These issues are of particular interest to both of us because we are both writers. As new parents of a half-Indian daughter, we’re thinking not only about our individual experiences of the collision between American and Indian (or more accurately, Tamil) culture, but our daughter’s future experiences. We perceive issues of representation so differently at times that we seem to be talking about entirely different objects or events.

My husband is a fair-skinned Chicagoan writer of mixed Italian descent who feels comfortable voicing whatever is on his mind and does not worry about the reaction. Without speaking for him (his viewpoint is more sophisticated than I’m able to capture here), I gather he doesn’t find it offensive when Americans emphasize exotic aspects of Indian culture.

I am an Indian-American immigrant writer who often feels torn about whether my experience is too small, too unique, to have any bearing on what other people think or should think, but nonetheless feels a deep need to voice opinions no matter how unpopular they are. In my view, writing and other art forms that don’t conform to exotic stereotypes Americans have about India and its diaspora remain mostly invisible, creating a narrow public impression of Indian culture and people of Indian descent.

Our latest discussion, over candlelight and fondue, was about the American and British news coverage of the gang rape in India. Specifically, I was interested in an article called My life behind India’s Purdah that ran in Salon on January 4, 2012, in which Mira Kamdar wrote, “India’s purdah mentality permeates every level of Indian society,” as remarks made after the gang rape by members of Delhi’s police force and political leaders make abundantly clear.

Salon picked up the piece from Asia Society, retitling it to suggest (erroneously I believe), that Kamdar, who grew up in America like me, was writing as a voice for all Indian women in India. The piece is packaged as an inside scoop on Indian society, rhetorically connecting the fear of violence that Kamdar learned from her grandfather with the argument that India is in its entirety a rape culture, the worst culture in the world for women.

Later, Kamdar tweeted that she had asked Salon to retitle the article. They retitled it “Behind India’s cultural purdah”.

***

Following on the heels of the news about the horrific gang rape in India was a false news story accidentally spread by Alternet and picked up by Salon, “Saudi religious leader calls for gang rape of Syrian women.” I noticed this article on a friend’s post on Facebook. It received twenty-eight comments expressing horror.

The sole commenter who pointed out that the story was link bait put out there for the purpose of fomenting outrage, that this ‘news’ might be the result of Islamophobia rather than reality, was denounced and shouted down. To critically question the legitimacy of shaky news pieces about the Middle East or India is apparently to be a vile and reprehensible person in American culture right now.

By the time Alternet responsibly retracted the story about the Saudi cleric, the damage had already been done. As far as I could see, Americans read the original article and reinforced their stereotypes about brown people “over there” in those terrible foreign countries. There was no consideration about what it means when Americans react with social media outrage to a story about a Saudi cleric or an Indian physical therapy student, but virtually ignore similar violence at home.

I am referencing here an event from last August: the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old by two Steubenville, Ohio high school football players that was followed with people urinating on her and dragging her around by the ankles and wrists, which was followed by onlookers sharing photographs of her and tweeting about the “drunk girl” and the “dead girl.”

The town, which reminds me of the one in Friday Night Lights, was reluctant to help in prosecuting this crime because of its potential to damage a chance to win the championships. It took the work of an industrious blogger, the hacker group Anonymous, and four months for The New York Times to break the news of this rape. There are many people who are as disgusted by the Steubenville rape as the Delhi rape, but the Delhi rape made global headlines almost immediately generating outrage, whereas the Steubenville rape, which occurred in August 2012, registered widely in American consciousness at the start of the new year.

***

With twenty-two mother tongues, twenty-eight states, and seven union territories, India is too heterogeneous a nation, and frankly too diverse in the experiences it offers, to argue with legitimacy from the personal, as Kamdar and other commenters discussing “the conspiracy of silence” in India do. Of course, all I can offer to explain the reason these articles hit me the wrong way is my own personal experience with India, which has been different, and less sensationalistic.

If I were to argue from my personal experience, I would reach an entirely different result from Kamdar. But you won’t see my viewpoint on this topic in a mainstream or even a progressive news magazine because my viewpoint doesn’t fit the sacred or profane dichotomy by which the West categorizes Indian experiences.

