The story of a rape

The story of a rape

This is not the story of the young girl who died today.  The circumstances of that rape were so brutal and public as to make a nation cringe.  This is one of those stories that will never make headline news.  Not because it lacks brutality.  Not because it is done in a private place where consent is in question.  Not that.  Only because it has not been labelled as such.  Not called rape out of fear of the perpetrators and the even greater suffering such a label could inflict, in a society that treats rape victims as social pariahs.  I will call this young girl Mahalakshmi because that is what she is.  A goddess to her mother.  A mother who is critically ill.  

Mahalakshmi is a teenager now.  She has a hard time staying in school and has run away from several over the last four years.  She does not like to take her anti psychosis medication because it makes her sleep.  When she does  not take it she violently assaults her ill mother only to express remorse and plead with her to live for two hundred years.  

Sadly, her mother Meena (not her real name) may not have very long.  Huffing and panting she came to see me yesterday, requesting my help to find the girl a home where she will be treated, cared for and protected from the big bad world.  She gave me a dossier on Mahalakshmi's medical history.  Behind the test reports and medication history was her detailed biography by a young psychiatrist who has recently returned from abroad.  I had a hunch and was stunned to see it borne out by the facts in this case.  

A young child with a lot of promise being raised by a poor single mother in a slum.  The apple of her mother's eye.  Precocious and bright.  Mahalakshmi attends a well known private school even though the fees are beyond her mother's means.   She returns home to a caregiver and waits for her mother to return, at 9 p.m. every night, doing her homework, reading and reciting Tamil poetry.  One day when she is 11 she does not come home at the appointed time.  After a couple of hours of waiting, the caregiver in a panic calls the mother who rushes home at 6:30.  Still no sign of Mahalakshmi.  They comb the school grounds and find the child in a hidden corner in the school.  She is a crumpled heap and shaking.  Mahalakshmi identifies the boy by his name.  He is several years her senior.   She pleads with Meena not to tell the school because he has threatened to kill Meena she did.  Notwithstanding this entreaty, Meena takes the matter to the principal, afraid to go directly to the police out of concern for the family's reputation.  No charges are laid.  There is no disciplinary action against the young man, who the school says is from a " good" family.  What was the young girl doing, wandering about in the school anyway?Meena has no money or strength to pursue the matter.  She decides to focus on her child.  Mahalakshmi does not return to that school and has run away from four schools after that.  She has never been the same.  She now has failing grades, has emotionally regressed and torments her mother.  No rape kit was ever administered to find out the extent of physical damage.  The psychological harm appears deep and irreversible.  

Mahalakshmi is the victim of a brutal assault.  However,  she is only being treated with medication for the  psychological harm she has sustained and it is clearly not working.  Now 4 years later - where does one begin?  I dread to think of the millions more out there that need help, healing and safety from repeated assaults?

I welcome your suggestions on assistance for Mahalakshmi.  

Sharing my journey with Suzanne

Suzanne Kuehne is Swiss.  She lives in a small town 45 minutes from Zurich.  She sat beside me on my flight from Frankfurt to Chennai, India.  I dozed during the first hour and woke up for the meal noticing she had been served special vegetarian fare.  I wondered if she had gotten mine by mistake.  But blonde, blue eyed Suzanne is a strict vegetarian and, I soon found out, India- bound to attend Oneness University run by her guru Kalki Swami, 3 hours from our destination and my hometown Chennai.   Over the next 7 hours Suzanne and I shared our thoughts on our  respective life journeys over the past thirty years.  Trials and triumphs, loss and learnings, relationships and realizations.   I was amazed at how our paths which had originated at such divergent places, mine in India and hers in Switzerland, were now converging at a place of no space and time.  To add to this mystique was the date and time of our travel, the 21st of Dec 2012, prophesied by some to be doomsday.  During our conversation we were literally and figuratively in a state of "kaivalya" (suspension)!  As we talked, we acknowledged the limitation of language in keeping us in that present state of suspension, given our habit of always speaking in past or future tenses;   of explaining the present in terms of our past, or the future in terms of effort - of "becoming", "trying", "changing", when we know fully well that the future does not exist except as a projection of our minds.  By wanting to become something we fall short of accepting who we are now and postpone realization of our present reality.  We spoke in shorthand and continued in an animated state of excitement from understanding each other so completely.  

