India's Other Daughter.

           We haven't moved in a while. India Gate is still on my right and the bold declaration of love to someone named Ritu that I had closed my eyes to is still looking at me from the rear-screen of the car in front of us.

"What's happening here?" I ask the auto-rickshaw driver, as if his eyes have access to more than mine.

"Protest, madam," he says turning to look at me, "I think it will take some time to clear up."

I rummage through my bag for loose change to pay him. It's only a few kilometres to my office and I can walk. Immediately, he objects, telling me that my destination is too far to reach on foot. I am not surprised, no one walks in Delhi. My friend Nisha says it's because the weather is always terrible here — too hot, too cold, too dusty, too dirty — but I think there’s just no space to walk. The struggle for space, is at the heart of this city. History lives with you here and it takes up your space. It's not like having Leonardo Da Vinci for a neighbour, it's like having the fourth son of his fifth cousin as a neighbour; one who always parks his car in your spot and steals your newspaper but cannot be asked to move because his ancestors bought him the right to invoke their accomplishments. The monuments of Delhi were the original askers of the question: Do you know who my father is? The right to behave a certain way here is bought with ownership, but it's never your own possession that you tout, because no one owns Delhi. Not your father. Not my father. Not the Lodhis. Not the Tuglaqs. Not the Mughals. Not even our democratically-elected government. Delhi owns itself, and in it we're all the mistreated renters who love our apartments so much we don't mind putting up with the current landlord and his policies.

I scurry through the traffic and onto the pavement. When I first moved here I was in such awe of this part of town, you can just walk past the parliament and run in front of the President's residence, the proximity to power makes you believe that you have it too. Democracy emanates out of the guttural fountains and Outside Broadcasting vans always parked in the street. This is where you come to have your voice heard. On the guarded streets in front of this circular structure where laws are made lies the pedestal of the common man. I walk past the yellow barricades and uniformed officers, into the sea of protestors, it's the fastest way to get to the other side. I push myself through the crowd, inhaling the scent of hundreds of armpits intermingling. As I get to the other side, I  bump into a young woman. She's wearing a big red bindi and glasses. Her face is small, or maybe it appears small because the shirt she is wearing is too big for her. She's holding up a sign and speaking to a group of people.

"Justice for India's daughters," reads the sign.

I apologise quickly, and as I find my footing, I can hear her behind me.

"India must learn to treat its women better," she says, "Justice for this victim makes every victim feel a little more visible."

The things people are willing to believe always astound me. I wonder which daughter we are fighting for today. I don't watch the news, but in Delhi you don't really need to watch the news to know what is happening. As I gain distance from the protest, the heat of the day begins to get to me, sweat accumulates on my forehead and I wipe it off on my sleeve. I don't believe I had ever truly sweat until I came here. The place I come from is very cold and dry, it’s located on the precipice of Kashmir, just close enough to qualify but far enough to accidentally exclude. Everyone walks there, but there is nowhere to go. I never thought I would leave that place, most people born there never do. My father has lived there ever since he was born. My father is an odd and laconic man. He's a professor at the local college but I've never seen him read a book or prepare for a lecture, instead he recites poetry in his classes. Sometimes on my way back from school I would run into him smoking a cigarette by the stream. When I was younger I would stop and talk to him but he always ushered me away, urging me to get home quickly.

Home was a tremendously dull place for me. My mother taught at the local school and tutored in the evenings so I was often alone inside the turquoise tenement where nothing ever happened. I was a disengaged child; I had no interest in my education, in pretty dresses or in making friends at school. The girls in my class talked about the jobs they would have, the men they would marry and the newest-trends in fashion they had found out about from magazine issues that were two-years old, but none of that interested me. I liked it best when people came over to our house, none of our neighbours ever did, but sometimes my father's friends came. The one I looked forward to seeing the most was Zagar Uncle. Zagar Uncle's family owned the jewellery shop in the big market, but he was a policeman. His family didn't like that, it terms of social hierarchy he had taken a step down. He always brought me a bag of tomatoes, not to cook with, but to eat raw. I love tomatoes, I still bite into at least one like an apple everyday, but my mother used to get annoyed at me for pilfering her stores so I was always thrilled when Zagar Uncle brought me a bag of my own. Along with tomatoes he always brought juicy stories.