The Indian women I know are not silent, nor any more vulnerable than any non-Indian woman in the West. Whether they are children of the diaspora in California or Sydney or Johannesburg, or living where they were born in Chennai, they happen to be among the most outspoken of my friends. They happen to be the quickest to offer an opinion or give help or ask a question or participate in an event.

Kamdar talks about the fear her grandfather instilled in her in order to argue that the same fear permeates all of Indian culture. The first Indian man I ever knew (my father) encouraged me to feel comfortable dissenting from popular opinion and taking a stand against injustices. I do not believe he is unusual for an Indian man. Jyoti Pandey’s father, for example, described his daughter as courageous, not transgressive.

***

During my visits over a thirty-year period to Chennai, the most salient aspect of the culture I’ve encountered has been liveliness in both genders, not a pervasive silencing of women. Women talk over men to get heard. Women visit nightclubs. Women work out at gyms. Women work in positions of power. Women protest injustice in the face of rising violence. Following the rape victim’s death thousands of outraged women took to the streets of India to protest the government’s inaction toward the perpetrators of the gang rape.

It is fair to say that India is deplorably behind the curve when it comes to Indian women’s rights. Yes, misogyny and brutality exist in India. In the American rush to condemn a foreign culture, however, let’s not forget that women brave, bold, and strong enough to protest the rape exist in the culture, and are emblematic of India’s culture, as well.

There is a total silence in the West on India’s culture of dissenting women in the face of severe patriarchy and authoritarianism. It doesn’t quite fit, does it, into the dichotomy carved out for Indian women by Americans and the British, being neither sacred nor profane, but a bit heroic.

Discussion of the protests, if any, is embedded in articles about how India’s entire culture, one composed of multiple nations bound together by British colonialism, is a conspiracy of silence, all of which fits rather nicely into the stereotype of the “quiet, good Indian girl” that I experienced while growing up and while dating in my early twenties. I don’t know where this stereotype originated because Indian women were rarely seen in mainstream television or movies before the nineties, but it was an expectation of silent obedience I encountered regularly while growing up into my mid-twenties. A prime example can be found in Madhuri, an Indian woman shown in the first ten minutes of the pilot for the cancelled series Outsourced.

One literary representation of the quiet Indian woman is V.S. Naipaul’s portrait of Shama in The House of Mr. Biswas. Another literary line referencing the perception that Indian women are inconsequential is referenced at the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway when Clarissa calls Indian women “silly, pretty, flimsy nincompoops”. After Mindy Kaling grew in popularity on The Office, Kelly Kapur transformed from quiet background character strategically placed to show what a bumbling politically incorrect guy Michael Scott was, to loudmouthed airhead in her own right.

***

Last year, a Bollywood actress, Sherlyn Chopra, decided to become the first Indian woman to pose for Playboy. She told BBC Hindi,

“I have become the first Indian to pose naked for Playboy, and nobody can take away that achievement from me.”

I don’t know why, but I feel a lot of sympathy for Sherlyn Chopra who thinks that being the first Indian to do something this banal and absurd and simultaneously this transgressive, is somehow an achievement. She has escaped the sacred and profane by being in Playboy.

Or is that still profane? Given the ubiquity of Internet porn and the rise of Hustler’s image via The People v. Larry Flynt, I don’t think that America still sees Playboy as profane, but the magazine is banned in India, which suggests that Chopra was seeking a way to make a name for herself by working within the sacred/profane dichotomy.

***

In a back issue of an Indian-American magazine I read regularly, I notice that one of the reviewers of books and films is white. I am irritated when she says, in her review, that she wishes she were Indian, too, that she would change her name to sound like an Indian writer, because it would be easier to get published by one of the big six—Indian fiction is hot right now!

Um, no, not unless you want to write sari and mango novels. Not unless you want to play into the stereotypes of what American people seem to want to read about India and Indians: that it’s all rape, poverty, plucky slumdogs, arranged marriages, mystical, yoga retreats, spiritual revelations, corruption, and elaborate descriptions of North Indian food. A hodge-podge of the sacred and profane packaged for easy consumption, rather than serious consideration.

