A year after the RG Kar rape-murder Swarupa Dutt looks at the city where it happened, Kolkata -- a study in dichotomy, at once the self-proclaimed cultural capital of India as also a petri dish for a peculiar rage that breeds crimes against women.
I was in Class 6, walking with my grandmother near our home in Calcutta, when I was felt up.
It was the first time it had ever happened and it took me a moment to understand that the brush on the posterior was deliberate.
The man, (who I realise now was a paedophile), turned around and grinned at me, and walked on.
I was scrawny, wearing a green and white printed frock, my hair in two pigtails with matching ribbons.
I remember the details because you never forget the first time you encounter that alien emotion -- the feeling of being violated.
Did it scar me? No.
Did I tell my mom or anyone at home? No
It's like your first period, you remember the when, the how, and every bloody detail, but it's just a memory.
But yes, it was Calcutta where I was first violated, the city of my birth, the city we spent most of our summer vacations at, as children.
I lived in Calcutta only till I was a year old, yet that city draws me close and fills my senses probably more so than where I live now -- Mumbai.
My mom used to say she may be physically in Mumbai but her whole being -- her heart and soul -- would always firmly remain in Kolkata.
My dad was indifferent as he was Lahore-born and bred -- and only moved to Calcutta after Class 10, just before Partition.
But they agreed on one thing -- Calcutta, and the average person on the street -- was always just a hairbreadth away from reckless rage. There was always that latent sense of threat on the streets.
In January this year, I was in an Uber with a friend and her daughter, headed to a night club and therefore dressed accordingly (the daughter, not us aunties).
In the middle of the narrow lane that led from her house to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass that connects the length of the city, three men astride bikes blocked the road.
They were simply chatting and smoking, but in the middle of the lane. I waited for the driver to honk -- he didn't.
It was winter and the sun sets early and it's cold, so the lane, though straddled by houses, was empty.
The bikers looked at the car and then at a snail's pace and with evident irritation moved aside.
I forgot about it but on the way back to her place, late that night, I told my friend that maybe it's because I always feel safe in Mumbai, but those bikers made me feel distinctly uncomfortable.
I remembered the 2019 incident when a woman was dragged out of an Uber and molested by a group of 15-bike borne men in south Kolkata late at night.
My friend who had spent decades working in Bengaluru and has just now relocated to Kolkata said she never gets into arguments over, say, small change, or expresses her annoyance verbally on the streets, or at a shop, or with an auto driver.
It lies there waiting, a simmering rage beneath their bhadrolok façade, a spark away from combustion.
And therein lies the dichotomy for these are people who believe they are the custodians of culture, supping and sipping with Tagore and Bankim, Marx and Engels, Ray and Fellini.
And it is possibly constant allusions to this Bengali culture and food, music and films and theatre, pujas and poetry, that has somehow allowed India to forget and maybe dismiss that a year ago on the night of August 8-9, a young doctor working her night shift at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata was brutally raped and murdered.
Yes, demonstrations and rallies and 'reclaim the night' protests continued for months in the city last year, but apart from one conviction, there are no real answers and therefore no real justice, despite her gutsy parents' tireless attempts at it.
Speaking over the phone from Kolkata, the mother of the girl who is referred to as Tilottama, says, "I do certainly believe we will get justice because that is the hope that keeps us alive.
"My daughter died on August 9 a year ago, and her dreams died with her. But her death also killed our dreams.
"We are only alive because of the hope that we will get justice for her.
"If we become despondent, how will we live?"
The parents in an earlier interview have blamed West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for the murder and had said that the chief minister and the police were in collusion and aware of the real culprits in the case.
"Nothing will happen unless the Trinamool government is yanked out from Bengal.
"The government and the police destroyed critical evidence in our daughter's rape and murder," says the girl's mother.
Unfortunately, Mamata Banerjee has set a precedent in her responses to rape.
When Banerjee was just a year in as CM, a woman was gangraped at Park Street.
She had trashed the rape case as 'shajano ghotona' (fabricated incident) to tarnish her new government.
In these 14 years in government, there have horrific rapes and gangrapes at Hanskhali, Kamduni, Kakdwip, Ranaghat, Siuri and Sandeshkhali.
She had termed the Hanskhali rape as an 'affair'; protesters in other rapes as 'CPI-M supporters'; and even transferred the woman IPS officer Damayanti Sen who had cracked the Park Street rape case.
"It doesn't matter that the CM is a woman because she leads a party of criminals.
"All that empathy was facile, fake.
"She had been kept informed every step of the way of what was happening in that locked seminar room where my daughter was raped, while we were barred from entry for hours.
"We begged the police to allow us to see our daughter's body, but they did not listen and when we finally saw her hours later, even to people as ordinary as us, it was obvious that the crime scene had been disturbed," the mother said.
In an earlier interview with Rediff, the father had said that when the door to the seminar room in the R G Kar College was opened they saw there were items in the room that they believe were arranged or planted.
He said they knew the moment they saw her body there, much before the CFSL report, which also concluded the same.
"We saw that her laptop, mobile phone and shoes were neatly arranged by her body.
"A murder has occurred in the room, but there were no signs of struggle.
"Nothing was in disarray," the father had told Rediff.
Mamata Banerjee had offered the parents money as 'compensation', which they refused, and she even led protests against the rape.
