"Getting Home"... a Missive from India by Anuradha Roy

Earlier this week I asked my friend the novelist and publisher Anuradha Roy about the recent protests over the gang sex attack in Delhi.  She offered this account, and then gave her permission to publish it here:

I came back to Delhi from travels elsewhere on Christmas eve. The roads were windswept and foggy and, unusually for any Indian city, almost deserted. Through a drive of about 20 kilometres, there was not a single pedestrian for long stretches. There were fewer than usual cars, hardly any auto rickshaws. Enormous state transport buses sailed past with no occupants other than the driver and conductor.

In response to the brutal gang rape in Delhi on 16th December of a young student, the state had taken several steps, the results of which I was witnessing from the window of my taxi from the airport: the Delhi metro, by which an average of about 1.8 million people travel every day, had been shut down; the state had cordoned off the entire central vista of Delhi where the protesters had been attacked the day before by the police, with water cannon (in freezing December weather), tear gas and batons. It had also set in force something called Section 144, which makes it punishable for more than five people to gather anywhere.

Gandhi described British colonial rule over India as ‘satanic’. It is hard to find any other word to describe the way India is ruled now.

The daily violence against women in India is nauseating enough but people are yet more livid because of the state’s routine indifference to it. The Home Minister has said that if he went to meet the protesters at India Gate today, as was being demanded, he might some day be asked to meet ‘Maoists.'  Both he and the police commissioner justified the violent action against the thousands of students agitating for justice, claiming that the protest had been taken over by hooligans.

The prime minister made a brief statement *eight days* after the rape. It was delivered in his usual robotic manner, successfully dispelling the notion that he had any capacity for  human anguish. The PM is not given to making speeches, he is said to be a reserved economist. Not many days before, he had addressed industrialists – for about twenty minutes. It appears pretty clear what he feels passionate about, if anything.

Meanwhile, with reassuring predictability, another man from the ruling party wagged a paternal finger at the raped woman: she should never have been out at that hour. Just because India became free at midnight did not mean she should have been out at midnight. (Factually too, this was wrong. She and her friend had got on the bus at 9.15 pm, after waiting an hour for other public transport.) This is not unusual. After almost every rape that makes it to the headlines, someone in power usually chastises the victim for going out/ dressing too provocatively/ staying out too late. A survey in June 2011 named India (alongside Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and the Congo) as one of most dangerous places in the world to be a woman. As a woman you know the truth of this every day on the streets of Indian cities, particularly Delhi.

I came to Delhi at 26 for a job, a migrant, just as this young woman is. My housemate, also a migrant, a student from the north-east of India, would tell me she was molested almost each time she stepped out in public transport and was often flashed. We’re used to being groped in buses, leered at on the streets. It’s normal for cars to slow down and for sleazy men to roll down windows and invite us in when we’re waiting for public  transport. We are used to walking with our arms close to our bodies, making no eye contact with men. We don’t stroll, we walk quickly to our destinations. If it’s after dark we try and have someone we know accompany us home. Even so, when we get home safe we count ourselves lucky. Of course many girls and women aren’t safe in their homes either.

It’s impossible to feel remotely celebratory on Christmas day knowing that a young woman who came to Delhi merely to train as a physiotherapist is now on a ventilator in a hospital not far from my house. Most of her intestines have been removed because six men, not content with shoving their penises into her, used an iron rod. They carried on torturing her with the rod even after she fell unconscious from the agony. Then they threw her and her friend, whom they had also beaten unconscious, out of the road and drove away. The woman and her friend were naked and bleeding. That was how they remained at that roadside for the next hour until the police reached and covered them with bed sheets borrowed from a hotel nearby.

Transport restrictions make it hard to reach central Delhi where the main protests are. But in my neighbourhood today, there was a procession of men and women. Not a big one that would stop the traffic, just about thirty or so people holding lit candles and placards, shouting slogans seeking justice. If there is no metro and the roads are blocked by riot police there is no choice but to decentralize the protests. The tragedy is that the Indian state has perfected a system of delaying justice so infinitely that while most of the world thinks of India as the world’s largest democracy, it is actually among the world’s largest and most corrupt tyrannies.

For background, an early account of the attack in Delhi last week, here.

An account of the shooting death of a journalist covering the protests, here.

About Anuradha Roy and her work here, and here.

UPDATE: The victim of the attack has died, as report here.  Meanwhile, it should be noted that the immediate neighbors of those arrested have strongly condemned the attack and the attackers.

Track backs, and thanks to those who've linked to this post: The Browser, 3QuarksDaily, and others.

