Goldengrove Unleaving

1. James Clavell, King Rat, for Rs. 150
2. Terry Pratchett, The Hogfather, for Rs. 125
3. Jacquie Durrell, Beasts in My Bed, for Rs. 70
4. Mary Stewart, Rose Cottage, for Rs. 10
5. E.F. Benson, Mapp & Lucia, for Rs. 10

Today one of my juniors messaged me on Facebook  “What are we going to do?” And that is how I found out that a female student in EFLU, while intoxicated—and therefore unable to meaningfully consent—had been allegedly molested by her male friends, who gave her weed prior to the attack. The molestation allegedly amounted to attempted rape; I add this because any number of sexual violations are trivialised in this country and on this campus.

Hearteningly, the administration appears to be taking all the correct steps. The student has lodged an F.I.R. and routing investigation is underway. Two students have been charged and two others interrogated in this connection. These are the facts as we have discovered them from local, regional-language news-media. The administration might have—and probably has—issued a statement to the media. The media reports—one cannot be sure of the absolute truth of this statement—that the police are emphasising the presence of intoxicants and narcotics; it is certainly true that a plainclothes raid was performed by the police on the boys’ hostel in search of narcotics. Given the usual she-was-asking-for-it trend regarding the sexual abuse of intoxicated women, this is slightly terrifying news, though to be fair nothing of the sort has been said yet.

It is important that this case be handled with immediacy and transparency, not only by the legal authorities but also by the university administration in the figure of a reconstituted GSCASH partially staffed by elected student members. It is equally important that it not be regarded as an isolated, unique event, the likes of which have never happened on this campus before, nor will happen since. EFLU is a good place, as far as gender equality goes: women smoke, booze, walk around campus late at night, have active sex-lives. It is also a place where sexual harassment is rife both within romantic relationships—yes, yes, that can happen, my children, and often does—and in encounters with strangers, acquaintances, and friends. Occasionally faculty members. Often seniors. Female students are subjected to moral-policing; their feminine performativity is strictly scrutinised; their dietary, smoking, and drinking habits are investigated and treated as symptomatic of their moral character; promiscuity is treated as license, of not to rape then to sexual harassment. Good girls are expected to toe ever-shrinking lines; bad girls—defined loosely as anyone who smokes, drinks, has sex, shouts, protests, has male friends—are construed as “asking for it”.

In the past—I can speak of the past four years and change—the university administration has dealt with cases of gendered violence—be it stone-pelting or catcalling—by advising female students to restrict their activities and movement. When students have been reluctant to do so, the administration has often taken the decision into their own hands and passed edicts making these restrictions obligatory. That it has not yet done so in this case is a good sign, though it is still early days.

Rules limiting female—and indeed male—students to increasingly restricted spaces and timings are not the answer. Barring entry into hostels, or closing the academic buildings after the end of class hours, are not measures that will decrease or end sexual and gendered violence—let us also remember that same-sex violence, not all of it sexual, also occurs and cannot be talked about in our hetero-patriarchal normativity. These measures will only restrict camaraderie between students and, by suspecting all cross-gender interactions to be sexual in nature, increase the possibility of gendered violence. Rather than enforcing rules that limit female students—and also male students, though rules limiting them are few and far-between in EFLU—to classrooms, hostels, and heavily-policed spaces, the administration should embark upon and encourage gender-sensitization campaigns across campus, among students of all genders as well as among teaching and non-teaching staff.

In India, we live by default in a rape-culture, where the rape-survivor is supposed to be a living corpse and is indeed often killed by her family if she survives the assault, where the verbal harassment of women in public is seen as normal behaviour and only to be expected if one ventures out-of-doors, where domestic violence is a domestic matter and incestuous assaults on children—as well as assaults by friends and strangers—are universally treated as the fault of the attacked individual. Girls, we are told, “must have done something” to have been raped, and boys “can’t control themselves”. We prize honour and honour-killings and corrective rape above love affairs that are inter-religious, inter-caste, inter-community, or intra-sexual. Promiscuous women, prostitutes and sex-workers of various stamps are held impossible to rape since they were asking for it by having a sex-life. Marital rape is impossible; non-consensual incest is invisible and indeed legal. Respect for women increasingly involves limiting their choices, restricting them—often by force—and victim-blaming if they are assaulted while trying to live full lives, professionally and personally: including but not limited to freedom of movement, the liberty to choose their professions, go on vacations alone, go to a pub or late-night show, take walks at four in the morning if they so choose. The students in EFLU come from, and continue to inhabit this society, this hetero-normative rape-culture. Outside, and even inside, the campus this is what the students experience and what female students—not exclusively, but in far greater numbers—are subjected to.

