Hark! What lurks in the dark?
Approach with caution.
As I approach the end of a month spent unboxing buried feelings, I am at a loss for words. I have taken 6 flights this month, and spent countless hours in transit. I’ve been home, been alone, been surrounded by loving strangers, been deep inside a bubble where time ceased to exist with my closest friends. At different points, I felt like I was 16, 22 and 100 years old.
There was a time some years ago, before the pandemic, when I traveled only for work or when I was summoned to court. As a result, my brain associated travel with urgency, and because of court, with unpleasant feelings. Trauma has a way of cleaving your life into two, and invariably, even an imperfect before seems rosy compared to what came after.
This month, soaking in the slow, molten summer of Delhi, Kerala, Goa and Pune, reclaiming parts of myself I’d left behind, I kept repeating to myself like a talisman — my favourite shape is a full circle.
Despite trying to limit my screen time on holiday, I did spiral briefly when I read the news about Harvey Weinstein’s conviction being overturned this week. I covered Weinstein’s trial for BuzzFeed News in 2020, and the testimonies of the Molineux witnesses (women who were not part of the charges against Weinstein in New York, but were brought in by the prosecution to establish his pattern of abuse) were both harrowing and textbook accounts of abuse of power.
While I understand the principle that every person deserves a fair trial, and that the courts have ruled that Weinstein did not get one — the fact that his rape conviction has been overturned because too many women testified that they were assaulted by Weinstein is yet another sign that the legal system is broken.
A year after Weinstein’s conviction, a court in Goa let the person that sexually assaulted me walk free. In a 528 page judgment, the judge (a woman) declared that I was too fit (apparently yoga teachers are born with self-defence skills), too promiscuous, too drunk, too unreliable and too conniving to have been assaulted. When I left India, I put my feelings about all of it — the endless trial, the absurd, hilarious, painful, horrifying judgment, the many betrayals — into a box and threw it into the sea.
This month, I’ve been confronting the feelings one by one, and they’re smaller and less overwhelming than I remembered, or maybe it’s me who won’t let myself be engulfed by them anymore.
The courts won’t give us closure, governments can’t guarantee peace, the police will turn on protestors and while Palestine burns, not one of us is free. But the one thing they cannot take away is hope, and I will no longer hide mine away in a box marked “fragile”.
