The Rape of The Mind

I was distraught at the increasing incidents of rape in India and the attitude of the politicians and the police to dismiss them as either too few for a nation of our size and population or due to the overall degradation of morality in our society. Then I remembered an incident some years ago that concerns my friend Venu and which gives him no peace even today.

He was then posted as a junior manager in a bank in Chennai and was living in the lower middle class locality of Triplicane with wife and infant daughter. His home was a two- room portion in the ground floor of a two storeyed building in Bells Road and there were some four or five other families living in similar accommodation on the ground floor. One of the families was that of the middle aged Krishnaswamy working in a private company with his wife and four children. His eldest child was Saroja aged 15 studying in the 9h standard. There were 3 other families on the ground floor with some five or six children studying in various standards from KG to the 6th standard. These children, mostly girls, played games like pandi, etc. in the evenings while Saroja the oldest in the group being a spectator. The first floor was a single unit of 3 rooms, hall and kitchen occupied by one Devarajan working in LIC.

One day in May that year when schools had closed for summer vacation after announcing the results, Venu had returned from work early and found gaiety and celebrations in his building. A little girl came and told him that she has passed and she was followed by other children gleefully saying that they have all passed. He thought that he should give them some sweet on their promotion and shouted to the shopkeeper across the building to send some chocolates. He asked the kids to come one by one to receive the chocolate. He kissed each child as he gave the sweet and did not consider it improper as they were kids. All this while, he had not noticed Saroja standing some distance away watching the proceedings. When he saw her, he asked her about her result and she said with all modesty that she has stood first in her class and got promoted to the 10th standard. She was about to leave when Venu asked her to take a chocolate like the other kids. She hesitated in the beginning but ultimately came forward. Venu gave her the chocolate and involuntarily turned to kiss her as he did with other children. Saroja was aghast at this and mumbled something like what would others say if they came to know that a grown up girl like her had been kissed by an adult male. As she started to leave, Venu grabbed her and planted a kiss on her cheek. She gave him the angry look of an injured and defenceless girl subjected to an act of shame and with tears in her eyes ran to her home.

That night, Venu could not get sleep easily. As he closed his eyes the child-like and innocent face of Saroja kept on tormenting him. He was at a loss to justify to his conscience his kissing a teen-aged girl and felt morally weakened. He told his wife about the incident in the evening expecting her to assuage his guilt feeling and condone his act of kissing a girl as young as his daughter without any sinister intent.. He tried to convince her that he had not acted with any amorous intention towards Saroja. But his wife refused to buy this and chided him for behaving stupidly with an innocent girl. He sincerely prayed that Saroja would not tell anyone in her family or others and that things would be forgotten soon. He did not see Saroja thereafter for many days and even felt glad to have not seen her. The intensity of his guilt feeling lessened over time Mercifully, he received his transfer orders within a month and left Chennai for Hyderabad.

Two years later, he was in Chennai on official work for a week and was pondering whether he should go to his old Bells Road home to meet the Krisnaswamys. In fact, the urge was to see if Saroja would show any rancour when she sees him. But he did not have the courage to meet her. He rang up Devarajan the tenant upstairs and expressed a desire to meet him. They met at a hotel and after initial exchange of pleasantries, Venu asked him about the other tenants in Bells Road. Devarajan informed that while other tenants continued there, Krishnaswamy’s family has moved away without any forwarding address. Venu pressed for details for this odd behaviour on the part of Krishnaswamy. Devarajan with some hesitation said that for a month or so after Venu’s departure for Hyderabad, things were going normally when suddenly Saroja seemed to lose interest in everything. She fared poorly in studies and failed her 10th standard exam. She lost weight considerably and became pale. She ate less and less and very often seen to go into a kind of a trance, sitting alone in a corner. Her responses to others were muted. In the beginning, Krishnaswamy, like any middle class father, used the “samadhana, beda, dhanda “approach and when all these failed got her treated medically by doctors of all systems including sorcery. But nothing was helping Saroja and she became more and more moody and confined herself within the four walls of the house sulking everyone.

As it happens in small communities, the rumour mills started grinding. Tale after tale about the promiscuous character of Saroja did the rounds making the Krisnaswamys exasperated. Then a psychiatrist was consulted. It was then the truth came to be known. To the psychiatrist, Saroja recounted the incident of kissing and told him about how she felt shocked and totally defenceless on being kissed by an adult... She had been brought up under strict discipline by her parents and when an adult kissed her she felt she has been subjected to an immoral act and lost her honour. She shuddered to think about the ramification of this incident for her family if became known to the public. She started to believe that she had been wronged by Venu deliberately. She despised all men and their mean ways of lust and overpowering behaviour with women. She underwent days and months of severe mental torture. She soon lost interest in everything and even thought of ending her life but fearing the adverse effect on her family name gave up that idea. But while she narrated all her feelings, she stoutly refused to divulge the name of the person who kissed her saying that he was an honourable man with a family and some status in the society. The psychiatrist concluded that Saroja was in a schizophrenic seizure and suggested taking Saroja out to new surroundings amongst new people to give her time to recover. The Krishnaswamys therefore decided to move away from Chennai to an undeclared destination.

Venu was now even more hurt than before. He narrated to me the whole story and rued how the tragic outcome of his well-meaning gesture of a kiss of a young hapless girl torments him every now and then. I could not see any justification of his act since as a middle class person brought up in a puritanical family environment where even talking alone to a girl after her puberty is frowned upon, except to muse how even a small act of indiscretion can ruin the life of a young girl brought up in strict middle class discipline.