Murder is kosher. War needs no introduction.
Even school shootings make the cut at the dinner table. But rape? No.
Never. We never talk about it.
My
daughter, nearly five, can read. She reads fairy-tales aloud, she reads
shop-signs from a moving car (we’ve successfully deflected her
attention from the ‘Piles and Fistula’ clinics in the proletarian parts
of town), she spots hilarious if confounding legends on the backs of
auto-rickshaws (yes, we’ve had engrossing family debates over ‘Mother is
god, lover is danger’) and she catches typos in the fliers that the
paperboy gets paid for tucking into our breakfast reading.
When she’s really bored, she reads the newspapers.
At home we get two dailies, three on weekends. Since December 17,
the headlines have consistently screamed a certain four-letter word in
our faces. It has latched onto our consciences and eaten into the
comfortable fabric of our lives. Despite such bombardment, we cannot
escape being startled to violent, impotent rage every time it is
uttered. The images it evokes are unbearably terrifying, even dooming.
Yet, as we attempt to shrug away the deluge of horror stories now
pouring out of the prisons where they have long been locked away, we
hear and read that this – this thing – is more commonplace than we
imagined. That it could be only a single frightening degree of
separation from our sheltered lives.
It is rape we’re not
talking about. Although we have all read enough to be informed that we
must talk about it. But when we nod our heads in agreement in a social
situation we’re talking detachedly about the lives of others – people we
don’t know, over whose pains we shall never lose sleep.
And the
headlines they continue to scream, telling of shocking tragedies that we
pray we won’t ever have the misfortune to endure. If we’re careful, we
whisper soothingly to ourselves, if we’re careful.
It’s only a
matter of time before my daughter, who has learned to argue with
conviction about her “fundamental rights”, asks me what rape means.
We’ve discussed everything from butterfly migration (“Where are the blue
butterflies we saw last year?”) to retail supply chains (“Where do the
toys in toy stores come from?”), all in answer to direct, sharply framed
questions from which there is no weaseling out. To her, I’m the fount
of encyclopedic wisdom, the Jedi master who unlocks the mysteries of the
Force. I can’t afford to let her down. Or she might go and find out
from somewhere – or someone – else.
When I’m not Superdad, I’m a
cog in a media machine where news is chosen not for its salience but for
its propensity to turn casual, accidental readers like you into patrons
who will come back for more. We media-types place rape high among our
priorities, right up there next to the Bollywood starlet’s wardrobe
malfunction and anything cricket. It’s a hot-ticket item with great
stamina and shelf-life, what with all the moralistic chest-thumping and
TV debates and candle-light marches and water-cannon-baiting protestors.
Oh yeah, we devote a lot of space to rape.
But we don’t talk about it. Not at home.
Murder is kosher. War needs no introduction. Even school shootings make the cut at the dinner table. But rape? No. Never.
And
not just because we fear or loathe it, but because somewhere in our
heads we confuse it with carnal knowledge – an unwelcome, premature,
irreversible initiation to life’s embarrassing truths.
Talking
about rape isn’t like clearing your throat, putting on a poker-face, and
delivering a preamble on birds and bees and dogs and cats. Though it
begins there. Sort of.
Unlike consensual sex, which a person has a
right to experience upon attaining legal age for it, rape is an act of
violence where the perpetrator does not always care if his victim has
attained sexual maturity. Minors, toddlers, even babies – of all genders
– are raped more frequently than we want to know, most often by people
known to them. People they trusted.
There’s the rub. So, whom can you trust?
My
wife, for reasons she can justify, distrusts men in general. In her
book, no one is a saint. Everyone – no exceptions here – starts at a
zero-trust level and then works their way up, if at all. It’s an
approach that is effort-intensive and stressful; it requires her to keep
a sharp, paranoid eye on our little girl at all times. Often, when she
deputes me to stand in, I can tell she’s not entirely confident of my
level of alertness to danger. I’m comfortable with that for the most
part, but there’s one thing of which I’m watchful: I don’t want our
daughter growing up fearing the world she must at some point confront on
her own.
We both want her to understand danger, to be able to
read the warning signs, and to act appropriately to save her skin. We
want her to be able to cope positively in adversity. We want her to be
confident about her body, not resentful of it. We want her to feel proud
of her femininity, not threatened or vulnerable on account of it.
There’s no easy way. We started the conversation with an iPad app for kids
that confirmed her suspicions that male and female bodies are indeed
different and work differently. While bathing her and dressing her, we
encourage her to talk about her body without shyness or reserve. We tell
her about parts of her body that are “private”, which only she and her
caregivers can examine or touch, and in what circumstances it is all
right for them to do so. We tell her about “good touch” and “bad touch” –
and debate endlessly over the social mechanics of it. We drill her on
how to respond and react if she thinks a touch is “bad” and how, and
whom, to call for help. From time to time, when we get lost, we turn to The Yellow Book: A Parent’s Guide to Sexuality Education and other online resources.
None
of this, we know, is going to erase rape from the world, or keep the
headlines from screaming. At least not until fundamental systemic
changes take effect in our society. Meanwhile, the questions, when they
come, will fly at us thick and fast. I try to wrap my head around the
answers I will give. I try to frame them mentally so that they sound
neither unconvincing nor terrifying. Both are undesirable outcomes – the
last thing we want is to have her believe that sexual abuse or rape
isn’t serious enough to be talked about, or develop a fear of it so
overblown and irrational that it cripples her for life.
I have but one chance to get this right.
Looking up from a book she is reading, my daughter smiles. Maybe she can read my mind.
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at Rs 21,500, the Samsung Galaxy Grand runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly
Bean. It sport a 5-inch display which provides users with an expansive
viewing experience, presenting messaging, multimedia and Web content in
brilliant color and clarity.
Priced at Rs 26,500, Apple
released the iPhone 4S in October 2011, accompanied by a key new
feature: Siri, a voice-activated personal assistant that lets you talk
to your phone to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls,
and find nearby restaurants, among other tasks.