Later, I’m surfing the Internet again, and stumble upon an essay in The Millions about Indian fiction gaining popularity and mainstream acceptance. I read an Indian writer’s comment to the article: “not writing about my grandmothers reminiscing about baking chappatis in some dusty back court in India, has made some of my work a very difficult sell.” I’m divided. Me, too, I think. I relate, and yet I don’t want to relate because it seems ungenerous and presumptuous to think that readers are motivated to read a book or watch a movie solely by how well it conforms to stereotypical images of my culture that seem “authentic” to them.

Surely those of us Indian-Americans who feel this way have sour grapes? Maybe our work just isn’t good enough to pique interest, having nothing to do with what kind of imagery is expected of us. If Mindy Kaling can write and star in the ultra-popular The Mindy Show without a whiff of exoticism, doesn’t that disprove that you need to write about India or the Indian-American experience in a particular way in order to be successful as an Indian-American writer?

I read interviews with Mindy Kaling in New York Magazine and The Boston Globe. In the latter she says,

When you’re a minority and you’re writing a show for yourself you don’t know that people are pinning hopes and dreams on you in a way and, like, if this fails, does this mean they won’t take chances on Indian-American actresses?

And then she says,

That would be a bummer. I’m not one of these people that’s like, ‘I didn’t get into this to be a role model.’ . . . We’re all role models to a certain extent. You have that responsibility to not do things or say things that you wouldn’t want to perpetuate. But at the same time it’s like I didn’t go into politics, I came out to Hollywood to write and act in earnest. I feel it’s a balance.

She didn’t ask for the responsibility—as she says, television is not politics, though it also functions on popularity—but she has it. When you’re a minority who is not as successful as she is in her field, you see that opportunities are few and far between for minorities in the arts.

It also turns out Kaling’s writer’s room is mostly men. And then I see the show a bit differently, thinking that what Kaling seems to have intended as part-homage, part meta-romantic comedy is being scripted by a bunch of men who are probably mocking, who don’t love romantic comedies at all, who are doing what Jane Austen and Henry Fielding did with sentimental fiction, punishing their heroines for being girls.

Before I learned those factoids, I thought The Mindy Project might counterbalance the whiteness of Girls. Unlike some other writers of color, I didn’t have a problem with Lena Dunham not casting nonwhite women in significant roles in Girls. It’s her fictional world and she should write it how she believes it should be written, I said to myself.

The responsibility lies with networks like HBO or Showtime to green-light projects that are closer to the experience most of us have—a real world in which (gasp) even women of color have bodies that are imperfect and egos that are even more imperfect, who say stupid, earnest, funny things. Mindy Kaling says she isn’t interested in having ethnic humor, or her skin color, or her gender define her: “I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists…I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?”

At the start of the day all writers face the same problem: how best to express what you want to express, which might prove to be inexpressible, in the face of a glaringly blank page and an audience that doesn’t care (hopefully, yet). The tick-tick of the clock, the patch of the great green outdoors you can see from your window, the siren song of the Internet or the television. The experiences that have shaped your ontology.

So although I am an Indian-American woman who loves stupid romantic comedies and finds Kaling very funny, I find it troubling that she separates herself from other Indian American women writers because she can compete in a bigger pool. Not because she’s wrong. She can compete outside her racial group, so why shouldn’t she? But so can many other Indian women writers whose voices must fit into the sacred-profane paradigm in order to be published in mainstream outlets at all. Would Kamdar’s essay have been picked up by Salon if she articulated that no, the stereotypes about India are not true? I don’t believe so.

Maybe Kaling wants to separate herself because she doesn’t want to fall into a race trap, the trap that you are a writer who, in writing for Indian-Americans, writes only for Indian-Americans or for people who see India as a bit of a promised land (a land of yoga or spiritual retreat), whose concerns are only racial or ethnic, as opposed to  the broader human experience.

