A cautionary tale

VASANTHA SURYA

Aruna's Story: The true account of a rape and its aftermath by Pinki Virani; Viking Penguin India, 1998; price Rs. 295.

CHATAK chandni: a little moon, whose rays could give you an electric shock. A quarter century ago, senior nurse Durga Mehta thought that the Gujarati-tinged Bombay Hindi phrase fitted staff nurse Aruna Shanbaug. Aruna's room-mate, Usha, had this opinion: "Aruna said anything jhatkarke, her tongue really tore into you at times. But she was good-hearted..." Ambitious and sprightly, Aruna, a 25-year-old woman with a fulfilling profession, was about to get married when she was assaulted and raped by a subordinate. The man was motivated by intense resentment at being pulled up for his misdemeanours and being ordered about by her.

"Because she could not testify, he got away with a light sentence, and she lives unhappily ever after." These must be the last words said about practically every case of rape. Like murder, this crime has the effect of silencing the victim one way or another. A rape victim will not - or cannot - speak out for fear of reprisal or of being shunned. In addition, there is the humiliation, and the sensation of profound defilement, both unspeakable.

Speechlessness following a rape can go deeper. Aruna Shanbaug's continuing silence is not the outcome of fear or shame: she cannot speak at all. That "muscle in her mouth" with which she flayed a subordinate for not doing his job no longer receives any signals from her brain. They have been knocked out. When Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki choked her with a dog chain before raping and robbing her, oxygen supply to parts of her brain was cut off, and she became bereft not only of the power of speech but of the power to express herself in any other way. She also became cortically blind, lost the use of her limbs and the control of her muscles, and suffered a kind of emotional disability, which is manifested in inappropriate laughter and bouts of screaming. Her memory and most of her other mental faculties were also gone. Now 50 years old, she exists in a kind of semi-conscious limbo. Solicitously looked after by successive batches of the nursing community and the doctors and the administration of Mumbai's KEM Hospital where she worked as an exemplary staff nurse a quarter century ago, she is permanently bed-ridden, curled up in an awkward foetal position.

PINKI VIRANI'S book begins awkwardly, too: "His eyes glittering in the dark, the man waits. He touches the dog chain, it is there. Waiting to be used. Its metal links feel cold to the fingers, but cruelly comforting."

Do human eyes glitter in the dark? Somewhat dismayed, I expected the "rapist-as-animal" image to be followed by soft porn. What followed was a carefully controlled, step-by-step description of a horrific ravishment. It not only casts perceptive light on the motive but sensitively refrains from injuring the victim any more by this retelling. Pinki Virani stops short of describing the act. Throughout the otherwise graphically detailed book, she holds herself back whenever there is a danger of crossing the line into the voyeuristic exploitation of a real-life character. This delicacy extends to all the characters in the book, except Sohanlal.

Throughout the book, Sohanlal's eyes are always "glittering", from which it is apparent that the author detests him almost as much as Aruna did herself. In the book, Aruna, who is of a fastidious and righteous temperament, tells her friend: "That other horrible sweeper Sohanlal ... steals the dogs' mutton, like a vulture... I am just waiting for some proof. The next time... I will report him immediately." Aruna had been assigned to the dog surgery research laboratory, where Sohanlal was a "tempoorwari" cleaner. In the book he is rough with the animals, drags them along with their chains. When she upbraids him (with "ice in her voice"), he says: "Sister, you worry so much about dog hunger and dogs getting strangled. What difference does it make... when doctors kill them here?"

That is when the "muscle in her mouth" (what a phrase!) utters some immensely loaded words. She warns him to "keep to his limits" or he will be "sacked on the spot". She has already been warned by her cousin Ramdas of the possible consequences. He asks her to consider the fact that he is poor and "therefore hungry all the time." Searching for confirmation of her hunches about the nature of the run-in between the two, Pinki Virani presents the actual statements of Sohanlal's fellow cleaners, who reported to the police that Sohanlal had said that he would "take revenge by molesting her" and that he would "spend one month's salary to sleep with her." Such confirmations vindicate many of the writer's flights of imagination. They also provoke thought about the deep-seated resentments that sometimes erupt into crime, when they cannot express themselves otherwise.

THE Aruna Shanbaug case of November 1973 touched off India's first nurses' strike demanding protection and proper treatment for her, and better working conditions in Bombay's municipal hospitals. Judging from this account, Aruna has become a kind of mascot for KEM's nurses, a symbol of their struggle. Nurses occupy a median place in the hospital hierarchy, making up a sort of intermediate, upwardly mobile group. To her colleagues, Aruna represented the ultimate in success. In the prime of her life, with excellent prospects of working her way to the top in her chosen field, she had been about to marry a doctor. But all that changed on that horrendous night.