Zagar Uncle appeared to know everything that happened, not just in town, but in the whole world. His favourite subject was the youngest son of our closest neighbours: Arif Jeelani. Arif was the cautionary tale of our neighbourhood. He attended the university in Srinagar, which was a few hours away. The first time Arif came up was when Zagar Uncle caught him smoking hashish with some local hoodlums by the stream. He said he didn't inform his parents as a kindness, but he told everyone else in the neighbourhood anyway. Over the years he came up again and again: Arif pelted stones at local leaders, Arif had gotten a girl pregnant, Arif hangs out with people of outside his kashlat, Arif joined Talib-o-Tanzeem, Arif got arrested. The stories about Arif were endless and there was no way of knowing which ones were true. I had known him when he was still in school but he was older than me and we never really spent any time together. Besides we were never invited to his home nor did his parents ever speak with us. Sometimes I would see him around the neighbourhood but I never spoke to him, I watched him to see if signs of scandal were visible on his face but to me he looked like just another young man. His beard was a little more unkempt than it should have been and his jeans were always a little frayed at the bottom, but other than that Arif seemed like anyone else.

By the time I was fifteen I had found my very own corner of the stream to smoke cigarettes, it was far away from my father's spot, and much nicer too. There was a large, flat rock right on the bank and a rare thicket of trees surrounded the rock. I would sit there with my feet dangling into the water and read cheap romance novels. It was always the same story: a young girl is forced to marry a less than reputable man, she hates him, then he does something touching, and they fall in rather graphic, sexual love that lasts forever. One afternoon, I was sitting on my rock, smoking my stolen cigarette, reading my borrowed book when Arif came around. He came up from behind and said hello. I was so startled that instead of dropping my cigarette into the water and hiding my book, I tossed the book into the water too. We both heard it splash, and for a moment as it flowed along the current of the stream; we silently looked at the half-clad woman in pink splayed across the cover.

"You never quite grew taller," Arif said, finally shifting his gaze from my book to me, "Still just as short as you were in school."

I laughed, but I didn't know what to say, I didn't know if I was allowed to talk to him. I started to pack my things and prepared to leave.

"Don't go, Zatasha," he said as he watched me pack up my cigarettes and matches, "I won't tell anyone about that. I didn't mean to scare you or get in your way, I just needed to get out of my house."

"What are you doing here, anyway?" I asked, feeling a little more relaxed, "Aren't you living in Srinagar and getting arrested at protests?"

He laughed but I think that time he didn't know what to say. We all have our secrets. From the outside Arif's resistance to talking about his political activities may not make sense, when I first met Nisha and told her I was from Kashmir, she immediately invited me to a protest she was planning to attend the following day, as if she were inviting me to attend a birthday party. She believed everyone in Kashmir went to protests all the time but for most of us it was completely forbidden. Our parents would rather we smoke cigarettes and read erotica than join a protest. Those who took that path often gained the reputation of being troublemakers and they slowly dropped off the scene until someday you just heard about them dying or being convicted in passing.

"You've been gossiping with people about me?" He asked helping me off the rock.

I felt embarrassed, I didn't want him to think I sat around talking about him. As he took my hand, I felt something in my extremities; a shooting pain coursed through my fingers and toes. My mouth became very dry. I tried to avoid his gaze but it felt like he could see the pain emanating from my spine, sending shock waves all over my body. We walked together for a while, talking about things that don't matter to anyone. He asked about school, I asked about his family.

"Do you think it's wrong to protest things?" He asked as we neared the bend towards my house.

"I don't know," I told him, "I don't know anything about anything. I know my house is there, I know tomorrow I will go to school, I know the winter will be cold, I don't know anything else."

It was true then, and perhaps it is still true today. People like Arif always knew things that made me feel small and insignificant. People like Nisha are always asking me questions as if everyone from my land is a person like Arif. I'm not that person, I don't know anything. I never did. I saw things around me. Sometimes there were curfews but to me that information only dictated when I could or could not leave the house. Sometimes there were attacks and deaths but I never even understood why or where. I didn't understand what Arif wanted or what he was hoping to get by protesting, I just knew I wanted to see him again.

