Even the disabled crave sex

About six years ago, as my family and I were preparing to visit Kolkata to attend a cousin’s wedding, news arrived that the couple had met with an accident. In the midst of cancelling our tickets and trying to find out more, we learned the girl had a spinal injury and was to be bound to a wheelchair for a few months.

We couldn't help but heave a sigh of relief. We were glad she had survived, and thought that it would only be a matter of time before the nuptials commenced.

We were wrong.

The marriage never happened.

A year and a half later, another wedding invitation arrived. We made plans to fly out once again. Only this time, the bride’s name was different. A woman in good health, well qualified, young enough to procreate, carefully selected by the boy’s upper caste Brahmin parents… same gotra etc.

The woman in the wheelchair was conveniently forgotten. No one even mentioned her at the lavish reception.

I’ve never known how to process my anger towards my cousin. Never understood why he dumped a woman he had been dating since college. Was it because they could never have "proper" sex again? Start a family? Was it the expenses he feared or the lifelong struggle of a caregiver? How he never even bothered to look back as he went on to become the father of a daughter. Now well settled in the US.

"It’s complicated…" was all I remember him muttering when I brought her up, minutes before the rituals had started.

Looking away.

Looking happy… in the end.

As per Census 2011, the disabled ratio stands at 2.21 per cent in India - 26.8 million people. Of them, 11.8 million are women. In a patriarchal country like ours, infamous for gender-based discrimination and being disabled unfriendly, I wonder what an Ira Singhal really stands for.

Singhal, who suffers from scoliosis (curvature of the spine), was in the news for having topped the UPSC exam, along with other three women candidates - Renu Raj, Nidhi Gupta and Vandana Rao. In her victory speech, quoted in most newspapers and channels, she stated: "Irony is that on medical and physical grounds, I am not eligible to be an IRS, a clerk or even a sweeper, but the rules do allow me to become an IAS. I want to say to everyone, let your daughter’s study and work. Go out in the world and make something of their lives."

Can her achievement overshadow her struggle to be part of the mainstream? Her brain? Her merit? Her academic qualifications? Her right to be a professional? Make her parents forget their unfair ordeal, when their child, an engineer from Delhi’s Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology and an MBA from FMS, cleared the Indian Revenue Service exam in 2010, but was sidelined. “First the revenue department refused (to give her a posting), and once it agreed, the DoPT (Department of Personnel and Training) refused,” says Singhal’s father, reminiscing about a bitter legal battle that was finally won in 2014.

Will Singhal become yet another example cited in women empowerment debates? Be celebrated on Women’s Day as a survivor of a tragedy? Become a brand ambassador, a spokesperson, and earn enough through lucrative commercial endorsements?

In a culture where there is a premium price on perfection, looking beautiful, being slim, fair, intelligent – will Singhal’s fight ever include desires, fears, dreams and longings? Will we ever accept that disability is a social condition, above all else?

I recall watching Margarita, With A Straw in a plush south Delhi multiplex a couple of months ago. During a tender scene where an adolescent Laila, the protagonist who suffers from cerebral palsy, played by Kalki Koechlin, masturbates on her expensive, automatic wheelchair, members of the audience broke into giggles and made lewd catcalls.

As we were stepping out, I heard a group of young girls discussing the film. “So Laila had to have sex with a man, once, huh? Guess nothing beats being penetrated. Even so-called lesbos and apahichs want a real d*ck.”

Their words stayed with me as I joined the dots to an interview I had read earlier of the film's director Shonali Bose, whose inspiration was her cousin Malini Chib, born with cerebral palsy - the author of One Little Finger, an autobiography.

“I asked her what she wanted for her 40th birthday and she banged her fist on the table and said very clearly, because her cerebral palsy sometimes makes it hard to understand her speech: ‘I want to have sex!’ It hit me that, over all these years, I’d never dealt with her sexuality, and that, in India, we haven’t dealt with the sexuality of the disabled, and that excited me as a filmmaker.”

Is a woman’s sexuality the easiest to stereotype? The fastest concept to sell to a Western audience? A commoditisation?

How come we hear so little of cases like the 2012 molestation of a 30-year-old mentally challenged woman by a cook at a government hospital in Kolkata. The hospital’s medical superintendent getting away, by saying: “This girl used to run after all the male workers of the hospital. Mentally-ill women usually cannot control their sexual urge. I am worried about my male staff.” Or the shocking 1994 forced hysterectomies that were conducted on 11 mentally challenged women between the ages 18 and 35 in Pune. When girls with disabilities attain puberty, parents seek ways to protect them from sexual abuse and unwanted pregnancy. Here consent was sought from the guardians and an irreversible surgery that was not medically recommended was carried out.

In a report submitted by Disabled People’s International (India) and its partners to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in September 2013, approximately 80 per cent of women with disabilities happened to be victims of violence and were four times more likely than other women to suffer sexual violence. Then why is there so little data by the government on crimes against disabled women?

Are certain disabilities less pleasant? How long will we restrict disability as being a charity and welfare issue?