What happens after rape? This book follows the lives of five women after the world has moved on

It’s hard to make plans with Smita and ensure she sticks to them. You could tell her, “Majnu ka Tilla, 4 pm,” and still expect to be called sometime before schedule and hear whingeing to the tune of: “Actually, mother will be deeply worried if I get too late coming home, didi. Can we do X or Y or Z place, and maybe 3 o’clock instead?”

You grumble and you gripe and, most often, exchange a flurry of petulant words (that you tell yourself you’re permitted after a nearly four-year-long friendship), but you agree. And you meet at a point where she feels, well, safe(r).

Plans with Smita hinge on a fulcrum of variables – how “safe” or “dangerous” a certain cafe, metro terminal or local watering hole feels to her; whether a certain item of food served by an unsuspecting bearer will potentially trigger a memory or elicit a sob; and whether she can return home by sundown or before her parents chastise her for being “out” – whichever comes first.

I’ve asked her a number of times, to let me talk to her parents; to urge them to understand if she needs to go out; or to loosen the safety net they’ve ensconced her with, but Smita always refuses. “I’ve just got them to trust me,” she says emphatically, over and over again. “They’re letting me go, little by little. I don’t want to jeopardise this.”

I suspect that Smita doesn’t really want to let go of the safety net just yet, either. I suspect she enjoys having it engulf her in a bottomless cocoon, not having to deal with the world until she’s ready. I suspect that she continues to believe she caused her own rape – four years and no resolution later.

There are far too many things – too many objects and artefacts around the large and labyrinthine city of Delhi that feel too familiar – and therefore, claustrophobic to her. “We can’t meet at Kashmere Gate station!” she vetoes a perfectly run-of-the-mill “cold coffee and selfies” plan, one Saturday afternoon, in panic.

“We used to meet here. He lives nearby. He could be on the train at this very moment. He could be changing trains. He could be going home. Do you know his home is by the station; down that little gully where the vendors set up shop? Do you see that gully, and the Ram laddoo bhaiyya? I wonder if that bhaiyya remembers me from all those times we stopped to buy a plate...”

There is no end to the vicious loop; to the kaleidoscope of blurred images of a relationship past, that are prompted by the smallest details – inconspicuous to the naked eye, but full of meaning and misery for Smita. Once, after I had known her long enough, I mustered the courage to ask her, “Do you still love him?”

She must have guessed at the mingled sense of surprise and wonder in my voice. Either way, her response seemed rehearsed, like something you say because it’s what people would like to hear, “I remember the good times...but how can I still love him? How can I think of him fondly, after what he did to me? He discarded me like a used scrap of paper. Like I was nothing.”

The reverie is quickly retracted and corrected by a vehement, “He should be punished. Why does he get to walk the streets scot-free while I suffer in silence?”

The ambiguity is marked, but with her, it has always been. If I’ve known Smita for four whole years now four years punctuated by perfectly regular, monthly visits to nondescript Cafe Coffee Days – each one of those visits has her teetering on the edge of a precipice. One side beckons her to immerse herself in fractured memories of a relationship that ended in rape. Another, towards willing the man she once loved, to be put behind bars. I can only make conjectures about which side of the precipice she’ll let me into, on a given day.

I was sure I knew her mind, when I met her the first time. It was during an interview that had ended with both of us in tears. The cameraperson who’d accompanied me had hastily capped the lens to what had been a rather disastrous shoot which Smita had sputtered and stammered all the way through, periodically and savagely poking at the corners of her eyes to wipe a stray tear.

The shoot had then come to a crashing halt, with her collapsing into a heap of tears at the climax of her story and with me rushing to her side, muttering hapless nothings and hissing “cut it! cut it!” over her head, to my horrified colleague.

Only minutes before, she had been up on a stage, relating some of the rawest and most guttural things I’d ever heard, finishing bashfully only to bask in a sea of resounding applause. Acting on an invitation to listen to her – among other survivors – speak at New Delhi’s Constitution Club, I had listened to her in awe. Smita’s presence had struck me the minute she’d walked up to the waiting microphone. Even from a few yards away, I could tell she was nervous.

Cowering noticeably under the glare of a couple hundred eyeballs and flashbulbs, which made her appear a little hunchbacked, the petite young woman – who, I later found out, was only a year younger than I was – started to speak. Quelling every other voice, every whisper, every breath in the room, Smita spoke – haltingly at first, then tremulously – of the man who raped her. Twice.

When she finished, I couldn’t stop clapping.

I would often ask her, later, where she had found the nerve to do something like that; she, who shrank from the spotlight like a woman possessed.

She hesitated. “Maybe it was the fact that it was my first time.”

“Your first time talking about what happened?”

“Haan, ek bar bolna tha. Par maine galat socha tha. (Yes, I needed to talk about it at least once. But I miscalculated.) That first time hit me like a ton of bricks.”

The first time. I clearly remembered the first time I went up to Smita and asked if she would tell me her story in greater detail, in front of a video camera. I would frame her in a silhouette to mask her identity and distort her voice, if she’d like, I told her. She agreed – which, it would later occur to me, she did to avoid disappointing the woman who’d asked her nicely.

The thought echoed in my head several times, during the rest of her narration.

It was going to be my most defining memory of her.

Excerpted with permission from After I Was Raped: The Untold Lives of Five Rape Survivors, Urmi Bhattacheryya, Pan Macmillan.