When I got home I noticed Zagar Uncle and my father standing outside and smoking.

"Where were you?" Zagar Uncle asked me.

His question didn't strike me as odd. People always seemed so concerned with my whereabouts, you'd think they were recording an accurate timeline of my life to represent in court someday.

"Just, walking around in the forest," I said, moving past them and towards the door.

"Why do you let her roam around like this?" I heard him ask my father as I entered the house, "She's growing older now, you should tell her to come straight home from school."

My father, ever the mouse, didn't disagree with him but quickly changed the subject to the detention of our local leader. By then I didn't like it anymore when Zagar Uncle came around. I don't know exactly when it happened but he stopped treating me like a child, and started looking at me with eyes that seemed like they were taking ownership of me. I must have been a little over thirteen when he came home one morning to discover no one else was there. My school, along with all the other educational institutions, was observing the Black Days and my parents were attending a commemoration to that end. My parents complained about attending that event each year, they always said that lighting candles wouldn't bring back those students who were shot by the police. Arif told me years later that he didn't even think the students were acting in the interest of Kashmir, they were only there to deepen the divide between Jammu and Kashmir. I didn't understand any of this, I just know that because of the Black Days Zagar Uncle came to visit in the morning, I thought he would have known my parents would have been out but he seemed genuinely surprised to find they were out. He brought his customary bag of tomatoes, the last bag that he would ever bring for me, and asked me to make him a cup of tea. As I prepared the tea he came inside the kitchen, standing behind me, he leaned over and whispered into my ear.

"Only half a spoon of sugar today," he said.

I tried to step forward into the flame but I would not have passed the test of purity, the flames would have engulfed me like any other mortal. I felt his body against my back, and his breath over my head. I felt panic in my jaw, it like the skin on my face had stretched itself so taut a mere graze would rip it to shreds. I snuck out below his arm and told him I would bring the tea outside, pretending that nothing had happened and hoping the pretence was enough to erase reality. I would have protested but someone had forgotten to teach me how to do that. He went left the kitchen and I breathed a sigh of relief. In a few minutes, I followed with the tea.

"It's so nice outside," I said putting the tray on the plastic mat covering the table, "Why don't we have our tea outside?"

I started walking towards the door, only to notice it was bolted shut. The curtains had been drawn and the sliver of sunlight that crept through the crevices seemed too far away to be attainable.

"Today, we stay inside," he said, walking over to me.

For all the things people say about rape, no one talks about how little time it takes. I may have struggled but for some reason I was a lot more afraid of getting caught than he seemed to be. He made no apologies, nor a case for himself. He simply put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me into his chest. I felt him strain against my belly as his hands fumbled with the strings holding up my salwar.

"Your mother will ask questions if I rip the salwar," he said, and I wonder, every day, if my life would have turned out differently if I hadn't undone that knot for him with my own hands.

After he left I sat on the toilet. With my fingers I wiped off the blood oozing out of me and watched it dry in my hand. It was different from the menstrual blood I was slowly growing accustomed to; it was more red, like it was coming from a wound inside me that I could not locate. I felt like I looked different, I wondered if everyone would be able to see it but when my parents came home the first thing they noticed was the tray on the table.

"Why did you make two cups of tea?" My mother asked, removing the dupatta from her head.

"I thought you would be home sooner," I lied with ease, "It's cold now."

A few days later I told my mother what had happened. If she was angered or surprised, she hid it very well. If she ever told my father, he's still doing a very good job hiding it. She did rattle off a list of precautions that I ought to take, and one of them was to avoid being alone at home. In the aftermath of the incident, I found I could bargain a certain measure of freedom from my mother. I started staying out of the house and while they always asked me where I was, they never stopped me. I spent most days after school wandering the forest. For a while Zagar Uncle didn't come around anymore, and whenever he did after that, my mother stood between us like a bulwark, often ushering me into the kitchen when he sat with my father in the drawing room. She'd give me a tomato, and I would sit on the kitchen slab taking bites as I peeled garlic.

