Ningreichon Tungshang
Hell rejoiced as with every wrong committed, the number of the beasts increased. Heaven cried. It wept along with many. The night was dark and cursed. Nothing could be dispelled. A nightmare began. The cursed night of agony. The dogs howled. The moon barked. The sun would never rise. The tears never came out. The screams and cries echoed. Like the bell of the death. It still rings. In the minds of many. It will continue to ring. For the times that speaks of absolute desolation. For the times they felt were forsaken. For the times they felt utter nakedness. It will ring for generations to come when the stories are narrated time and again. Because history of pain and shame are hard to forget. The bitterness hard to let go. Forgiveness becomes a stranger. The story has not ended…
I am told again. The story of the never ending nightmare. I listened again to that story. Of pain and pain and pain. It set me restless again trying to imagine what the characters of this story would be going through. My imagination will never ever capture the pain of that night and the many nights that followed. The pain of the 21 girls and women who were raped by those men whom they fed and were living licking their hard earned salt. Men who do not know the meaning of humanity. They forgot they too came from women. The raped are their own wives, sisters and mother. Not lesser a woman. Not lesser a human being. By sheer physical strength and power of the loaded gun they were dragged and defiled knowing not that the power of a gun is false power and will slowly kill the one who has the hand on the trigger instead.
These women have not seen much beyond their village. Their life revolves between the hearth and the hoe. They barely knew each other but an event in life turns them sisters. I have not met any of them. I do not wish to. I will have no solace for them. I will need strength to meet them. I have seen some faces. Faces that reflected the dark side of the world. Each carries a story that they do not wish to remember. The hearts that have stopped to feel. The eyes that have failed to see anything beautiful for it was their beauty that ‘might have’ betrayed them.
They were taken as the weak and the meek but they emerge stronger. The fact that they could tell the world about the injustice meted to them is the voice those men thought have suppressed and silenced by flaunting the ‘barrel of the loaded gun’ to these women and to their battered men and weeping children. That is real strength. Little did they realize that they will teach the world many a thing. They teach us the meaning of struggle and existence, the value of a human life, of being a woman.
The story rolls....
I am told how everybody in the village knew what happened to some of the women. But nobody talked. The women in the village gathered in the church for their usual fellowship. One woman opened the ‘Pandora box’. She prayed for the raped victims. It triggered off. The others no longer could hold back the burden each one was carrying and slowly shared their story too. Some were the victims. Some mothers of the victims. It sure was something everybody wished was a bad dream and not a reality.
After the incident the villagers were so lost and scattered. They did not know what to do. Some fled. Some stayed. The trauma left them so wounded I am told that even the creak of a door and the floor, the sound of footsteps would send shivers down their spine.
I listened about the family who huddled around the hearth. The hearth that provided no warmth that night even as the fire and the embers crackled. The father of the family shook and shivered as he shared what was done to the daughter. He saw no point and the need for seeking “justice” because for him there was no hope and ‘everything was over’. The mother I was told reasoned out. She hoped some solace in sharing, unlike the father who must have been so devastated. The daughter listened to the ugly story being repeated as she sits in an upper room and drifts away to numbness. When they went to speak to her she did not look up. Was there any strength left in her to face people and the world? The wounds were too fresh.
Some found comfort in prayers and holding, if not reading (what could have been read in such a state of mind) the Bible. Many must have asked “Lord why have you forsaken us”. God sure had His ears and hands full!
As the story rolls I try to imagine the utter helplessness of their battered men as they watch their daughters, wives, sisters being dragged to the ‘altar’ of rape. They must have wished for the last wish. They must have wished that mother earth swallow them instead. Pride Pride Pride. They had no pride left after that night. Some of them must have wished for the rain and thunder to fall. They must have remembered mother “Eve”.
They story tellers continues narrating. Each comes with their experiences. Sharing must be healing.
They tell me about a man in the village who was so sloshed the next night and went around shouting and screaming ‘there are no girls (meaning virgins) left in the village as the families in the quiet of the night were struggling to nurse their wounds with the last bit of strength and dignity left of a human being. His insensitivity enraged me but then I realize it was the absolute misery that made him utter nonsense. He fired shots in the air. I was told. He must have wished that the shots hit the perpetrators of his misery and the collective pain.
I can only feel the agony from a distance as a silent listener as they narrate the tale of the never ending nightmare. Some of them have often said they want to “rape their sisters so they know how it feels” This is not a sensible statement from educated people. Yet, it does not mean they will go and rape. It is just the last line as an option to express the anger and the hurt deep within.
A year and three months have passed by. These women are still struggling to cope with the trauma of the never ending nightmare….
To make their lives more miserable the ones who came to defend them have stripped them off the little solace. The defenders now perpetuate greater injustice against them as they have stalled legal procedures that was a ray of hope. They were the first one to hear their story. They cried with them but the tears dried too fast. Wasted tears! They shared and poured everything with the hope that they will help them take away some of the pain but they added instead. The defenders of rights could not differentiate between right and wrong because conscience left them or they never had one. They doubted the numbers of women who were raped. It is so irrelevant. It is insane. These women will never claim rape. Rape is not fame. It is stigma. It is fear. It is pain. It is trauma. It is a never ending nightmare. The defenders of rights should have chosen to remain silent instead. The crime would have been lesser.
Now the case rest in the court of the public minds and conscience. Will the public not let the case fade but fight? Will the people not let these women die a slow painful death? Will people take them as their own mothers and sisters and help them to seek Justice. There is no right amount of Justice in rape because one cannot undo what has been done but there is a need to compensate the victims in terms of moral, psychological, community and other kinds of support. Help them to build their lives again.
