Paradise Lost.

When Nirbhaya happened, I remember the word that went around every room was ‘bestiality’. A savagely cruel or depraved behaviour, especially of the sexual kind. It also means sexual intercourse between a person and an animal. In this case, it was not one, but several animals against one person. It is likely to resurface again, in the accounts of the eight-year-old girl’s brutalisation and murder. But bestiality may not be enough or appropriate a word to describe the crime. 

We often make light our of intimate lives. We often compare some of the more sexually driven males to animals. We say, ‘he was a beast in bed’. But even in fairy tales, the beast was often more compassionate than the humans that chose to demonise him. 

Of late, several women authors have been trying to map the mind of the average Indian male, trying to understand what prompts him to consider rape. In a report, pre- teen boys and older men in Haryana, cutting across communities and social contexts, say most women and girls ‘ask’ for it. In the way they smile, they dress, they walk. 

Was the eight-year-old child ‘asking’ for it? 

I fail to understand how men, who have fathered children, or even as young as 15 years of age, can look at the tortured, defenceless, frail body of a child and get aroused? Paedophiles? Psychopaths? What is fuelling this depravity? How are we then any different from the ISIS that has used young children as sex slaves to score political, cultural and ideological points? 

Perhaps Asifa’s tragedy is not about politics. Neither is it about religion. It is just about a complete destruction of our collective moral compass. The men who committed the heinous crime is one of us. Just as Asifa is one of us. We are in anguish over what happened. Some of us are obstructing the course of justice — no matter how much of a sham it is. Those who are silent on the issue as are complicit as those who are condoning it. Those who are ‘trending’ Sara Ali Khan’s brush with the tabloids on the day the details of the chargesheet were made public, are no different either.  

There are many women and men I know, who have been unable to look beyond the eyes of young Asifa. In a different time, those eyes would have gazed on the lush meadows of paradise, the mighty mountains and the blue skies, and spotted patterns in the clouds. She would have dreamed of a life full of love, laughter, happiness. Of horses grazing and flowers blooming.

I keep going back to those eyes, and I say to myself: 

Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast

Asifa. Our little ‘firdaus’ is lost to us forever.

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