Growing up Suzanne was taught to experience life through her mind and through rational thought and logic.  She was well attuned to cause and effect, opposites and action and reaction.  What she had not done was experience life with her whole being.  She had always censured "irrational" impulses, thoughts, words and action as she had been taught to do so.  She was strongly discouraged from making decisions or engaging in actions that were not born of thought and hence the concepts of grace and faith, were totally foreign to her.   I, on the other hand, had grown up listening to myth and fable, cultivated the concepts of grace and faith and these had often collided with rational explanations of phenomena.  I grew up confused, tentative and uncertain.  While I knew life was not just experienced through the mind I lacked the courage of conviction to explore how or why.    When I made my journey to the West, I grew more rational and less accepting of anything that was not explained in logical terms.   It has taken several years of undoing to get back to my roots of being spontaneous, curious, open to all possibilities.   For Suzanne and me the last few years have been of "unlearning" of "abandoning deep rooted conditioning" of just being rather than wanting to become.  We acknowledged that we were still triggered to react and retreat to safe places with predictable paths on charted roads.  Only now, we bring our awareness to every such occurrence thus peeling off one more layer of learnt behaviour.  We both engage in habitual rituals, me yoga and meditation and she spiritual retreats and intense contemplation of the self,  but this time in awareness that all this is only a means to an end. 

As we neared our destination, we wondered aloud about the spiritual evolution that was occurring all around us that we could legitimately have these conversations without shame, self consciousness or preconceived notions about each other.  The seven hours flew by.  We hugged, shared contact information and vowed to follow each  other on our respective journeys through life!

Enjoying music season

For several years now I have found myself in Chennai for the music season ("season").  In the month of December, the holiest month of Markazhi in the Hindu calendar, the city comes alive with the finest display of devotional South Indian fine arts by preeminent artists of the day.  Chennai hosts over 3000 concerts between December and January, its most temperate months.  Visitors come from around the world to listen to music, reconnect with friends and savour the food at concert venues around town.   

My mother, in laws, aunt and uncle abandon their sedentary routines to attend the annual music conference and concerts at The Music Academy (Academy) and other venues around Chennai.  I bring the group's average age down a notch but can barely keep up with their rigorous 12 hour concert routines and zeal.  They fortify their arthritic knees, pack a picnic, carry a consolidated program and flit from one concert to another, sometimes at different venues.  Academy concerts being the  most coveted, they jostle long line ups to purchase season tickets.  I arrive just on time to enjoy the last half of the season and revel in their company, while also taking a page from their book on zest for life.  

The average age of the audience at the Academy is 70, so my family is hardly unique.  Many are their contemporaries, long time concert goers and there is much swapping of stories and critiques about artists, venues and of course canteen fare.  As interesting as the music is the time spent with this amazing group of elders.   Dressed in the latest sarees with matching jewellery and wearing jasmine flowers in their hair, the women carry themselves with elegance and grace.  The men, true to  all ages of that gender, are careless and casual.

Today is Vaikunta Ekadesi, a day of fasting.  The canteen is sparse with all its older patrons observing the fast while keeping up their concert routines.  

Vaikunta Ekadesi, notwithstanding I have a full meal.   I relish the communal lunch served on a banana leaf,  with other heretic young patrons.  I do justice to the feast of vadai, payasam (almond kheer), another sweet, ghee and dhal, served with a variety of vegetables, rice dishes, rasam, sambar, chips, papad, pickles and yoghurt.  I have two servings each of the hot almond kheer and rasam mentally postponing my fast by another year.   We are on our third concert having started today at 9:15 with one byTrichur Ramachandran, this year's Sangeeta Kalanidhi (music laureate), who took us on a 50 year musical journey paying homage to his many teachers.  We have two more concerts and will conclude the day at 9 p.m.  We have settled in nicely, with the older folks wrapped in shawls and mufflers to shield themselves from the effects of the AC.  They doze from the calming effect of the music but wake up at the beginning of each song to chime in its raga.   I too stop intellectualising and fall in with the crowd.   It is peaceful and I am truly in the moment with no place to go and nothing to prove, so in tune with the company around - mellow, content and simply biding time, surfeit with amazing food and song! 