Summer Postcard from the Hills, India

In north London something has been messing around with the bins. The neighbors' dog, no doubt, the aged one that barks blindly, still not recognizing me, whenever I pass their gate. Meanwhile, another near neighbor received this missive from our friend Anuradha Roy, author of the recently-published An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Roy writes:

Feeling rather shaken because as I was writing this email a leopard came andtook our neighbour's dog, a sweet, slightly demented little thing calledGoldie who had barked his heart out at Biscoot this morning, as everymorning. He stands on his hind legs and barks in a frenzy--such comical rage. Now there's much yelling and shouting down the hill, but too late.Last month another favourite, a short legged, bushy tailed brown-and-whitecalled Bobo had vanished.

A leopard. Panthera pardus, a protected species in India. We come across them on and off--crossing a road, sliding into the forest--after dark. From the safety of a car, they're magnificent. The town I live in is at the edge of a forest which has quite a lot of wildlife, the leopard included--and when they haven't enough prey in the forest, which they usually don't, they are always on the lookout for food. They love dogs--but not in the way we do!

from Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing

This week we're reading Anuradha Roy's AN ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING. We were introduced to the book by the esteemed publisher Christopher Maclehose, whose imprint at Quercus Books (UK) has just published the book in the UK.

ATLAS is a beautifully written multi-generational saga that, oddly, is reminding us, in its charting of the centrifugal forces acting upon a family, of "The Cherry Orchard." This excerpt below has been lent to TMP by the author herself:


“Look, a skeleton!” one of my workmen exclaimed.
However busy I was, and however many buildings I was building, I always supervised each one’s first day of digging. That day I sat on a tin folding chair on the building site, shaded by my usual large, black umbrella by then so worn out that the sun came in through its many minute holes as if through a salt cellar. The week before we had cleared out the last of the debris from the crumbling mansion we had demolished, and work on the foundations of a new building had just begun. I had been arguing with my manager about some detail in his accounts when I heard the workman’s voice: “Look, a skeleton!” After a pause I heard another labourer snort with disappointment, “Hah, just a dog or cat, Nandu, carry on.”
I looked into the tumbled earth and, within a tangle of bleached weed roots, I saw an almost perfectly preserved brownish skeleton of what must have been a dog, with the mouldy remains of a blanket and an aluminium dish from which it must have eaten all its life. I sat on a stone next to the grave filled with disproportionate grief for this dog I had not known, for the family that buried its dish and blanket with it because they could not bear to part the dog from its possessions. I thought without reason of the children that may have pranced around with the dog in that vanished mansion’s garden.
There was a house once whose garden I knew, every last tree, and where the stairs had chipped away and which of the windows would not shut. The ophthalmologist asked me once, “Do foreign bodies ever interfere with your vision? Floating black specks?” And I thought, not bodies, houses, and not foreign, ground into my blood.
“Shall we carry on, Babu?” the labourer had enquired after a bemused pause. The sight of me sitting practically in the dirt next to the dog’s grave had startled him.
I could not imagine shovelling the dog out with its things like the rest of the rubbish we were daily heaping into trucks and sending away.
Eight families now live in slabs, one on top of the other, over those bones and the dish, which I planted deep in the foundations. They know nothing of it, naturally; skeletons have no place in new apartments.
People are afraid of ghosts in old houses. I know it’s the new ones that are haunted, by the crumbling homes they replace. Old houses don’t go away. They lurk crumbling and musty, their cobweb-hung rooms still brooding over the angled corners of shining new kitchens and marbled bathrooms, their gardens and stairwells still somewhere there in the elevator shafts.
Left to myself – despite my profession – I would let old houses remain exactly as my memory told me they always had been. Termites would write their stories across ceilings and walls, their wavering lines mapping out eventual destruction. Once the termites had dissolved the houses, returned them to the earth, a natural cycle would be complete.
I know all about houses and homes, I who never had one.
I am Mukunda. This is my story.

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, by Peter Clarke

Martin Rubin writes perceptively HERE about Clarke's The Last Thousand Day's of the British Empire. Clarke sees the end not as a parade of leading figures (Churchill, Mountbatten, Gandhi) but in material terms, Britain being unable to feed its own people while becoming a debtor to its then-colony India. He recognizes the seeds of inevitable dissolution of the empire in the decisions Churchill took over the preceding ten years.

Clarke also shows a visceral distaste for the US and its postwar rise, and with gratuitous viciousness and obtuse moral vision writes that that, by 1947, "the British Empire was now in the hands of the liquidators. Churchill's thousand-year Reich had barely outlasted Hitler's."

Still the book sounds very interesting. I'll be curious when I read it to see if from Clarke's perspective a distasteful subtext argument arises: If Britain had reached an early accommodation with Nazi Germany, as had been urged on by certain segments of the British upper class, and abjured Churchill's Anglo-American unity, would Britain have retained its empire?