So this is short story I wrote in the first semester of my university life. The locations are of India because of my education in an Indian School which made me more aware of the geography of India rather than my own country. Various parts of the story might sound a bit cliche but all the incidents mentioned have their inspiration from one or the other real life incidents which I have read somewhere or the other.

Nirvana

Sitting on the benches of the Thane police station I stared at the loud crowd around. The sound of quarrelling prisoners, criminals, police constables and other officers filled the air. The only thought in my mind was “O God! What have I got myself into”. With this thought I recalled how I landed up here. A lecture was going on in my class and being the big mouth that I am, I challenged the professor’s idea that “no criminals should be subjected to capital punishment”. A heated debate went on for the entire class. Finally, I ended up saying to the professor “your idea suits you and mine suits me “.

After the class the professor called me to his room. I kind off guessed that I am in for some serious bashing. On the contrary the only thing that happened in his room that day was, the professor asked me to visit the Thane Police Station and talk to a three women who were sentenced to death by hanging. He said that he will arrange the meeting.

A dark room it was, no windows, a fan whose blades could be counted. A police constable led me in, “I am outside, call me if you sense any hostility” and with his last word he glared at three women sitting on the bench of the dark visiting room and left the room ,locking the door behind.

For a moment there was silence, the only sound being the whisper which two of the three women shared among themselves. Finally I broke the silence,”hello, kaise ho app log?”. The last thing one could ask a person who knew that he/she was soon going to be hanged.

I had read the records of the three prisoners before visiting them. One of them was 25 and charged and proven of guilty of murdering her husband, the second being a 17 year old girl who was accused of stabbing the owner of the house she worked in a record 50 times and the third being a 35 year old guilty of burning to death her own father and brother.

So one could very well understand my state of being sitting in a room with 3 professionally unprofessional murderers.

The one thing that puzzled me the most was there was neither sense of guiltiness on their face nor the fear of death. I bluntly told them the purpose of my visit and they just smiled. From the itsy bitsy conversation that followed, I sensed a feeling of untold freedom in the lives of these women.

I left the place soon and when I went to bed later on that night, the gift of sleep tended to run away from me. The feeling of freedom which I sensed in the eyes and behavior of those criminal disturbed me a lot. For a strange reason, I kind of got angry when in my own thoughts I referred to them as ‘criminals’.

The next few days passed by the same way. Disturbed, distressed, troubled, lost in thoughts etc. And finally when the ghost of mental distress drove me crazy, I finally realized what I should have done a long time ago. The very day I went to the professor and asked him to kindly arrange another visit to the three women. For some strange reason, he didn’t even question me the reason for it and just said he would.

When I reached the police station I got informed that all three of them were already hanged. The way I felt that time, I fail to put it in words. The same constable who had taken to me to the room that night ran towards me when he saw me at the station. He said that the three women did leave a letter for me. They had paid him and told him that if I don’t come in within one month, he should dispose off the letter.

The letter read like this…

“Aryan,

You told us the reason for your visit .You told us that capital punishment according to you is just. But what if someone is given capital punishment due to a something they committed to escape a punishment far greater than capital punishment. We didn’t tell you about this that day because we wanted you to know our real stories only after our death.

Yes we did commit murders. One of us murdered her own husband. Why a woman who is newly married will possibly murder her husband? .I ,Sujata, I got married to my own brother in law after my sister’s death .My husband kept me happy ,but soon after our marriage my only brother died. My husband completely changed after my brother’s death. He started drinking openly, partying with his friends, coming late at home. All these sudden changes in his behavior made me a bit suspicious. I tried to search for a clue in his drawers, around the home. One day when he reached home, he was drunk and we had a quarrel. In my anger I told him that the money he is spending didn’t belong to him and that it’s my family property. In his drunk state he unconsciously told me that he has slow poisoned my brother to death and also murdered my sister and told me to prove it if I can. There wasn’t any proof. I thought about all the possible things I would do to avenge my brother and sister’s murder but there wasn’t any way nor I could leave my husband ,not because I wasn’t strong enough , but because I did not want another woman’s fate to be the same as mine due to this man. His presence filled me with disgust. I realized that I was the one who got depressed, while the real criminal lived his life to the fullest as if nothing ever happened. I finally decided to murder him.

