When you call activist Harish Iyer, you hear instead a hilarious warning by Quick Gun Murugan to not waste too much of the gentleman’s time. Compliment Harish on all the work he is doing for rape survivors and LGBT rights and he feigns sadness and says, “But all this is not enough to get me a boyfriend, no?”
We laugh at the universality of the matters of the heart but there is no mistaking the anger and devastation Harish is feeling over the death of his friend Suzette Jordan.
His sense of humour in retrospect was what bonded him to Suzette, the woman the world knew only as the Park Street rape survivor. Harish met her at the Think Conference where she was to share her story and was really nervous. To put her at ease, Harish had said, “Kaiko darti hai baba, tu bhi rape victim main bhi rape victim.”
Recalls Harish, “We never called each other by name after that. It would always be, ‘Hello, rape victim!’’ Suzette would want to share the fresh humiliation someone had inflicted upon her and Harish would say something really “obscene” and make her laugh out aloud. Says he,“We insulted each other all the time in good humour though we never forgot that we had survived rape. Rape parks itself in a part of your brain forever.You cannot tell someone who has been raped to forget it and get over it. But you can draw courage from it.” Not in a negative, toxic way but in a positive way like Suzette did, Harish says of the woman who died on March 14 after battling the stigma of being the unapologetic survivor of the violent abuse she was subjected to in 2012 in Kolkata. “I am an atheist but Suzette believed in God. She even sought forgiveness for Mamta Banerjee who had called her rape ‘fabricated.’ She never wished death upon her rapists even. That is the kind of spirit she had,” says Harish.
Today as the media lavishes empathy upon her and mass support is being offered, he says, “When she was dying, she had no support and it is sad that in this country you have to die to prove a point. It is best that Nirbhaya died because if she had survived the rape, she would have been killed slowly but surely the way Suzette was.”
About Leslee Udwin’s documentary India’s Daughter, he says, “We seem to be shocked by the cold-blooded lack of guilt in the rapist but if Nirbhaya had lived, it is she who would have lived with the aftermath of the incident and would have been judged.”
Suzette,he says, had battled the aftershocks of her rape, far too long. He says, “No one dies of depression but a rape survivor needs constant support. I need constant support. I need validation. I need to do something constantly which gives me happiness. Suzette was put through acute humiliation through out. She had to change houses because a politician had called her a prostitute. She was thrown out of a restaurant. She could not get a job. She kept holding on and on and everyone took her courage for granted.”
Speaking of the feisty, single mother of two, he says, “Just because she was raped, people expected her to withdraw in a shell. She never stopped living, dating, going out. She never wanted to be put on a pedestal or to be treated like whore.” He shares how she often wondered why it was believed that if a woman was a sex-worker, she was supposed to accept rape as part of her lot.
Though her activism made her believe that, “it really wasn’t about the journey but the story,” a part within was perhaps giving up. Says Harish, ‘’She had a premonition that she would not cross the age of 40. That she would be shot or poisoned. No one killed her literally but society and the people of this country did slaughter her.” By not standing up for her. By branding her. “I feel ashamed to be an Indian citizen. The way we treated Suzette just endorses what India’s Daughter projected. It showed us what Javed Akhtar said in Rajya Sabha. That we think like the rapists do. We shame and blame the victim rather than offering her support.”
He adds, “We crack rape jokes but the joke is really upon India. How many rapes do we need to wake up to the truth?”
At the moment, Harish is worried about Suzette’s teenaged daughters and says, “They are at a vulnerable age and I plan to start a Trust Fund for them. Those who want to help can check Suzette’s Facebook page which I will be updating regularly.”
About the girls, he says, “They are India’s responsibility. They too are India’s daughters.”
We need to also stop categorising women in extreme terms, says he because they are individuals just like Suzette was. “We need to stand up for what is right so that slowly the mask our society wears slips off and we see women for who they are. To a lot of people, Suzette was an exotic being they didn’t get. She was not a stereotype and they could not forgive her courage,” says Harish.
Change will come, he says, when we start with mind sets at home, in schools and colleges. When we sensitise doctors and lawyers and politicians to gender crimes. When legal systems get streamlined. “Someone wrote to me saying that my tribute to Suzette should have come from a woman. I responded by saying that I don’t need to have a vagina to stand up for a woman. Just as I don’t need a tail to stand up for animals. All men are not rapists. Some of them do stand up for women. We need to now look beyond gender and race and other limiting definitions to speak up for each other,” Harish concludes.
If like him, more people had spoken for Suzette Jordan, maybe she would still have been here. To speak up for others and fight on.
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Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats