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Can we lay Nirbhaya to rest and grieve in silence now?

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Damayanti Datta
Damayanti DattaMay 06, 2017 | 14:18

Can we lay Nirbhaya to rest and grieve in silence now?

Now that the verdict is out, I would like to remember her by her media moniker, Nirbhaya.

Her real name, Jyoti Singh, like the memory of who she really was or what she looked like, perhaps, belongs only to her parents.  

One dismal evening in 2012, I remember meeting her parents, along with a colleague from Aaj Tak, in their Dwarka flat. Conversation was difficult. Grief hung over the bare-as-bones apartment, like a fog.

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If her father seemed exhausted by sadness, her mother could not finish her sentences - alternately angry, calm, defiant or tearful. They were mixing up tenses, forever caught between “she is” and “she was”.

I remember that there were no photographs of hers anywhere. Anywhere. She truly lived in their inner life: they talked about her years in school, her grit, her determination to study further, how she was feeling cold the day before, how she wrapped herself in a shawl and lay on the drawing room divan, how she didn’t feel like going out, how she was extra sweet to her mother before leaving home… her parents grieved their slain child in public, fought against the system in public. But they were careful to remove every personal trace of hers from the inquisitive public gaze.

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At the end of our time, suddenly her mother got up and asked me to accompany her to their bedroom. Photo: India Today

At the end of our time, suddenly her mother got up and asked me to accompany her to their bedroom. She specifically asked my colleague (a male) not to step in. And there, next to the sprawling bed, in a corner, was an altar, with shelves filled with rows and rows of framed gods and goddesses.

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There, nestled amid all that was an enormous photograph of a girl - fresh-faced, eyes like bright buttons, a flop of long bangs across one side of her forehead. Her girl - one who was denied privacy and dignity in violation, in suffering and in death - restored to sacred divinity in the mother’s inner sanctum.

Beyond December 16, its aftermath, and the effect it had on us all, the Nirbhaya episode exploded the line between what is private and what is public. And now, once again, with the Supreme Court pronouncing the death sentence on her four rapists-cum-killers, we have decided to debate –everything - threadbare: were the judges right? Is the death sentence good or bad? Why are the “liberals” not saying anything now?

Can this argumentative nation be quiet, just for once, and grieve in silence the wholly unprovoked, outrageous, unaccountable snuffing out of a life?

Last updated: May 08, 2017 | 11:52
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