Julie, a 17 year old girl from Goa, who came to Mumbai after her parent’s death. The only job she could manage was that of a nanny, to take care of a 1 year old child of a working parent. The first month went by getting adjusted to the new environment. It was only in the third month, the horror of reality struck. The lady had gone out of town with her child. This is when the man first raped Julie. She could not tell anyone about it for the fear of the society, for fear of being the one accused instead. Silence kills the lamb and that’s exactly what happened. She got raped 17 times over the next one week. All her senses seemed to defy her, she failed to distinguish between real and virtual world, and finally one day when she was in the kitchen and the man tried to rape her again, she stuck back, stabbing him until his flesh looked like minced meat. I am Julie and this is the crime for which I got death sentence. Is this just in our eyes?

What do people talk about a 35 year old woman who is unmarried? Something must be wrong with her character; maybe she got gynecological problems etc. Rarely anyone tries to understand what can be her reasons for not marrying or what could be the reasons behind her to not get married. People shiver to talk about incestuous rape and I ,Zainab experienced it since I was 20. People say that one’s home, one’s family is the safest place in the whole wide world, for me my home became a living hell after my mother’s death. For 15 years, I got raped continuously, first by my own father and then my brother. I was made to live within the walls of my house for years and years. My father and brother spread the news that I was mentally handicapped. I tried to suicide several times but failed, I tried to run away and again my bad luck caught me red handed. Once I saw a news article that thousands of pigs were burnt to death after they got affected with mad cow disease. I finally knew what to do. I burnt my father and brother. The punishment for murdering another human is either hanging, or lifetime imprisonment. So did my father and brother still fall in the human category? I smile every time I think of this fact.

3 prisoners sentenced to capital punishment,

Sujata, Julie and Zainab

I put the letter in my pocket and went home. I wanted to cry badly but my tears cheated me.

Men’s role in ending violence against women

“The second gender”, “the other sex” etc are often used to refer to the same gender responsible for giving us birth, bringing us up, often being our first best friend and doing every possible sacrifice for our happiness. Indeed we are talking about a “Woman” not just a mother, daughter, wife or sister but a being complete in herself. Ages of oppression has led to this equal sex being relegated to a secondary position. However the question arises is it their weakness or sacrifice which has been responsible for this? In most cases it is their sacrifice and never ending love for us which has come to be regarded as their weakness. So isn’t it our responsibility to be a part of this new age “restoration” – the restoration of the equal rights of women.

When we talk about this restoration we have to accept the fact that it cannot happen in one day not even one year. Years of suppression and oppression will require years of efforts to bring the women back to equal prominence. One of the fist steps to take in this direction is to end violence against women. This end of violence is even more important than the education of women. If a girl or a woman is abused physically or mentally she will psychologically not be in a position to accept any other forms of reform. There are various ways in which women are violated and most of the times this violence is inflicted by men or by women who have an altered psychology towards the same gender due to ages of living in a patriarchal society (mother in law, sister in law etc). Domestic violence can only end if men start treating women as their equal rather than “half beings“. Issues such marital rape, forced abortion, forced multiple pregnancies (especially in the Third World Countries) need to be highlighted rather then giving them a cover of religious excuse so that both men and women become more aware of the rights of the latter.

We say that the contemporary women who are working in MNCs, hospitals, schools and every other possible field are a symbol of the new free women who enjoy equal rights. Is that really the scenario? Is there no violence committed towards this so call new wave of working women? Lower wages than their male fellow counterparts, continuous passes being made towards them in the name of promotions, higher salary or simply owing to their looks – are these not forms of sugar coated violence? How can men help women in these scenarios? Simply by being a little more understanding – a husband should make his wife comfortable enough so that she can discuss these kinds of problems with him and he can support her to come out of them or the boss should treat women in the same light he treats this male employees and protect their dignity and self respect rather than squashing them under the boots of male chauvinism.

Even if we consider the role of younger males in this fight to end violence towards women there are many ways of doing so: standing by the side of a mother who is battered by a drunk or aggressive father, by simply not occupying the seats reserved for women in buses, trains etc, by protesting against the distinction made in the family towards him and his sister or by simply being a compassionate human rather than an animal driven by a crave of flesh – this will end major forms of violence such as rape, acid throwing etc.

These are only few ways in which men can contribute towards the end of violence committed towards women. However this is only possible with a change in the mentality of men. The women on their part should also start asserting their rights of equal beings and help the men to come out of their psychological barrier which provokes them to think themselves of being a superior species. And it is not very difficult to come out of male chauvinistic mentality – if we can just close our eyes for a minute and think of all the sacrifices and work a woman does through out her life be it as a mother, daughter, wife, sister with a mentality that they do it out of love and not weakness we will not be able or at least we would think twice before committing any violence towards them. If we still do continue committing violence towards them then there is no difference between us and a wild animal or even worse as many a times even animals do not bite hands which feed them.