By The Pricking Of My Thumbs, Something Evil This Way Comes

“Rape's not something where you just go, "Well, get over it" or "Believe in love and peace, my child, and it'll all be over." Well, fuck you, that isn't the answer. It's a great thought, OK, but you can go and stick crystals up your butt and get on with it. I'm all for love and peace, but that's not the side I work on. If somebody would talk about it, or worse, joke about it, I would be ready to kill. That's not healing. It was a very long time after that before I was able to be with anyone again. And it has never been the same as it was before”
Tori Amos
Famous words by American pianist and singer-songwriter Tori Amos. The reason I chose to start this post with this quote was another blog I stumbled upon the other day. I love blogging and in the process end up coming across a wide range of blogs, some are nameless poets, some are mystic storytellers, some are passionate activists against the war, while some are regular people like me who are a comfortable mish mish of a little bit of this and that. But this girl was different. I found this particular blog and what I read disturbed me. She was unusual, wrote with a certain aggression, an unexplainable force, something pent up inside, simmering on the surface but difficult to pin point what exactly it was. I read on and saw signs of a dysfunctional family but curiosity had got the better of me until I finally reached a particular post where she had described her nightmares. She’d written about a dream of that heinous act of rape, which had taken place when she was only 13 years old, and how it all keeps coming back to her in her dreams. The nightmares don’t seem to end and how she just wished that the girl next door who looks ever so happy would just stop smiling because she cannot stand to see someone else so gleeful and without a care in the world cos she can never be like that. Tragic, isn’t it?
The author of this blog was a smart young woman with an amazing job. This girl oscillated between from being brilliant to being the angry feminist to being downright eccentric. I liked the way she wrote, one moment she was a human rights activist advocating the cause of Muslim women and how the purdah and hijab should be abolished and next moment she’d be making downright fun of people who smoke ultra milds cos she thought they were gay cigarettes. However throughout her writing there is always an underlying sense of pervading doom. Why wouldn’t it be there? Some man did the unthinkable to her when she was only a child and he killed her soul, buried her very existence , her sense of wonder, her happiness and gave birth to another being.
Rape is an unspeakable horror and for most of us it is something we read about in newspapers, or see in movies or news channels. I know that in today’s world it is very much a reality. Statistics prove that every half an hour some woman is raped in our country. The irony being that now we can’t constrict the term rape only to women. Men are being raped; small boys are also victims of this heinous crime. I can only imagine how tragic it would be, how violated one would feel. It would leave terrible psychological scars that are sometimes almost impossible to obliterate.

This girl lives in the same city as me.

She is in the same profession as I am.

I might have passed by her sometimes.

She has this garb of ordinary on for the world.

But no one knows about the tormented existence she leads.

The voices which grow louder and louder, the monster who doesn’t go away and the horrible memories which haunt her.

Would I have grown up to be such a cynical and dark individual if I was raped as a child?

Would I have let that rape define my whole life, dictate my thoughts forever?

I don’t know, don’t know at all.

But what I do know is that “You know that saying, bad things don’t happen to good people?. That’s a lie.”

It can happen to anybody , we have been lucky , damn lucky and to those who have gone through this,and come out of it hats off to you women. You don’t need my pity or for that matter anybody’s pity but darn you have some strength of character. For all those women who lost their lives cos they became the victim of some filthy bastard’s twisted thinking may your soul rest in peace.

As for the rapists, sexual abusers and every category akin to them , well they should be bloody castrated, then blinded and have their hands and limbs cut off. I wish the Indian Penal Code had death penalty for rapists but in our country life imprisonment itself amounts to 14 years in prison. 14 years is too less for this evil to die. We should have multiple sentences like the kind they have in the United States where the convicted murderers and rapists are given life terms comprising of 100 to 150 years in prison. They make sure that the beast rots in prison and dies there. Hope even hell doesn’t give shelter to such hideous criminals.

“I don’t want to know about the constitution of the rapist—I want to kill him! I don’t care if he is white or black, if he is middle-class or poor, if his mother hung him from the clothesline by his balls: I only want to kill him! Any woman who has been raped will agree.”