Rape
“Listen, don’t cry…I agree what happened is horrible, but don’t let it get to you so deep that it disturbs you to this extent”, said a friend over phone, concern clouding his voice. But I could not. I still can’t. Ever since I understood rape, I’ve never been able to ‘take it easy’. I’ve taken it rather hard, sledgehammer hard. I remember when I was very young, some age in school, when I comprehended the meaning of rape. The first emotion was that of intense anger. Of mad outrage that sent me into fits of savage tears. Of blinding humiliation. ‘I’d much rather be killed than raped’, I would think. Overwhelmed with a shudder of shame, the utter loss of face. Gang rapes terrified me. The very idea of a girl set against a group…was so so unsettling that rape news jangled my nerves for weeks and months. That a man, or worse still, a group of men, should gratify themselves by such use of force on an unwilling girl – the extreme inhumanity of this act, the total disregard of a woman’s p