After I Was Raped: The Untold Lives of Five Rape Survivors by Urmi Bhattacheryya

Author:Urmi Bhattacheryya
Format: epub

5

Pia

I

I CAN REMEMBER VIVIDLY WHEN I FIRST HEARD OF PIA. In the middle of making a documentary on Nidhi – approximately two years since her rape – to accentuate her journey, I was asked by the editors at my workplace if I wanted to explore the story of ‘that little baby ... have you seen ... very similar to this one.’ I knew of the baby they were referring to; I’d followed the bulletins on her case almost daily since it had happened: her rape and the arrest of her twenty-eight-year-old cousin, the alleged perpetrator.

That baby was rapidly becoming the nation’s darling and the epitome – the very embodiment of the collective conscience of a nation that had failed – over and over again – to thwart rape. Pia’s story had emerged out of her nondescript northwest Delhi shanty and had evoked outrage across the length and breadth of the country. She had found herself making headlines here and abroad, and suddenly, miraculously, becoming the subject of Supreme Court debates and governmental interventions.

But in terms of her story, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I would like to tell Pia’s story the way I learned it, piecing it together through my many meetings with her family. It was long after the stories had been written and filed, then filed away, far from the peregrinations of the news cycle, that a friendship began to bloom between the family and me, which exists to this day.

So it happened that somewhere right after Nidhi’s documentary had been shot, edited and digitally released, Pia’s story found me. I had wanted to know more. I was driven by the urge to investigate, in fact, if there was any prospect of our media outlet to do for the eight-month-old rape survivor, what it had done for Nidhi – raising money through a crowdfunding campaign.

The rape had occurred on the morning of a Sunday, on 28 January 2018. At the point that I set out to see her, about ten days after the incident, the baby had already – from what I accrued from news reports – been brought back home to recuperate. Therefore, sometime in the first week of February, I made my way to Netaji Subhash Place Police Station in northwest Delhi, and met with the IO and additional sub-inspector, Parvati. We’d spoken on the phone and I wanted to meet her to find out about the latest developments; I had been given to understand that she was in charge of the investigation on the baby’s rape.

Parvati informed me that Suraj, the accused in the case, had been arrested and was currently in police custody. He had confessed to committing the crime under the influence of alcohol. A chargesheet hadn’t been filed yet, although she expected to get to it within the next few days – the chargesheet wouldn’t be filed for another few weeks after our conversation. The fact that the case had excited public frenzy and caused several talking heads, at once, to bay for the accused’s blood, had understandably helped hurry the police proceedings.

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