The anniversary of injustice

I can’t express my feelings for the girl who is no more, but the brutality of the alleged crime haunts me. How we are leading untroubled lives one year on, how justice is always a mirage, how she was forced out of her viscera—twisted sinews, broken bones while pre-mortem, gaslighted, gangraped mentally, then raped, choked, and then raped post-mortem as a corpse multiple times.

In her passing, she showed us just what it means to be inhuman. Yet these were either doctors or civic volunteers with connections to a hospital. These are people. People quite like us. So, where does that leave us? Because these people are not “them”, they are “us” and crime and criminals are not just those who are charged in courts, but the complacency in every single one of us, the “me-me” selfishness which not only fosters indecent intent but accolades it with inaction, and promotes more of this general moral slippage. Can we really shrug this off as an yesteryear problem?

For the Bengali who only smells the sweetest in the worst and nothing else, this may be a time of reckoning—although my experience of India as I will explain in other posts, stands vindicated. This is the new India where corruption is king, and cruelty is its soulmate. Their teeth and fangs are what will leave marks in history, not the educated or hardworking population who suffer in silence. I’ve known my nerves go numb a number of times, often in moments that backed me into a corner by a heartless doctor, or this generally prevalent unethical, immoral, profit-oriented end-justifies-the-means bengali or indian edifice in which such criminals in white coat proliferate. While the credo of physicians is enshrined as “do no harm”, this system is about “go all the way out intentionally and without impunity to do the maximum possible harm”—because the concern here is not to cure, but to create a snare in which they keep the patient’s barely alive to pocket the maximum profit.

This rape was an exception where it wasn’t me, but in her, many of us will still identify ourselves ensnared in a malevolent educational and corrupt system of their disliking—people who hail from a meagre background, love books, who study hard to reach their destination, who bend to no one and always speak with an intonation free of flattery. I can only voice my thoughts in my blog, and I have no expectations from this society, because it’s like a hollow tin vessel. It can sound when beaten, and it can beat up a loud crescendo to its own made-up glory or in praise of its female gods who thankfully can’t be raped being nonexistent, but nothing changes the fact that it’s hollow inside. The truly meritorious will leave for the lush greenery of betterment that awaits in the world outside.

The death of a civilization isn’t like the death of a man; it’s a long, drawn-out process over a timespan that doesn’t lend itself well to the human attention span. But all the markers of it are in India. Whatever cocktail of horror you can conceive—so long as you’re not too particular about the skin color of the cast—you’ll find it here. If we don’t already have it, we’re quick learners, advanced even, especially when it comes to the destructive or carnal gruesome arts. We always have funding for it; our conniving leaders salivate at the chance. Because only here, touch wood, transparency is as good as a thick lead shield, and no one has to be responsible for anything, ever. Usually, there’s a scapegoat factory somewhere, and hallelujah, the citizens have amnesia.

Flames flicker and die; candles struggle to stay lit in these wounded winds. A peaceful show of strength? Not in this country. Instead remembering the mayhem last year to suppress popular outcry, a flurry of thirty paid goons descends—thank god they’re illiterate fuckwads who confuse the Bengali তিন তলা(teen tola) with the English second floor. They ransack the general ward instead of the seminar room, breaking whatever CCTV cameras they can find, then leave. And it will be Independence Day soon, at least another unremarkable one. Congratulations to us nitwits—what a great country we’ve spun from our semen. The only way to divert attention from a rape is to create more rumors, rapine and ruckus, perhaps in a way that further muddles an already muddled, scatterbrained, impoverished, and easily tired population. Their stamina to hold on to an ideology is as fleeting as their interest in a television channel. Time is always on the side of the incumbent who follows the ‘do nothing’ policy—it always works. Just sit tight, toss an occasional distracting fart or two into the media, perform random actions to raise bewilderment, and presto—amnesia. Especially in the monsoon when floods are a good distraction this is added on top of false promises to repair or rebuild. The rebuilding really needed is character.

I remember she got a hurried cremation—they couldn’t risk a second, more detailed, more gruesome, and gloomier post-mortem. But what about the post-mortem of the civilization? Have these friends or fiends recorded her last ordeal? Will they entertain people with tastes like theirs in the undergrowth of the internet, bringing them to a masturbatory climax over and over again? Will this become a movie, making a group of people rich who will never contribute to the cause of people like her? A book deal? Perhaps the point is this: lessons from her death won’t be learned, no changes wrought, just more societal gift wrappers. But she will still be alive in the many working-class women who positively transform the world, who, like her, aspire to be good at what they do, who—like me—can’t stand corrupt people and fall victim to nefarious plots, still preyed on, still vulnerable. I know it’s only a matter of time before another villain comes scurrying from the shadows to rinse and repeat this, and once again, we will see gross inaction and a society slowly dying its own death because it has traded its spine for the fancy dress competition of a hedonistic parade, allowing the submission of judgment to crimes for petty, useless trinkets.

There isn’t any solution that can be worked out overnight, or by one government or even one civilization. The important question to ask is why, not where. The ingrained nature of certain behaviors is reflected in language patterns in every society, however dissimilar. It’s plain that violence against women is coded into male DNA, reflected in the artifacts of language and culture, the very things that obscure the primal urges of the animal inside, which in attire we forget. If you have a careful ear, you’ll discern this—invectives across cultures often target mothers and sisters, paired with expletives. Rarely, if ever, do father or brother fuckers gain any popularity in any language that I’m aware of. Although in this case, the root cause can’t be extirpated because we are animals, and evolution has delicately designed us with certain abstruse needs, we can still do more than just the usual—hand-waving the problem away or offering a feeble, farcical papyrus of symptomatic treatment that does no good.