Some months ago I ran a workshop in writing narrative non-fiction at a university in Delhi. For the first assignment I asked the students to write a non-fiction piece about themselves. It was not easy: how do you represent yourself? How much of your story do you explain? How much do you imagine can be taken for granted? How do you acquire the distance that is needed to ‘see’ yourself?
I watched the students struggle with this — and with other issues not so easy to articulate. And then, finally, one-by-one the stories began to emerge. They were what you would expect young people’s autobiographical stories to be: about alienation, about not being understood by parents, about dealing with difference and so on.
But then came a story that shook me. Late one night, it dropped into my inbox with the innocent apology for being late. I began to read it. A deeply wrenched-out-of-the gut story about wanting to have a brother, it described an innocent childhood scene: a large family, happy, living together in one place and one morning everyone goes out of the house, barring the young woman (the protagonist of the story) and an older (male) cousin.
The protagonist goes to her room to study and is lying on her bed reading, listening simultaneously to music as young people do, when the cousin comes in and sits beside her, and slowly begins to touch her, sliding his hand up and down her leg, and as the child tries to cope with her bewilderment, not understanding what is happening, the violent act of sexual assault and rape, accompanied by threats of don’t-you-dare-tell-anyone, is complete. Over the years it is repeated.
The way our workshop was structured, we read everything together in class, I was in a dilemma, how could I read this story out? More, how could we together analyse it for content and form, its stylistic devices, its use of language? How does a conversation take place between teacher and student, between a student and her counterparts, on a subject such as this?
Students, however, are more resilient than us. I realised as I was trying to articulate my initial hesitation that the small group of students I was working with were quite close to each other and had already shared their writings with each other. Empathetic and supportive, they made it possible for me, the teacher, to talk to them about this terrible testimony as a piece of writing.
Two days later another story arrived in my inbox. This time in Hindi and by one of the male students. Its title was innocent enough — something to do with tickling. But as I read it another terrible tale of sexual assault unfolded: once again violence inside the family, the other actor a brother, or an almost brother, the playfulness of holding and tickling a small child, the ‘play’ turning into something more sinister, the use of threats to ensure silence. The difference this time around was that the assault had taken place between two men — or more accurately two boys, one a mere child, the other an adult.
As part of the exercise of learning how to write, the students were asked to expand the short pieces they had written into full stories. I was quite worried about what this would do to the two young people whose stories were already so painful to recount.
But, days later, when they came back somewhat fleshed out, a different picture began to emerge — sometimes of family complicity, sometimes of families taking small steps to deal with the problem that they could see but that they found difficult to address, and sometimes of encountering your assaulter, years later and being able to stand up to him .
What surprised me though was that two such stories had emerged in a class of eleven people — that is, if one is to use percentages, a high of nearly 20 per cent. I know that we talk all the time of very high statistics on violence that takes place inside families or by known, familiar persons. But somehow statistics come to acquire a different meaning when you relate them to real life.
I was discussing this with my students, and saying how surprised I was at this, when one of them turned around and said to me, “Ma’am, don’t forget that these are the two people in your class who have spoken about this. There are many more of us who have had similar experiences and haven’t spoken.” She was not saying it to put down the ones who had spoken, but rather to alert me to exactly how widespread the issue was.
If this is what I learnt in the space of a few encounters, imagine what the scale of this problem actually is. Imagine what we are doing to our children, to our young adults. Imagine what this will turn them into, what this will turn our society into.
Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan; blink@thehindu.co.in