I spent a lot of time with my mother in those years, we didn't talk much, but I often found myself craving her presence. That stopped after the day I spoke to Arif for the first time. Soon after that day, Arif and I started spending a lot of time together. We would meet at my rock by the stream, and talk for hours. He wouldn't let me smoke around him saying that young girls shouldn't do that, so I had to find a new place for that. Arif's world was so different from mine, his stories often to him rather benign, to me sounded like the most glamorous tales. He came and went as he pleased. He met people of all kinds in the city. He went out to eat and took trips with his friends. He had big beliefs about the world, when he spoke it felt like he understood everyone and everything. He took names I had never heard of before and spoke about Marx and Kant as if they were his roommates. Sometimes I helped make posters for their protests. With a 12-pack of coloured pens and crayons, I would make beautiful the messages they wanted to convey.

"Kashmir for Kashmiris," in black.
"Kashmir is Bleeding," in red.
"Journalism is not a crime," in purple.

Often, to me, it felt like they were playing a childish game, I couldn't understand how a poster was going to resolve a decades-long rift. It seemed like they were all playing at ideology, until someone got arrested, and became revolutionary. Whenever I asked questions, Arif told me I wouldn't understand, and I shouldn't worry about these things. Instead he taught me about women's rights. He told me I had been oppressed for thousands of years. I didn't have to cook food unless I found joy in doing that. I didn't have to cover my head in the street. I could say no if someone touched me without my permission. I liked cooking just fine. I didn't think about covering my head, I just did it, I wasn't sure what point I would be making by not doing it. As for saying no, he was a few years too late on the lesson.

For a long time, I didn't tell Arif about what had happened with Zagar Uncle. I've always loathed moments of revelation, they give too much power to the information being shared, but Arif and I had grown very close. There was no way what we had wasn't going to lead to sex, and I was scared that if he saw my body he would know. If he noticed the criss-cross of scars on my thighs that I had left there in an attempt to find silence inside my head, he would ask. If he felt my insides, he would know someone had been there before. I finally told him a few days before I turned seventeen. We were alone at the tiny little room one of his friends rented. I had perfumed my wrists with rosewater and shaved my legs with my father's razor. I had practised telling him and maybe even developed a fantasy about how it would go. I imagined he would treat me like a cracked piece of crystal, and try to put me back together through tenderness. I spent hours thinking about his warm skin on top of me, his tender kisses on my wrists and the gentle words of love and reassurance he would whisper into my ear.

That's not what happened. Arif got angry the moment I told him. It seems so naïve now, but for a second I thought he was enraged at Zagar Uncle.

"How could you let this happen?" He screamed.

I didn't understand the question since it seemed like all I did was exist.

"I didn't do anything," I told him, tears welling in my eyes, "I wasn't..."

"Did you say no?" He asked me, standing before me.

His eyes were bloodshot, I had never before seen eyes that red. They looked like they were bleeding.

"Arif, I was thirtee..." I started to say when he gripped my shoulders with his hands and shook me.

"So, no? You didn't say no did you, slut?" He screamed into my face, "I've seen how you are with men, with me, I see how you send signals. You wanted it, didn't you?"

I felt my jaw stretch out in panic again.

"Please, I'm sorry," I said, and every day I wonder if my life would have turned out differently if I hadn't apologised for being raped.

He walked away from me and turned his back on me. I stood there crying for a very long moment. When he turned back around he seemed less angry.

"I forgive you," he said walking towards me and gripping my waist, "But I own this body, I will destroy you if anyone but me ever looks at it again."

There was no tenderness in what came after that. In fact, there was no tenderness between us ever again. I never felt him on top of me, instead I felt his weight stabbing me from behind and his hands gripping my throat. I would have screamed or bled but Arif killed what was already wounded inside me that afternoon. The dead don't bleed. I would have protested to his method of making love, but I was scared he would hit me if I did. I was terrified that I would like that as much as I liked hearing him tell me that he owned my body, in my head all of it read like one of those romance novels I had devoured. From that day Arif was different, he was cruel to me. He fought with me about everything. He got angry when my head was uncovered. He wanted to have sex with me frequently but it made him so mad if I ever appeared to enjoy or initiate it. When he told me he loved me, it always felt like he was warning me about something and I could never figure out what that was. He spoke often about marriage, and when I told him that wasn't a possibility until I finished college, he chastised me for wanting an education. We fought for hours until he agreed to let me attend college as long as it was in Srinagar where he was working on his PhD. I lied to him and applied to college in Delhi instead, because by that point I had realised that I had to get away. I loved Arif deeply but his love was killing me. Delhi seemed so big and unreal, I couldn't imagine him being able to follow me there  