What happened on the 31^st is not an isolated incident and should not be treated as such. Nor should the response be to create an environment where female students are scared to take long walks at night, or visit their male friends, or indeed are forbidden from doing so. Today a number of students—quite a few of them male—rallied in support of the harassed complainant, and asked for non-restrictive measures to be taken by the administration and the GSCASH (among them the reconstitution of the latter statutory body, which has been defunct in EFLU for several months). This is an excellent step—and as a cynical veteran of EFLU protests and on-campus attempts at gender-equality and gender-justice, extremely reassuring to witness—but we ought not, must not, stop here.

ETA:
News-reports:
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/141102/nation-crime/article/elfu-postgraduate-student-raped-hyderabad
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/English-and-Foreign-Languages-University-student-gang-raped-at-the-campus-hostel/articleshow/45012865.cms
http://www.ndtv.com/article/south/university-student-allegedly-gang-raped-in-hyederabad-615240

[reproduced from a note on Facebook.]

I am looking back to other endings at this ending, and at other beginnings too. At the friends I have made over slow years, and at the friends I made too fast and the friends I did not work enough to keep and the friends who I cannot call friends anymore and have nothing else to call; and at the roads I have travelled and the places I have seen and the places I have turned my head away from; the sights I have see, have not seen, have seen through the sanitising lens of my camera. At a crossroads all roads call one closer.

I have been taking accounts of things, as one does at these times. Today I rediscovered the blog I used to write in undergrad, when such things were more popular. It was strange to read, like looking at a stranger's mind through familiar eyes. Depression changes you: with me it has ground me down, left me more patient and less easy to jump to exasperation, more exhausted. I am kinder to people now because I know how kind I have to be to myself at times, and how hard I find that emotion, how I snarl because I want to set my teeth in something and cannot. Depression has been a hand clamping shut the sharp maw of my mind. I can still eat, but slower, in smaller bites, and I am afraid that soon my stomach shall shrink. I am still angry but now I store up my rage and use it carefully; I don't shout at people any more, I don't write anymore, I keep quiet. I keep watch.

My sister is about to start college this year. It's a very strange thing to think of. Today I was reading all the things I wrote at seventeen, at eighteen, all the sentimental, half-formed poetry and fluid, easy prose that I used to write. It is easy to think that it was an easy life. Always summer, always alone [together], the fruit always ripe. But that's facile, a lie, and dismissive of that time. I had my first break-up that first semester and took two years to recover from it, I lost two friends to a misunderstanding and lost ground with a fair few others, I, never social, felt consistently lost in all the currents of a twenty-odd group, I co-ran a magazine for six months, I lost a year to dead languages and by the time I looked up everything was different. By the time undergrad ended I was claustrophobic, gasping for breath, desperate to get away. I'm nostalgic about JUDE, but so am I also about EFLU, and so can I also be about school. It's not the place, it's the time. I was seventeen when I started college, and now I am twenty-four, seven years and nearly three degrees richer, and my relationship with that half-remembered girl is one of pain. She was an angry young thing, very hurt and very brave, and I want to take her between my hands and soothe her. Stephen Fry famously wrote back to himself at sixteen, and I wish I could do that.

Dear Rhea,

You will be happy. First know that. You will be happy for three years in JU, which you will feel is home the first time you walk in. You will read many books and learn many things. You will be taught King Arthur in the original and Beowulf, and Iliad by one of the best men you will ever meet. You will learn how to be friends with people, how to sit down on a patch of grass or a stone step and talk for hours about everything and nothing. The girl you love will break your heart and you will miss her like a wound, but you will be happy. You will have friends and books and coffee and ridiculous conversations and long walks that will end in you getting very decisively lost. You will get a camera and realise that photography is a sort of solace. Years later you will watch a film and recognise yourself in a scrap of behaviour and the knowledge that others, too, use a camera to create distance will come as a relief. You will be taught the ethics of photography by the man who will first teach you the Iliad, and Aristotle, and Plato, and then later the ethics of feudalism, and as he tells you that photography has to be an ethical practice, the girl sitting beside you will sneak a photograph of him surreptitiously on her phone. You shall write and run a magazine and watch films and read comics for a test and your sister will look resentful and your parents confused. You shall have fun studying for the first time in your life and you will have friends.

You will have friends you can drink with and watch the same film with till it becomes a ritual and you will fall in love with the actor and when he dies it will be the first time you grieve the passing of a celebrity. The first time you get drunk your mother will text to ask for directions so that your father can come pick you up and you will gloat about this to your friends forever as proof that your parents are incredibly cool. At twenty-two your mother will believe you when you tell her that you are still gay and will stop asking you about marriage. At a little less than twenty you will get blind drunk at the house of a girl you barely know and then wander around the streets at midnight on New Year's Eve and a boy you barely know will bring you home while you fight him and will never accept any of your apologies for your misbehaviour. At twenty you will realise that you no longer want to study English literature, even though it has been your dream since you were five, even though you have been shown vaster worlds and better treasures than you thought possible, even though you have had a window opened into a thousand new worlds. Your teachers will accuse you of not loving them anymore but they will grin at you while saying it and you will grin back, and at twenty you will go to a city you have never visited, to live among people whose language you do not know, and study something the name of which you barely know.

