true. People don’t go to the police in India because with the commitment rates as low as they are, there’s just no point. Or something else could happen: they could make the situation worse.
Which is why seven days after this young woman was sent to a hospital policemen were spraying tear gas into protesters’ eyes.
But four days after that, she was sent to a hospital in Singapore for special treatment.
It’s like when someone comes over to your house and your mom finally cleans the living room. When the eyes of the international press turned onto the worlds ‘largest democracy’, it cleaned house. We have the pressure exerted by the protesters to thank for that, and for journalists at publications like the New York Times, who picked this story as one worthy of international attention.
Until these past few weeks accounts of India have largely ignored how women have to live their daily lives. Books like The Rough Guide to India describe buses as a cheap and convenient form of travel, while advising you to avoid the back seats, as “they accentuate bumpy roads.” I learned to avoid the backs of buses for entirely different reasons.
There are many countries that are infamous for their treatment of women, but until now India was not truly one of them. Of course there are lists made ranking India as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, but somehow they are overwhelmed by the seductive fantasy of a spice-scented, spiritual land of mystery. For every Slumdog Millionaire, there’s ten Eat, Pray, Love’s. I have met many a person who is surprised at my stories of my experiences as a woman visiting India, and many of these people have travelled through India themselves.
So what is the reason for this blind spot? I can only think of one answer: It’s far more difficult for Westerners to understand sexism when it wears a sari instead of a burka, when it calls itself a secular democracy and not a theocratic dictatorship. India has existed as a Western fantasy for centuries, and thus it became for the West an escape as well as a member of our army in a world democratic struggle. We are that more willing to look upon the headscarf women legally must wear in Iran with disgust than to question why women in the streets of India so often where scarves around their necks in intense heat. Our photographers revel in the bright colors of women’s daily wear, but as the sun sets the colors fade and the photographers put away their cameras. If only our journalists were to look around the streets of India at night and see that so many of these finely-dressed women have retreated into their houses, and if only they were to ask why.
Right now as the six suspects go to trial, the nation is screaming for their blood. Nearly a month after she boarded that bus, this young woman’s story is still receiving international attention, as is the condition of women in India at large. Soon the eyes of the world will turn somewhere else: there will be a bloodier disaster, and louder screams. After that, even eyes within India will avert once more. So far, this story has outlived its protagonist by twenty-six days. But just like her, its days are numbered.
this is real this is fiction 