Shadow twin

On rage, binaries, power and an eclipse.

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My parents nearly named me Chhaya, the Hindi word for shade; welcome in Delhi’s scorching summers. It always felt as though she’d already existed in their minds. Respite from the heat, a cooler version of me.

Shadow twin.

My father was a journalist; he would play a game with me where he flipped through the pages of a magazine or a newspaper and asked me to name the men whose pictures we saw: ministers and their political affiliations, who belonged to which party, who was a cabinet member, who led the opposition? He had trained me for these quizzes for as long as I could remember, since the time my mother became pregnant with me. He would come home from work and regale her belly with tales from the newsfloor: political intrigue, breaking news, editorial clashes, tomorrow’s headlines.

And yet, my first lessons in politics were not from Parliament.

My first lessons were in male rage.

I grew up terrified of men’s anger. I’ve written before, when grieving my father’s death, about who he became when he drank, which was most nights we spent together. He was a slender man fleshed out by rage, smashing everything, including my mother, onto hard surfaces and into unyielding walls. Obliterating the world around him until he fell into a stupor of sleep. Morning would transform him, once more, into a loving angel filled with guilt and forgiveness.

I saw glimpses of this rage in others I loved. A boy who should never have been working lived in my home for a while to look after me after my parents divorced. I was a child of five, he was 16. He touched me and masturbated over my sleeping body every afternoon until my grandparents caught him in the act. That day, I saw him, this boy, my playmate and caretaker, my first abuser, beaten by my uncles and my grandfather before he was sent home. No part of me felt vindicated, and every part of me was ashamed and terrified, suddenly acutely aware that I had caused a rupture, realising these men I loved carried within them an anger no different from my father’s. They just hid it better. Something in me knew that once breached, this descent into madness, this monstrous violence could return and be aimed at me too, if I ever crossed the line.

Rage didn’t stop at home. As I grew up, I encountered it everywhere in Delhi. Auto rickshaw drivers who wanted to be paid more, would explode at me, my mother and cousins, call us whores, threaten us with rape and beatings. Men in buses grew enraged if they were called out for exposing themselves, for touching women and children. Strangers, acquaintances, boyfriends who stalked my older cousins, then me and my friends, following us on our way to classes or work, throwing eggs at our homes over sexual rejections. Harassment and anger appeared in strange, new insidious forms like a phone that never stopped ringing, receivers that had to be kept off the hook for weeks on end, a voice whispering abuse if you answered the line.

What does growing up in a violent society do to us?

Where my father’s anger was volcanic - an eruption of beatings and abuse, my mother’s anger, sadness, heartbreak, fear, turned inwards. She would go silent, fall sick, slam the door shut to her room, sometimes disappear for weeks to live with her parents. I can tell you with certainty what it did to me - it turned me into an obedient and terrified woman. I grew adept in predicting emotional weather. I learned that angering men could mean you were beaten, raped, evicted from your home, exposed to yet more dangers. I learned to read the room, to keep smiling when I wanted to cry. I learned to soothe angry men, whatever the cost.

I split myself. I mistook these partitions for my personality. In my public life, I became a journalist like my father, but poured anger into my work and my politics: into writing about the government, the systems that failed women, minorities, the climate, the culture that told us to stay small.

In my personal relationships, I stayed small. Pleasing, light and non-threatening, still soothing men, still smiling when I wanted to cry and scream, still putting my feelings last, turning them inwards, to be dealt with, examined and cried away when I was alone.

The split worked, until it didn’t.

I’d spent years believing politics lived in newspapers, manifestos, elections, Parliament and protests. Suddenly at 27, I discovered what women have always known: politics lives in the body.

Things I’d studied and reported on - class, gender, sexuality, kinship - all of these political ideologies were in the room with me the night I was raped, but I didn’t know that at the time. I knew only the truth of my body, frozen with fear, sexually assaulted by a man nearly twice my age, a man responsible for my livelihood, a man who my father knew and trusted, whose family I was close to. I was still trying to make sure he wouldn’t get angry with me. I didn’t know yet that I was allowed to feel angry too.

Starting that night, my body became the site of several political struggles at once.

More splits followed. Good victim vs bad. My past became a way to deny, and worse, justify my assault: My relationships, my financial precarity, my loneliness, my clumsiness as a 20-something woman figuring her way as a young adult in a new city with new friends. Even my professionalism became a cudgel in the hands of male rage.

The trial that followed lasted 13 years and continues to upend my life from time to time. During my cross-questioning, a saga that filled up over 1000 pages, I was shown photographs and text messages from my 20-something self’s phone, asked to justify why she was the way she was, why she wore what she did, why she said and wrote the things she did, why she didn’t cry when she was raped, why she froze, why she continued to work and then why she vanished from work, what her politics were, what her motivation was in accusing this supposed ‘liberal’ ‘hero’ of rape.

In the teeth of the legal process, I realised that politics are always of the body, not just when we fight for reproductive rights or against sexual violence. Power is enacted on and through flesh and blood, muscle and sinew. It is the truth that underwrites everything, from the hierarchy of where bodies are positioned in a courtroom, to the way bodies are written about in jurisprudence.

It exists in who gets to be described as a great mind, and who is reduced to a sum of violated body parts. Power decides whose bodies are afforded the dignity of care, privacy, safety and which ones are scrutinised, surveilled, and treated as disposable. It is why the bodies of millions of struggling students are described as cockroaches, why the bodies of sewage workers who descend into drains that suffocate them to death are forgotten everyday. Bodies are deemed pure and polluted in the name of caste, and these bodies are then mutilated in the name of protecting social order, forced into straitjackets of belonging and otherness: male, female, trans, disabled.

Power ranks bodies, and it is served by binaries. Hindus and Muslims, men and women. Good and bad victims, heroes and liars, liberal and conservative actors. All of these are disguises slapped onto the naked truth: power pits bodies against one another. Power manufactures binaries because our complexity, our full humanity is difficult to govern.

For thirteen years, I’ve been described and reduced to binaries too.
Victim. Liar. Journalist. Activist. Liberal. Promiscuous. Survivor. Reliable. Strong. Broken. Political plant. Bubblegum feminist.