You will walk through a different set of gates and feel at home. A girl will smile at you and you will give her your heart. A girl will sit in your room at night, stubbornly on the floor, and you will decide all of a sudden that she is your very best friend, whom you have been awaiting so long. A man will put his hands on you in desire and you will dislike it and it will end in rueful smiles and he will flirt with you for a while and it will be nothing like when you were seven, when you were fifteen and it will unlock something in you. While you are still living at home you will read the first book where the hero falls in love with a boy who is a little like you, and later you will read a book where the hero is a woman just like you and you will smoke endlessly every time you go back to these books even though you try not to smoke too much. You will get drunk and try to send people away from fear that you might try to molest them, you will get drunk and ask your friends to stay near you, you will get drunk and other drunk people will have fights and try to cut themselves while you try to stop them. You will have bitter arguments with everyone, you will shout about injustice, you will gain new ways of looking at the world and lose the last of your prejudices.

You will regain the faith you thought you'd lost. You will regain confidence in your self after it has been dragged out of you, inch by inch. You will be disenfranchised all over again after three years of being a full citizen. A man you barely know will kill himself and you will be heartbroken because at least one of his reasons for demanding death has been your reason since you were thirteen, fourteen and knew that your desires were filthy. A woman will desire you, but you've had a handle on that for the last eight years, you smug brat, so I'm not sure why I'm mentioning that at all. You will make friends online, and one of them will be like the twin you used to dream and wish you had. You will make friends with a girl you knew in school and regret all the time you weren't friends. You will travel to out of the way towns and look upon what gets called "Indian culture" and find that what you always suspected is true: there are any number of semi-naked people of all genders having sex in history. You will travel for the third time to Darjeeling and read a paper about queer people that will be published: the film you will write about will prompt your first foray into Bollywood fandom, will help you make friends you haven't lost yet completely. You will learn to make friends casually, parcel out smaller fragments of your heart; you will find that you keep them longer than the wild friendships of school. You will go to Dilli and live with another couple and fail to meet your friends and they will all scold you for it and it will be the truest reaffirmation of friendship you've had in a while. There will be other reaffirmations. You have not grown secure in the thought of people's love for you, yet, but you're getting there.

You will be ill. The illness that made your mother grow apathetic and listless will sink its claws in you. There will be months when you lie in bed all day every day and do nothing and go nowhere. It will be a miracle that you finish your masters degree, but you will. Both of them. The friends you desperately longed for at five, ten, fifteen, are lurking in your future and they will save your academic career, your sanity, and very possibly your life. You will love them for it, but a great debt has the nature of fealty, and you will be faithful to their secrets and ways of thought, and when those you try to help yourself , because debts like this can never be paid back but only paid forward, when they will look at you with loyalty and you will feel your heart rend. You will find love lurking in strange places: eggs and pasta and tea and earrings and books and lyadh and adda in front of Worldview and the way a girl looks at you with her eyes dark in the evening and the way a girl looks at you with tendrils twining into her hair and the way a girl smokes cigarettes perched on your window with amber eyes and the way a man smiles at you and holds you close; and they will all be love and none of it will be romantic. Your friends are waiting for you in their future and in yours, and there is an yearning in their hearts that matches the yearning in yours. You will be friends with people whose language you do not speak and you will speak constantly to bridge that gap, to explore worlds that are strange and where the core of familiarity is a delusion dragging you forth.

You will be happy. You are happy, as this is being written. You are lying in bed in a little room with the detritus of your life all around you, and unwashed dishes and undone laundry and unfinished work all asking for attention, talking to a girl online and missing a girl who is in Dilli, and a girl who is in Bombay and a girl who is in Dilli and a girl who is in Pune and a girl who is in Dilli and a girl who is in Bhutan and a girl who is in Dilli and a girl who is in Kozhikode and a girl who is in Dilli. You will take up embroidery again and drop it. You will read every book you can lay your hands on, and that, too, will preserve your sanity. You will take endless photographs and you will learn how to buy vegetables, and you will learn how to cook and realise that it doesn't have to make you feminine it just has to feed you. You will learn that it is fine to be feminine and that looking good in pink isn't something to be ashamed of. You will learn that you like cooking and that you can never be made to take care of yourself even when you get good at taking care of other people. You will learn how to talk to your parents as an adult and how to talk to your sister like she's human, you will learn that you like the girl she's growing up to be and while this is being written she's prepping for college like you are now.

You will be happy. First know that. Only know that. You will be loved and trusted and depended upon, and you will be happy. You are loved and trusted and depended upon, but the knowledge is yet to come to you; you will know it when you can bear the weight of it. For now, know only that you will be happy.

-Rhea.