Reflecting Back

- Sudithi Bhattacharyya

T/W: mentions of sexual abuse

 

Shock was not among the emotions that she felt. Her eyes skimmed over the comments she scrolled through. A particular set of words kept getting iterated all through her mind. Disgustingly vile as they were, they were not at all surprising. She had seen it before. She was seeing it again.

It was not Nadia’s first time witnessing victim blaming.

She looked up from the screen, clicked her tongue and threw her phone away at the farthest corner of her room. To some extent she wished it broke. She couldn’t care any less.

Nadia fell on her back on the bed and stayed that way. Staring up at the ceiling she searched for answers to her ambiguous questions. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish. Like an infant oblivious to the cruelty of the world, she was momentarily baffled on the question of her existence.

She closed her eyes.

“Stop putting words in my mouth, will you? Please?”

His voice reverberated in her ears. She remembered reasoning with him, in a way that was perhaps harsher than she had intended. She could not keep her cool.

 “You’re making absolutely zero sense right now, you know that?” snapped back Nadia. “You were the one who suffered. You were disrespected. You were forced. I don’t understand why you’re blaming yourself.”

Actually, she did. She did get why he was in denial and especially why he was blaming no one but himself. But at the spur of the moment, she burst out without much prior thinking.

Nadia inhaled.

Sourya was unable to meet her eyes. He fidgeted constantly, his feet shaking uncontrollably with every growing second.

He mumbled, “Maybe I was mistaken.”

Nadia’s mouth fell open. “What did you say?”

“It’s all in my head. It couldn’t have happened like that.”

“Oh.” Nadia was taken aback, “Why you think like this, may I ask?”

“Well,” Sourya paused. Then he said, “Because I’m a… boy.”

Nadia opened her eyes. She swallowed the lump in her throat. It had been ten years since the conversation. The perpetrator got away.

Sourya had finally understood that he was in no place to be blamed. He demanded justice. Undeniably, he fought, towards the end. And the end was probably a mirage.

Maybe the laws failed him. Maybe the judiciary did. Like thousands and thousands, Sourya was unable to get the justice he sought. Instead, he got loads of mockery, insults and abhorrent criticisms.

Apparently, consent was ‘gender specific’. “How could a man possibly get raped?” “It did not happen.” “He is making things up.”

Nadia got up. Nothing had really changed. If anything, it was worse at present. The disbelief, the misconception, the victim blaming – all were there.

Over the years she had seen many other boys like Sourya. Unfortunately, they kept denying. They had vague notions regarding consent. They couldn’t grasp the gravity because they lacked awareness themselves. Their problems remained unheard.

All the events that had been taking place since the past few months came crashing down her like raging waves. The sporadic outbursts all over the state flashed in front of her. Suddenly, she was reminded of her school years. On the day when she first got her period, back in fifth grade, she found a number of boys mocking at the sight of her stained skirt. She was surprised, not at the sight of blood, but at the state of her classmates. She thought everyone was supposed to know about menstruation by that age; she guessed she was wrong.

Nearly two decades later, she hadn’t seen much change among the students. It was true that as a teacher, Nadia was trying to educate her own pupils regarding basic concepts of sexual anatomy, reproduction and most importantly, regarding consent. She made it very clear that consent is not confined to any particular sex, that a perpetrator is a perpetrator irrespective of their gender, so is the victim. Sourya’s face popped up every day at the back of her mind. Rage and sadness filled her every time.

Although, sex education was not yet incorporated formally into the curriculum, Nadia, like few other teachers at school, was doing as best as she could.

A couple of years back, a student at her institution got pregnant. Also, it was in that very year that the school authority had thought of introducing sex-ed classes for high school students. Nadia remembered how that incident sparked immense controversy and transcended the boundaries of the school. It was a hot topic all over media. The girl had to drop out. Any progress that the school had made in its decisions about sex education was withdrawn.

Nadia, along with some of her colleagues did argue how that was the very apt reason why sex education was highly necessary – how it would help the young people to gain consciousness about sex, aware them about teen pregnancies and educate them on their sexual health.

But the orthodox teachers didn’t really like those points. They were hardly concerned about that. The only thing that bothered them was the possibility that early sex education would escalate such issues. It was clearly a myth. But they were beyond any rationality. The school too was kind of half-willing on the entire matter.

Nadia clicked her tongue. Getting up from the bed, she went to the corner where her phone lied. She picked it up and found that the screen guard had cracked a bit at its edges. Brushing off a few specks of dust off the screen, she unlocked the phone. The comments were still there. She crouched down.

The next thing she did was type out a long reply to the most despicable comment she could see. It began with strong, reasonable points and ended with sentences directly attacking the commenter. She knew that one such reply on the internet won’t have an effect on people like them. Yet, it was the only thing she could think of in order to calm herself down at the moment.

She put the phone down again. Her vision started to blur. The pent up emotions were overwhelming her.

Resting her head on her knees, Nadia wept.

She didn’t remember for how long she had been weeping. The sound of a notification startled her. She looked up, then down at the lit up mobile screen. The tears were fresh. A drop fell on the screen, magnifying a name she yearned to hear from.

Sourya.

It had been a few weeks since she heard from him. Again, she picked up her phone. Sourya had sent her a DOC file. Below it, he wrote:

Had been thinking about writing this since a long time. Give it a read. See if it needs any correction.

Think of it as your student’s answer sheet. Grade it as ruthlessly as you can.

She chuckled at the last bit and opened the file. The heading caught her eye – “Sex & Consent: Why sex education has become much more crucial in this era”.