Who must I write this for? For you, friend? For your loved ones? For those who met you once or not at all? For the future? For the present? For myself? For the dead women whose stories yours must now join? I want to tell a story of laughter, because in every frame of every memory of you, there is laughter. Life-loving, life-grabbing laughter. But how to tell a funny story about a dead woman?
You remember when you called me six years ago? We were new friends. “Can you come?” you said. “I need you to come. I need to get away.” This is when you lived in Madras, three streets parallel from my parent’s house. I was in Kodaikanal, and the only way to get to you immediately was to take an overnight bus. I booked a berth, which turned out to be a double bed. I had to share it with another woman, a lawyer, who was equally embarrassed about the forced intimacy of our situation. For 10 hours, the bus cut through the night, swerving madly, juddering over speed-breakers. As I lay head-to-toe with a stranger, trying not to roll into her territory, I squeezed my eyes shut and thought, I may never survive this. The next morning, I came over to your place and said, “The things I do for you, Monika! I could have been killed.” We laughed about it. We laughed all the way to Sri Lanka.
Now that the story of your death has passed like a supernova from the front pages of newspapers into a kind of oblivion, all I can think of is this: The things I have not done for you, Monika. The ways I’ve failed you. The ways we have collectively failed you. They say that writing about violence gives violence another cycle of life.
In the days after they found you, I was asked to make comments, write obituaries, but I could not speak. The only talk I could manage was with friends on the telephone. In the beginning, when we didn’t know what had been done to you, but knew only that it was terrible, we needed to hear each other’s voices.
People who didn’t know you were also talking about what happened, making guesses and pronouncements. Each telling brought more violence, but we couldn’t stop telling it. Everything came in waves: horror, sadness, numbness, disbelief, horror again. A strange thing began to happen. You stopped being who you were. Your smile was the same — unwavering, but you were always wearing sunglasses, and in the photographs, there was a fragility about you, as though you had always planned to drift away.
I cannot sleep at night without waking once, twice, to a sound. Something’s coming to get you. I bump into women who knew you — at the airport, at dance conferences. We admit it to each other. We cannot sleep at night.
There are two things that consume us: the loss, and what happened. The loss is trickier. It makes our legs buckle in the middle of the day, manifests in sudden tears when we’re boiling milk. Some friends hack at their gardens, others write poems. Still others carry jasmine to your cremation. I cannot understand dead. I cannot understand disappeared forever. If there had been an illness, an incident in a dark alley, a car accident, there might have been a way to hold this in our hands, because grief is always resilient. But a woman attacked in her own home? What category of grief does that fall into?
The loss is like the dull whirr of a machine that eats through the days. The what happened begins to take over. We friends have all become sleuths. We scavenge for information. What we know is this: that you had been obsessed with your safety. That you moved from a house to an apartment with security guards to feel safe. That you took Kalaripayattu lessons to empower yourself. That you would not honk at boorish men blocking the street because you did not want to endanger yourself. That two days before you were killed, you were examining the tiny window above the door in your apartment to see if a person could get through.
You were a woman who was only just beginning to learn to live alone. You wanted to be fearless but you had fears. You were trying to overcome them. You took every precaution. We told you that you could do it. We said, go ahead, you’ve got this.
There’s a story being told about women and violence in this country, and I’m trying to understand how your death fits into that. This story is old and it still believes that women can be witches or temptresses, that those who presume to move beyond prescribed Lakshman Rekhas must be punished, that there are always those kinds of women who might have survived, if only.
This story is the biggest failure of all, because it means that the measure of your life, and the grace with which you lived it, will not necessarily be commensurate with the nature of your death. It means you can die horribly and you must die again and again in the retelling. That aspersions will be cast on you because of your body, your privilege or lack of it, your marital status or lack of it, your ambitions, opinions, desires.
There’s a new story that’s trying to be written in this country by women who believe in the simple, heroic journey of living alone. What must we tell them? That we’re going to accept the dangers? Stomp over the lines? Feast on the beautiful guts of our lives?
(This is one of several women-authored pieces published this weekend in tribute to Monika Ghurde.)
