Suzette Jordan was not a name. Or a face, Or a person. For most part of the last years of her life, she was just a news headline. A controversial rape story. A cautionary tale about what a single woman must never do on a night out with her girl friends. She should not go to a bar. Never trust a man enough to befriend him or to take a lift from him. And if that trust is betrayed, and she is brutally raped and thrown off a car, she should never go to the police station or create a fuss.
Especially because, it was all her fault anyway. She asked for it and got it. And then become infamous as the ‘Park Street Rape Victim/Survivor’ whose undergarments were paraded in the court and who was cross-questioned by the lawyers, doctors, cops and the media with the same insensitivity and disrespect that her rapists had subjected her to. Suzette became a story because she was hard to figure as a woman.
What kind of a woman leaves her young daughters to go to a pub and then takes lift from a stranger? What kind of a woman has no fear of men? No fear of life despite a bad marriage, untold financial hardships, and two daughters to raise in a hostile world?
Suzette was supposed to be a wall-flower, a woman with the joy of life leached out of her, without any desire to wear a bright lipstick, dress up and meet friends over a drink or two. Women should not do that. Single mothers ofcourse, must not even want to do such unthinkable things. And if they really cross these lines of propriety, they must be willing to pay the price.
They must be willing to be raped, to be damned by politicians, denied job opportunities, receive threatening calls, blank calls, be thrown out of restaurants, tarred and have their lives wrung out in full public view.
Suzette survived all of this and had the courage to smile in the camera with her wild untamed curls framing a face that held no mark of pain. In one picture I cannot get out of my head, she is laughing at something and cradling her cat tenderly. We also saw her on TV and she always came across as a whole woman. Someone whose spirit remained inviolable despite what was done to her body.
Someone who radiated strength and most surprisingly, joy. That was the keynote of her life. Joy. She kept that alive against all odds. And she refused to be treated as a victim. As someone who needed support and empathy. She claimed her face, her name back from the Park Street victimhood.
She faced the world defiantly and decided to be a source of strength to others who had not been able to rise from their pain like her. But then maybe, like her confidante and another rape survivor Harish Iyer said in his eulogy, maybe she should not have fought so hard to be so strong.
Maybe she should have allowed herself to break down once in a while, to concede that she had been hurt grievously not just by her violators but by a culture that refused to recognise her as a valid human-being who was bigger than what had happened to her.
Maybe, all the suppressed, unresolved pain caught up with her or maybe her death was just as random as her rape.
What her death has left behind are questions that her life could not resolve.
Just what exactly is wrong with us that we brand a rape victim for life and like her rapists, treat her as a dehumanised object?
When will women like Suzette Jordan have the freedom to be themselves in a milieu that wants to confine them, judge then, deride them for being spirited, for claiming their share of personhood, for having a drink?
When will we hold herself accountable to what happened to Suzette? And what kept on happening till a part of her gave up?
On her Facebook page, Suzette continues to post inspirational, witty messages in absentia, mocking our grief and empathy that came too late. She does not need it now. This outpouring of love and guilt. It is wasted on her but her girls are still here. And hopefully, India will treat these daughters better.
with
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