Sohanlal was caught and convicted, and he served a seven-year concurrent sentence for assault and robbery. Not for rape or sexual molestation, nor for the "unnatural sexual offence" (which could have got him a ten-year sentence by itself). The "shame" syndrome took over. The crime was not reported to the police by the KEM doctors, out of a desire to spare Aruna and her fiance the pain of such a public disclosure. The writer reports the rumour that he is a ward boy in a hospital. We are not told what he may have to say.

In her introduction, Pinki Virani speaks of how the public responded with thousands of letters to her original article in The Sunday Times and of how it was plagiarised by many other papers and in other languages, including Arabic; however, she neglects to mention the date of its publication.

Aruna's condition and circumstances have not changed for years. So why was the book written now? The writer says that half the royalties from the book will go towards Aruna's continued care and treatment and, after her death, to a nursing school. Looking at the question from another perspective, there exists today a felt demand for such a book. It brings together several ideas and issues that are coming to the boil in Indian society. They range from rape and the safety of working women to class and caste conflict between "subalterns" and the "oppressed", from medical research and hospital management to the care of the incurably ill and euthanasia.

The book belongs to an amphibian genre: the non-fiction novel. When Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood in the 1960s, about a notorious multiple murder in the American mid-West, he fleshed out the bare facts with imagined conversations, descriptions and the thought processes of his characters to produce an electrifyingly convincing "non-fiction novel". Since then non-fiction works have been surfacing by the shoals. The writers are equally at ease with the techniques of fiction writing and the increasingly competent methods of investigative journalism. They cater to the contemporary yen for the nitty-gritty as well as to the ancient yearning for story and legend.

Because they deal with well-known factual events that are not far removed in space and time, non-fiction novels appear to enjoy a wider readership than any other kind of serious writing. People remember the event and their own reactions at the time. They identify themselves with the characters and are stimulated by the issues. Not surprisingly, the themes of choice are celebrity and crime - particularly violent crime, which sometimes seems to cry out to be set down as literature. It has always seemed particularly unacceptable to the popular imagination that the bald medico-legal facts are "all there is" to any sex-related crime.

A good non-fiction novel is far from escapist fare, unlike the pseudo-biographies of, say, O.J. Simpson and Princess Diana: it is guaranteed to make one's tongue hang out. The autobiographical novel Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, an Irish-American writer who recalls his childhood amidst the miseries of Limerick (Scribner, $24), won last year's Pulitzer for non-fiction. Aruna's Story is easy to read, peppered with lively, if sometimes over-wrought, Indian English and bold snatches of Bombay Hindi, Marathi and Kannada. There are too many of them to pass muster with an audience that is hardly likely to know all four languages. Disliking the idea of a glossary, Pinki Virani gives little language lessons in the form of asides. Some of them are delightful, but most are distracting. They make one wonder if she is trying to fill up the pages - after all, she says in the introduction that she was given an assignment of 75,000 words by the publishers.

It cannot, however, be denied that the words are packed with information - anything that the writer thinks will give a fuller dimension to the story of one woman's existence. As she takes the reader on a tour of the hospital where Aruna lies, and in between telling you what is happening in Aruna's brain, you also learn how a municipal hospital managed to get started under the Raj, and how it was run in independent India. There is the story of Dr. Rajesh Parikh who is summoned from the United States to take up a position as India's first neuro-psychiatrist. A notorious "pipe-smoking" politician-cum- dada puts in a word for the daughter of his secretary, and Parikh is put out of the picture. You watch a bed being efficiently made by an efficient nurse in this hospital where the poor are treated them free of cost. The patient, who "has never had a bed, or crisp clean linen ... clutches the (pillow's) softness against her bony chest... with what sounded like a small whoop of happiness." When the head-nurse asks her if she has any special complaint, she says in a "woebegone" voice: "Kal humko discharge karne wala!" ("Tomorrow I'll be discharged!")

INTO this loosely structured bunch of varied anecdotes, the writer deftly inserts Aruna's squeaky-clean romance with Dr. Sundeep Sardesai and the saga of his care of her for four years after the rape. I do not find it hard to believe. The behavior of Aruna's family, too, is understandable. Her bonds with them were brittle... The tour around Aruna's bed expands into a meandering saunter around Mumbai by the end of the book, and takes off into the grey uncertainties of the euthanasia debate.