The day I told him about wanting to move to Delhi, I expected an explosion,  but he didn't say anything, he told me he had to go home, but a sense of dread grew inside my stomach. I walked home slowly, through the woods, like I used to when the biggest problem in my life was keeping my romance novels hidden. When I got home, the door was closed. I rang the doorbell and my mother opened the door, behind her Arif and my father sat on the sofa.

"She has to get married to me," Arif was saying to my father, "Think about it, who else will marry her?"

I ran inside and said the word no repeatedly. I said it until I was hoarse. I didn't know how to put into words all the pain and betrayal I felt so I said the one word over and over as if it changed meaning each time I said it. Arif ignored me, my mother consoled me and my father refused to meet my eye.

"Arif she is too young," my father said to him, as even-toned as ever, "Maybe in five years, if she wants to..."

"Not even in five years," my mother said to him, "Your family would never accept her Arif, we're not from the same caste."

Hearing my mother apologise for our position in society to him made me feel safer for a minute, I had forgotten to consider that I could be unwanted in more ways than just the taint on my character.

"She has to marry me!”  Arif said banging his fist on our plastic table

"No," I screamed from the floor with a helplessness I hope never to feel again, "I don't want to be here anymore."

"If you don't marry me you will have to leave," Arif said addressing me for the first time, "I will destroy you in this town, everyone will know every single thing I did to you..."

"Arif, you should leave now," my mother said looking at my father with uncharacteristic rage.

She walked to the door and opened it. Arif walked out in a huff but I knew him, and I knew what was coming, and sure enough within a few days he replaced his placards of protest with proverbial aural posters designed to shame me. There was no ornamentation to them whatsoever, only crass words spoken in my blood behind closed doors  

"Zatasha is a slut," in red.
"Zatasha had sex with many men," in red.
"Zatasha got pregnant and had an abortion," in red.

No one knew which one of those stories were true, but they believed all of them. I had no choice but to leave. Scandal is the eternal toy of small minds. A few days after that Zagar Uncle came to speak to my father. No one in my house was speaking to me, and my mother had taken to standing guard at the door to keep me from leaving. I was in the kitchen when Zagar Uncle came over and I never went out, I listened to their conversation over the sound of the whistle of the cooker on the stove.

"The things they are saying about her," he said to me father, "It will be better for her if she leaves for some time. Didn't she want to go study in Delhi?"

"How can I send my daughter away?" My father asked, weakly.

"Arre, just say she went for higher education," he said as if my life was just another administrative decision that didn't affect any real people, "Look, she made a mistake, we can understand that but the world..."

I made a mistake. Those words broke me. That night I told my family it would be better if I went to college in Delhi and no one disagreed. My father came with me to drop me off, he gave me money and promised to send me enough to live each month. That was ten years ago. I haven't been back home since, they haven't come to visit. Over the years there were fewer and fewer calls from my father. My mother tells me about Arif sometimes, he is still protesting for the rights of people. He would have scoffed at this protest, calling these people the children of privilege and power. They would him lauded him as a hero if he descended amongst them. After all, he's from Kashmir, that's where you go to get your social doctorate in activism.

I look at my watch and realise I am already extremely late to work. I turn around and walk back towards the protest. I don't know what I am expecting to see. I stand behind the barricade and watch a male reporter with a mic tell a young woman in a saree to stand facing the camera. She adjusts her hair and makes a joke to the man beside her. Their laughter makes me want to cry, if there's anything I've learnt about Delhi it's that the laughter of this city is designed to drown out the cries of its people.  

"This is for the last bit of the segment," the reporter explains to the protestor, "Look into the camera and say: Justice for India's Daughters."

She nods her head and he rolls the shot.

"Justice for India's daughters," she screams with a fervour that would almost make you believe.

I don't know how to tell her. I am India's daughter. There will be no justice today.