Woman of letters: No happy endings

Dear Asha Devi,
Ever since I saw your anguished face and heard your words of grief and disappointment on the third anniversary of the death of your daughter Jyoti Singh, who was brutally raped and left to die three years ago in Delhi, I have been overcome with sadness.

To think that after all you went through, the unimaginable pain and sorrow of losing a child, a daughter, who was the pride and joy of your family, to such heinous circumstances, you have been forced to say that 'crime has won' and that 'we have lost' evokes a deep sense of dejection. As is, seeing how you were detained, made to suffer and even received injuries inflicted by the State on the third anniversary of your daughter's rape, when you participated in a peaceful memorial in her name.

The thing is, Ashaji, most of us like to believe in a notion of justice, like to imagine that for all suffering there is closure, that for every cloud there is a silver lining and that there is a light at the end of every tunnel. Perhaps we do so because the thought of a world of endless suffering and pain is overwhelmingly devastating to imagine. Therefore, we construct our myths and fables, our religious texts and legends to have happy endings. We console ourselves with sayings like 'the night is always darkest before the dawn' and repeat fairy tales in which the princess gets rescued and the evil king is banished.

After all, we tell each other, and ourselves, if we do not hold on to the belief of retribution, justice and good triumphing over evil, what point is there to life at all?

But seeing your tear-filled face and hearing your anguish three years after your daughter's death has once again proven what I've always suspected. That for some people, it never stops raining, the storm clouds never disappear and there are no happy endings.

And the truth is Ashaji – most of those people happen to be women.

Yes, women. Brave and courageous girls like your daughter, who encounter the face of brutality and hatred against women on the streets of their city every day; other women who see it wink at them in offices and boardrooms, disguised in corporate garb; still others who experience it growing up in homes where misogyny and chauvinism are as ingrained into them as the chuna on their walls and yet others who run up against it in the laws of the land, glass ceilings and visible or invisible lines and borders drawn around them which they cannot step out of.

Most women live lives of such unfathomable misery and unspoken wretchedness that were it to be unearthed, it would destabilise the planet.

So, along with subscribing to happy endings and stories where the princess is always rescued and the evil stepmother banished, we also teach our women to hide their tears, put a brave face on their sorrows and soldier on.
However, your face this week, anguished and defeated, three years after the death of your daughter and the fact that nothing much has changed regarding the safety of women across the land, the fact that the juvenile who is said to have been the most brutal to your daughter has walked free with a sewing machine and a grant of ten thousand rupees (no doubt to sew blouses for other unsuspecting women), the fact that rapes continue occurring every day as do other crimes against women has finally brought home the awful truth.

Women suffer, at the hands of men and often even more at the hands of other women who've been conditioned to buy into this conspiracy of subjugation.

They suffer because they do not speak up, do not stand up, do not demand change and most of all, believe in those stories of happy endings, justice for all and knights in white armour that the world has deliberately concocted to keep them quiet and complacent.

For half of the world's population, there are no happy endings.

What a terrible thought to begin a new year with. But then, you've been facing every new day over the last three years with this thought. Please accept my own small flame of anguish in the bonfire of your grief and know that you stand for millions of others. Half the world's populace, in fact.

In respect and solitude,
Yours sincerely etc,
malavikasmumbai@gmail.com, @msangghvi

(The columnist believes in the art of letter writing)