The book's strong point is the imaginative reconstruction of a woman's personality and character, and of the inexorably logical sequence of events that began to unravel when staff nurse Aruna Shanbaug pulled up "sweeper" Sohanlal Bhartha. She was not above bending the rules a little: she used her authority and ordered Sohanlal to fetch her laundry, although she knew he did not like it; and she flouted the matron's orders and used the dog laboratory in the usually deserted basement to change into and out of her uniform because it was conveniently close, unlike the regular nurses' room. Mindful of the personal dangers faced by any young working woman who wants to make her mark, Pinky Virani has written a cautionary tale, reconstructed with logical extensions and extrapolations and resuscitated with intuition and imagination.

Aruna's Story is not a smart or clever book. It is not subtle, or nuanced, or scintillating. Yet, shining through its problems of style and execution, and making it for the most part a worthwhile achievement, is the quality of mind that the writer has brought to bear upon her subject. The word that stayed with me until the end is devotion. Pinki Virani seems to wish that she could breathe a kind of life back into that part of Aruna's brain which died in November 1973.

Capturing colour

TIMERI N. MURARI

Tamil Nadu photographs and text by Raghubir Singh; D.A.P/ Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 1996; pages 144, price not mentioned.

IN India, we live in several centuries at the same time. I am not sure who said that but it is one of the real few truths that can be said about us, without being contradicted.

Raghubir Singh understands this only too well. He has captured the palimpsest of daily lives perfectly in his new book, Tamil Nadu. I do have a bias for photographers. I have worked with several and have an admiration for the sharpness of their eyes, the quickness of their reflexes in capturing just that right moment that encapsulates an event or person or place. My bias extends to Raghubir, as I have long admired his work and admit to the fleeting friendships one can only have with a person constantly on the move.

In his introduction, Raghubir writes about his slow growing love affair with Tamil Nadu. As a Rajput, he had grown up with the superior-than-thou mentality of the north Indian and was quite ignorant about south Indian history. He had never heard of the Cholas or the Pallavas and the extent of their achievements.

FROM THE BOOK TAMIL NADU
Worshippers and visitors, Chidambaram Temple.

He has done his homework very well and one certainly cannot accuse him of ignorance. In one of his previous books he had followed the Ganga, in this one he follows the Cauvery, for as he writes, the rivers have shaped the lives of the people. But in Tamil Nadu it is not merely the rivers but also the landscape - the ghats, the sea - that has shaped the State. In fact, he quite clearly points out that the coast of Tamil Nadu, sculptured by the sea, resembles the profile of a man. From Chennai to Mamallapuram is the forehead, tracing down from there to Auroville we have the eye, the nose is distinctly Point Calimere, the jutting tongue points to Sri Lanka and the chin end at Kanyakumari. As I had never noticed this before, I did turn to look at the map and he sure is right; only a photographer would have seen this profile in a coastline.

But it is the river that guides us through this book of stunning photographs. His opening shot frames a distant modern bridge, a temple to the left and still further a hill. It captures the India of many centuries immediately, ancient and modern, and the blue river. All great civilisations grew up along river banks, and those same people who built the Chola temples still exist by the river. It still sustains their ancient way of life - the coracle-taxi spinning its passenger across the water, the pilgrims in Tiruvaiyaru - an old man and boys, a worshipper in Bhavani.

But it is not merely the rivers or the ancient ways which Raghubir captures in his book. Like a true artist he knows it is the people who in their turn shape the land they live in. The people with their expressive faces - in worship, repairing a bicycle, threading a traditional loom, a dancer practising her steps. There is a moving photograph of Vedic scholars in Chennai. Ancient looking men in a modern setting, they appear equally at home under the banyan or standing on a shiny mosaic floor. And Raghubir also has a fine sense of humour and irony in his work. A businessman prostrating on the roof of his building, overshadowed by a dish antenna, while he prays facing the Kapaleeswarar temple. I liked that composition neatly capturing the contrasts and the conflicts in today's India, and his theme of an India living in many centuries at the same moment. It is the thread that weaves through all his work, the dancer prostrating, captured on the video monitor at a dance festival. And then there is the very modern India which could be anywhere in the world - the Ashok Leyland truck factory - and on the opposite page, boat builders working in their traditional ways with their ancient tools.

We are a naturally photogenic people - point a camera and you can get a slice of character, beauty and vibrant colours. Raghubir is a master at capturing our personalities, our longing, our dreams. And the colours which leap out at the eye, vivid reds, blues, mauves. Nowhere else in the world can we see the harmony of such colours fitting in so naturally with the people and the landscape and their activities.

There are moments of calm too in the book. One of a Carnatic music maestro in a planter's chair and the other of our best novelist, R. K. Narayan. Narayan has also written the preface to this book in which he recalls his days in Puraswalkam and his uncle taking photographs of the young boy, R.K., with a billows camera.

I am pretty sure Raghubir could take equally great shots with that old instrument as he does with his Nikons. Talent such as his spans time, even in the same way as India does.

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