"What is she protesting against?
"She is protesting against herself?
"What she and her government-led police force have done is unconscionable," the girl's mother says.
There is a word called obangali (non-Bengali) which is synonymous with disdain because the inference of course is, Bengalis are synonymous with intelligentsia, the 'others' are not.
Historian and author Ramachandra Guha in a column for The Telegraph, titled: 'Why Bengal Is To India What France Is To The World' (external link), says how the most popular cussword in Bengali is not referenced with sister/mother as it is in the rest of India, but with the intellect: Boka****a (dumbf**k).
It is intellect over pecuniary gains for the Bengali.
The coffee house culture where dyspeptic Bengalis gathered, debating 'isms' from capitalism (fie, fie) to Marxism, wrote prose and debated poetry, or argued about the economics of Kant, wearing simple dhoti kurta or pyjama kurta is long dead.
But it was birthed in Calcutta.
The Bengali died for what he believed in -- the Naxal movement, the Left movement may have been mistakes that set the state back economically by decades and left hundreds dead, but they were rooted in ideals, class equality, atheism and inherent secularism.
In that Calcutta of the 1970s young men were pulled out of their homes by the Naxals and killed, bodies thrown in ditches; 'class enemies' like teachers, policemen, politicians annihilated.
Fifty years on, Naxalism and its ideals of a classless society have been replaced by a culture steeped in capitalism and consumerism, wont to street thuggery.
According to a report by the economic advisory council to the prime minister tabled last year, the Trinamool Congress-led government is leading the state on a path to penury.
The report says: 'West Bengal, which held the third-largest share of national GDP at 10.5 per cent in 1960-61, now accounts for only 5.6 per cent in 2023-24.
'It has seen a consistent decline throughout this period.'
The lack of jobs has led to migrations to other states and the jobless who remain in the state get on to the streets, itching to get into a brawl.
Several of these rowdies are politically connected to the TMC (like the alleged rapist in the South Calcutta Law College case) and this sense of entitlement makes visitors to the city like me, feel a sense of disquiet.
Even during the CPI-M years (1977-2011), when Calcuttans say they felt relatively safer, than now under the TMC, horrific violence marred the state.
The Marichjhapi massacre, the Sainbari killings, the Nanoor massacre, the murder of Ananda Margi monks were all believed to have be orchestrated by CPI-M cadre.
When the CPI-M was shorn of power in 2011, its cadre joined the Trinamool, and the hacking to death, burning of houses of TMC party activists by 'unidentified miscreants' is an often enough occurrence nowadays.
Consequently, I have always associated sundown Kolkata with a feeling of unease. Sure, I feel safer in the city than I would in Delhi, Gurgaon or Noida, but the aftertaste of feeling unsafe remains.
The NCRB statistics on crime in 2022 said that India had a national average of 66.4% but 13 states and UTs topped that number with Delhi heading the list at 144% and West Bengal at a much lower 71.8%.
However, if you have lived in Kolkata all your life, this disquiet is probably lacking.
My sister-in-law, for instance, says she never feels unsafe in the city but would still never use public transport late at night alone.
Safety is a feeling.
When those bikers blocked the street, I immediately avoided eye contact and neither did I push the driver to honk, which I probably would in Mumbai.
That law student at South Calcutta Law College must not have felt unsafe to stay back after college hours.
The R G Kar doctor did not feel unsafe at her place of work. In fact, her parents say that she always loved going to work and that the hospital was her second home, her haven, her safe place.
"On the night of the 8th (August 2024) she was unwell and I told her not to go but she said that if she did a 36-hour night duty she wouldn't have do it again the whole month.
"In fact, we had an invitation that day for dinner but she said she wouldn't attend.
"Mothers are supposed to have a sixth sense, but I did not. I did not even dream that she would be unsafe in the hospital that night and I failed her."
She says their lives have been turned upside down in the last one year.
"Our daughter was our whole world and when we lost her the world as we knew it changed.
"We live because we have to get justice. We eat so that we have the strength to go to court, to fight the case.
"She would have been an MD by now and married in November."
West Bengal heads to elections next year and the BJP, the main Opposition party in the state, hopes to increase its seat count from the present 65.
"We hope that we will be able to send our respected health minister from the 14th floor (Mamata Banerjee is also the health minister and her office is on the 14th floor in Nabanna) to jail.
"We don't want to wait for a change in government," says Tilottama's mother.
On the 9th, the parents have called for a Nabanno Abhijan (March to the Secretariat) and on the 14th of August, a pre-Independence 'Raat Dokhol Korun (Claim the Night)' rally led by women, wherever they are, all over India.
The victim is also referred to as 'Abhaya', the 'fearless one', after the incident, much like the Delhi gangrape victim was called 'Nirbhaya'.
Indian law forbids naming a rape victim (whether alive or dead) and these are names we choose for them.
This doctor had 28 bite marks on her body, and we know the horrific brutality of the Nirbhaya case.
Why wouldn't they be frightened?
Her mother says, "When we lie awake at night we can't stop thinking about how our daughter must have screamed for help.
"How terrified she would have been... We couldn't do anything to help her. We failed her."
I want to move to a senior living home in Kolkata in my dotage (which isn't far away) of which there are several high-end ones.
I just hope by then, it will be a Kolkata where my mind is without fear.
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff