ON MAGICAL THINKING
Gangraped as a teen, Sohaila Abdulali first wrote about it in Manushi in 1983. In this excerpt from her new book, she writes of how every survivor believes she has suffered less than other survivors
Iam sitting in a Mumbai suburb with Kalki Koechlin, and she is telling me about the sexual abuse she lived through as a child. I am aghast at what I’m hearing. I thank her for telling me her story, and say I cannot imagine how she has come so far in working through it. I cannot conceive how awful it must have been. “I can’t imagine going through your experience!” she says. “I can’t think of anything worse.”
There’s something slightly unhinged about the scene: two grown women each insisting that the other deserves the prize for Worst Rape.
Is one rape worse than the other? This is a ridiculous question. Why do we insist on ranking sexual assault? Survivors do it to our own discredit. I remember sitting in a support group and thinking to myself that “my” rape wasn’t as bad as those of the other poor losers.
No matter how many stories, no matter how many victims, I’m always appalled afresh. It always sounds so terrible. “Mine” always seems more manageable.
I’m not sure why we do this. It’s a weird phenomenon that I have seen over and over. In my experience, only individuals do it. Put us in a group, and we humans are usually eager to claim the mantle of victimhood. “Collective victimhood” is well documented. But, when it comes to sitting in a room on an August afternoon and talking about rape with a fellow survivor, I’m always aghast and appalled, and convinced that the other person suffered more than me.
Perhaps there’s some defense mechanism at work. If someone else is worse off, suddenly what you’re dealing with isn’t so bad. It doesn’t always work, of course— after I had two miscarriages and one man helpfully told me about his wife’s six failed pregnancies, I just wanted to put my head in a pressure cooker and boil it. But sometimes it does.
I’m not wholly convinced about my defense mechanism theory. I know how bad my rape was, but everyone else’s still seems worse. I don’t think it’s because I’m trying to downplay my story. It’s because I know my story. I know it beyond the few sentences I’ve written, or the words I’ve used to describe it to so many people over the years. I know the tiny the RSS. There is information on how and why it has changed with the times. But there is no analysis of the effects of that change or of what the RSS means to the India which does not believe in its regressive ideas. A lot of attention is paid to the success of the government of Narendra Modi and the RSS role in that. But there is no more insight than what any regular reader of newspapers would know. There is no critique of any sort. But even without that, the reader cannot gauge exactly how the Modi government and the RSS feel about actions of the VHP and Bajrang Dal and other militant affiliates. Therefore, in the discussion of “ghar wapsi” of Muslims and Christians into Hinduism or of “love jihad”, the breaking up of inter-religious romances, there is no mention of the illegality of these actions or the assault on people’s civil liberties or of intrusion into personal space. It is as if, for the writers, the RSS exists in its special universe untouched by Indian law or society.
Therefore, if the attitude to Muslims are restricted to the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, the murderous acts of “cow protectors” are restricted to a few throwaway sentences about aggressive acts by “outliers” on the Right. The inference that the RSS cannot control its associates is not analysed. The RSS idea that all Indians are Hindus and what this means for the Constitutional rights of other religions is never on the radar. Similarly, when the Gujarat riots of 2002 are mentioned, it is with this very casual reference. When the little details (although by now it’s pretty hazy — a rather wonderful side effect of time). I know what they did and I know what I felt and I know how bad it was. But I know I made it through. When you experience something first-hand, you know its colors and smells and the full horror of the hands pulling off your shoes. But you also know the limits of your pain and suffering. You don’t have to wonder. And reality, no matter how bad, is more manageable than unknown horror. I was never in Kalki’s position, so how do I know I would have survived? I know I survived what happened to me. No matter how bad it was, here I am. Here is the East River flowing outside my window. Here is a bowl of pomegranate seeds deeply, joyously red. Here is a little plastic pig that my spouse gave me when we first met. Here is my temple at Ayodhya is discussed, we get a potted history of the destruction of the Babri Masjid and not one word about the riots that took place as a result. At this point, it is clear that A View to the Inside is a whitewash.
The most interesting chapter is on the debate within the Sangh Parivar on “Economic Self-Sufficiency”. The conflict between the BJP’s ideas of global capitalism and the more socialist and India-centric notions of the RSS and its affiliates is laid out for the reader. Once again, there is no deep discussion. The biggest criticism of this book would be that the functioning of branches of the RSS are not touched on at all. The VHP, SJM, BMS, Bajrang Dal, Durga Vahini, ABVP are barely mentioned. It would have been interesting to see how these arms function. Even the formation of the BJP and its close association with the RSS is out of the writers’ purview. With the use of newspaper articles, the writers have brought the book up-to-date as it were. The chapter on China, therefore, stands as a mix of confused nationalism and politics, a distraction even from an important discussion on how the RSS can impact India’s foreign policy, as a remote control for any BJP-led government. For insight into the RSS, this book is a disappointment. Perhaps its biggest value is in the tables in the appendix, which explain the hierarchical structure of this secretive organisation. Acid Sangeetha Sreenivasan 400pp, ~499 Penguin brother wearing a suit and tie, looking seriously at me in a photo that always cracks me up for some reason. Here I am. No matter what happened, here I am.