Reading lists

MCIS staff pick their favorite books !

Nino's picks

I absolutely love Mario Vargas Llosa, he is a Peruvian writer/journalist and who won the 2010 Nobel prize. My favourite book by him is “Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter”.

Milan Kundera’s “book of laughter and forgetting” is absolutely brilliant.

If you are interested in Japanese writers Haruki Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” is excellent. It is my sisters favourite book J.

I would also recommend Lasha Bughadze, who is a young Georgian writer, but I am not sure how available his books are in English.



GABRIELA'S

My list of suggestions, they are of course Latin American/Spanish novels J

1)      Julio Cortazar- “ Hopscotch”
2)      Garcia Marquez – “Love in the time of Cholera”
3)      Carmen Laforet – “Nada”
4)      Juan Rulfo – “Pedro Paramo”
5)      Jorge Luis Borges – “Ficciones” this is an anthology, I think you can find it in English
6)      Eduardo Galeano – “Open veins of Latin America”

Veronica's picks

Two Canadian novels:

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys

Also, a little bit of my own cultural background: The Appointment by Herta Muller - she is a Romanian born novelist, currently living and writing in Germany. She got the Nobel Prize for literature a couple of years ago. This novel is about pre 1989 Romania - a very sad story, but an excellent novel.

And an old favorite... I could read this over and over, it's really clever and funny: A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters by Julian Barnes

Sea of Poppies

This is my review of one of my favourites!

Sea of Poppies is Amitav Ghosh’s gripping tale of a perilous journey in the high seas, and the events leading up to it.

In the 1800s the British colonists replaced food crops in Western India with poppy fields, paying exploitive prices to the rural poor who farmed and processed them in ghastly factories.  The colonists then exported the opium to China to support the habits of addicts there.  Several Englishmen became extremely wealthy as did the British Empire, until one day the Chinese authorities woke up to the devastation inflicted on their population by this malaise and issued an ordinance for the enforcement of a strict ban on the import.  Ironically, the ripple effect of this action was penury for the rural folk of Western India who had lived off the poppy trade.  Several then choose to indenture themselves as coolies to serve the colonists’ interests in other parts of the world and set sail to islands around the world where the British needed plantation workers.   

It is against this backdrop that some desperately poor people venture out on their journey in the high seas, this time to Mauritius.  On this slave ship, the Ibis, accompanying other desperate souls like them and a crew of social misfits, are the protagonists who include a bankrupt Raja, an opium addict and an abandoned spouse.  A few perish from the heat  in their overcrowded quarters, located in the underbelly of the ship.  However, most find cause for celebration with courtship and marriage, singing songs and revelling in their newfound friendships clearly frustrating the colonists' efforts to quell their spirit.  

This is a tale of epic proportions not because of the grandeur with which it recreates another era and captures the social, economic and political mood of that time, but because of its nuanced depiction of the minutia of everyday life, be it a farmer’s, a local Raja’s or a British Memsaheb’s.  So we vicariously experience lavish dinner parties and the varied hue of accents and dialects used by the book's many colourful characters, which include the ship’s crew members, and a self proclaimed avatar of Lord Krishna.  The Indian reader will be bemused and angered by the the colonists Hinglish, mostly pejoratives, used to put in place their army of servants and subordinates.    

Even though Sea of Poppies is a sad tale of brutal oppression it is not a depressing read.  It is tragic and funny, brimming with hope under impossible conditions and replete with heroic and subversive acts by ordinary women and men.  In some ways good triumphs over evil at the end of this first book of a trilogy.  Except for the nautical language which is challenging at times, this book is eminently readeable and demonstrates Ghosh’s preeminence as a writer and researcher par excellence.  