Whatever the reason, ranking rapes is a prime example of the magical thinking that swirls around rape. Seems like no matter how rational we are, when it comes to life’s big things — death, pain, birth, love — we quickly revert to charms and chants and magic potions. So what if it doesn’t work?
For a short time before I learned the actual statistics on rape, I thought I was safe because, now that it had happened to me, my turn was over. I was out of the running — been there, done that. This was a great comfort, until it hit me that of course you are right back in the running — rapists don’t go around asking victims whether
Acid is a turbulent trip: hallucinogenic and haywire, imbued with melancholia. Originally written in Malayalam, Sangeetha Sreenivasan’s English translation of her own work is masterfully accomplished.
A strange volatility grips the unusual household of same-sex couple, Kamala and Shaly, and Kamala’s teenaged twin sons Aadi and Shiva. The women live out their subverted togetherness fuelled by LSD. Kamala’s inner demons are many: a failed forced marriage to a cousin, her sexual orientation and consequent attachment to Shaly, and her dependence on psychotropic drugs.
Narrated in a non-linear style, the story opens with the news of Kamala’s mother’s death in her native village in Kerala. Kamala’s seeming ambivalence towards this event coupled with her drug-induced delusional stupor presages what lies ahead. When she decides that they must pack up their urban Bangalore life and move to her mother’s ancestral home, it creates upheaval in everyone’s lives.
Shiva the smarter, disabled son and his caretaker brother the gentler Aadi grapple with their new shuttered existence. In their earlier city life, the women and the boys had clearly segregated living areas. “The house had two storeys. Kamala lived with Shaly on the upper floor and the boys lived on the lower floor. The women were free to come down whenever they wanted. But the boys were not allowed on the upper floor.”
In the ancestral house, it is Shaly who must keep away from the curious probing eyes of the relatives and stay in a room apart. The stifling existence in the house takes its toll. Kamala becomes a pale shadow, sliding into a hellhole of delusional spells, increasingly seeking isolation. The house smells of decline and decay. Befittingly, the closest sign of life is a nearby crematorium, which fascinates and repels.
Though seemingly the protagonist, the story isn’t Kamala’s alone. It is, at different times, about each of the four main characters. The interplay of shifting dynamics between Kamala and Shaly, between
Shaly and the two boys, and finally they’ve already had their turn.
…I know that a part of me believed, and still believes, that if I just own it and know it and figure it out, then it can’t happen to me again...
While it serves no useful purpose to rank pain and suffering, we do. And of course rapes do fall into some categories— being held by warlords and gang-raped for years just isn’t in the same box as being raped by a stranger where you live, and going straight to the hospital. That’s true. But you can’t predict which woman will be able to come to terms with it sooner. Will the marital rape survivor build a new life faster than the incest survivor?
…It’s very delicate, this balancing act: to acknowledge that rape is just ghastly, and to simultaneously assert that it is simply one of many ghastly things. …
Perhaps we have a basic need to rank things...
For me, the death of my father was worse than being raped, although fathers are supposed to die and children are not... I wasn’t abused for years by someone who should have been looking out for me. Maybe the childhood rape was worse because it was a malign act, whereas the child’s death was not in human control.
Maybe … See, here I go, comparing again. Why do we waste time thinking about what should be worse? It’s a futile mindgame.
I do have one absolute: the worst rape is the one you don’t survive. Jyoti Singh fought her attackers, and that rightfully makes her a hero. I would never say, or think, that she should have lain there and taken it. She might have died either way. My point is that there is no wrong way to react, but there is a worst-case outcome: you don’t get a chance to carry on.
In Alice Sebold’s powerful novel The Lovely Bones, the protagonist Susie Salmon is raped and murdered, and the book is told from her point of view. Reviewers loved it; so did I. But there was a fatal flaw — the wonderful heroine is dead. I don’t care how feisty and insightful and wise and unforgettable you are — once you’re dead, you’ve lost.
Marital rape. Incest. The drunk boyfriend, the family friend. For me, being gang-raped on a mountain by drug addled would-be killers seems far preferable to any of these. Crazy, but true. I could leave the mountain behind, tell myself it had nothing to do with my safe world. But anyone I know who has been raped by someone he or she knows is as aghast at my story as I was at Kalki’s. Magical thinking. I know it makes no sense, but I still think your rape is worse than mine.
PRINCIPLE