Just imagine - my thoughts post this tragedy

Just imagine walking in the shoes of one of those parents.   So violently were their beloved children's lives snuffed out.  The details are sketchy.  The deceased mother of the deceased killer had legally purchased the three guns which he brandished as he stormed into that school wearing military fatigues, stop  He was mentally unwell stop.  His mom was rigid and isolated him from other kids stop.   His parents were divorced and his father had remarried stop.  His older brother who is a tax expert with E nd Y was initially named the killer and was handcuffed and brought in for questioning, stop.  Could have been an average family, before this gruesome incident.  What then happened in that small affluent community just 90 minutes from NYC?  Why were there no telltale signs? How could this have occurred in a place wealthy enough to have social structures in place for all forms of harm reduction be it infliction of harm upon self or others?  A person does not just snap.  This was a culminating incident where the people in contact with the killer had buried their heads in the sand,  distracted or in utter denial, with no motivation to probe and understand.  I am sure a few people who were willfully blind, his father and bother to name a couple, will not sleep easy wondering if their inaction was tantamount to recklessness.  There are probably a few physicians whose heads will roll if it came out that they medicated inappropriately or did not intervene more proactively when they could have.  Every incident such as this warrants a public inquiry to examine the minutia leading up to it.  With an inquiry may come legislative reform in the form of mandatory reporting of behaviour likely to result in harm to self of others by persons in positions of trust, and/or revocation of a family member's license to hold firearms if they are custodians of persons diagnosed with mentally illness. Better still would be media bans to discourage copycats trying to gain notoriety imitating these heinous crimes.  I, for one, will not gratify my voyeuristic urges watching CNN which under the guise of journalistic thoroughness fills countless hours of airtime with long, tiring and repetitive reports while shamelessly pedaling cars and wares.  I will get my news from a public broadcaster such as the CBC, and will spend time quietly praying for those who have lost loved ones.  

Holiday thoughts and cheer

Those who live here know that North America winds down mid December. There are holiday parties galore and much talk of food and celebration everywhere you turn. The Christmas lights are up in most homes and this holiday cheer pervades the malls and all public places. Families go on expeditions to buy freshly felled trees to bring into their homes the sweet and spicy fragrance of pines that they decorate with ornaments and glitter. Children meet Santa wherever they go. However, political correctness prompts us to refer to this time not just as Christmas but as the holiday season to include, prominently, Jewish holidays, Kwanzaa, a celebration of African heritage, and a multitude of others representing the religions of its diverse population. Religion or no religion it is that time when folks wind down work and just chill. When we first landed we were fascinated by the frenzy and rushed to the malls to catch the deals on thanksgiving, brought a real tree into our home, baked cookies and cakes and did everything except roast the bird. We joyfully joined in on parties where we tasted mulled wine or hot apple cider and eggnog, exchanged gifts wearing Christmas colours and Santa hats, and even made snowmen with a carrot for a nose, buttons for eyes whom we dressed with mitts and hats in festive colours. We kept cookies and milk under the tree for Santa and did the gifts exchange so our daughter did not feel like she was missing out. Over the years the real tree was replaced by a fake one and all those adopted Christmas traditions have fallen away so like the pine needles from those trees. Today, true to our agnostic selves we treat every religious holiday as a reason to celebrate with friends, making a happy social event of each. We attend Passover meals, part-take of Id Iftar and of course attend a multitude of Diwali parties. But those holidays notwithstanding, it is at this time of the year that people release their collective breaths, abandoning the routine and the mundane, while making a concerted effort to spread cheer among friends, family and even strangers. Every email sign off includes joyful wishes and the mail is peppered with cards carrying tidings of love, peace and hope. Customers and vendors shower us with confectionary, cakes, cookies and gifts and office parties abound. Its also that time when we remember our less fortunate brethren and give generously to charities and food banks. All these rituals make for a happy preoccpuation so we can put off commiserating about winter, when the days are short and the air is cold. I must say off late, with climate change, we see few signs of a white Christmas even here in Toronto, much to most people's disappointment. As we take stock and reflect on whats important, I realise,for me its about embracing who I am, at any given time. For now, a fan of Atif Aslam and romantic hindi serials on the one hand and pass-times like yoga, walking, cooking, reading and indulging my passion for social justice, on the other. Happy and safe holidays, everyone!