How a writer asks and how she answers questions of race and identity and gender and culture are crucial in a time when the vast majority of women of color working in entertainment, literature, or the arts still have to package and commodify their “exoticness” or experiences of “otherness” as an “Indian-American writer”, a “black writer”, “a Chinese-American writer” etc. in order to have anyone even be interested in what they have to say.

As Kaling seems to realize, there’s a trap here, which she dodges. If you choose to market yourself this way in America, you are only that. You are the writer or artist or entertainer that many people still elect not to read because your experiences are too exotic, too alien, too other.

“I’m not really in the mood for an Indian novel,” I’ve heard readers say. And I am ashamed that I have been guilty, too, of choosing not to read particular books that I have ethnically pigeonholed without reading word one of them.

What would be the cost to me of pretending I am not an Indian-American writer, but just an American writer? Having taken my husband’s name, I might get away with that.

But a heightened experience of otherness is what I’ve experienced. It’s part of my artistic makeup, not only because I grew up learning Tamil, going to Bharatanatyam classes every Sunday, eating thair sadam and lime pickle at dinner each night, reading Hindu mythology comic books, visiting India as child, but because of how other people have responded to me.

No matter how many Babysitters Club books I read to fit in as a child or the law degree I acquired or other markers of social acceptance I’ve sought out in the hopes of belonging. I was always other in American society. I could not help it. My otherness has become part of my ontology.

On the other hand, if I chose to pull a Lena Dunham in reverse, writing only about Indians, is my work automatically to be sneered at (as the writer of The Millions article on the New Wave of Indian fiction put it) as “ethnic fiction”? As fiction that is assumed to have no value to broader America except to the extent it addresses the sacred or the profane?

***

My daughter is half-Indian, but like her father has fair skin and the question for me everywhere I go now, from pizza parlors to doctors’ offices is, “Are you her nanny?” or “Is she yours?” When I told my husband about the latest episode at a pizza parlor, he was quite surprised. From his perspective, most people don’t talk like that anymore.

My mother told me to ignore it. For some reason, perhaps because it is my daily experience, perhaps because I’m sensitive, I can’t. Every incident reverberates, vibrating with every other experience of otherness I’ve had.

When I was a teenager, a boy I liked who knew that I liked him compared my skin to the color of shit as the reason he didn’t find me attractive. Five years later, I learned that my brother had the same experience with some elementary school bullies. Ten years later, a half-Iranian male reading some of my fiction mentioned the experience of being called “sand nigger,” while growing up in Arizona.

What does it mean that this is not the unique experience of a few kids in the suburbs, but also the experience of our president? President Obama had the skin color publicly compared to shit by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the popular television show, Girls. For me, this is something we shouldn’t ignore about American culture: that people of color are compared to waste products and very few people are outraged. Bullies who talk trash like this are not boycotted and shunned and fired; instead, people of color are expected to stay quiet and ignore it.

When I talk about a racist episode, people assume it is limited to one instance with an ignorant person—one instance in a pizza parlor or one instance at the doctor’s office where somebody assumed I was the nanny. However, in my experience, it is a lot of instances, with a lot of ignorant people.

I can’t help but think that these instances are connected to the issue of representation in art, film and literature. The more we see life from the perspective of someone outside the majority culture, the more empathy we are likely to have for the targets of this kind of abuse and the more likely we are to talk differently ourselves.

Girls is a show I enjoyed last year and now feel maybe I shouldn’t. A show that feminist writers gush over as “honest” and “realistic”, comparing it to Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines.

Women writing about their experiences in their own form, women writing about their experiences in the face of a world that wants them to be quiet, women writing in a world that trivializes the seriousness of writing about one’s personal experience when the writer is a woman like Sheila Heti or Kate Zambreno, but elevates that same ambition when the writer is a male like Philip Roth. However, nobody to my knowledge suggests that Girls, How Should a Person Be, or Heroines is actually interchangeable with the other and that you only need consume one to consume them all. Perhaps you’ve noticed, too, that this cultural conversation about silencing, which takes place in both alt lit and mainstream publications, is almost entirely silent on women writers of color.

Zambreno’s book, which I liked a lot, contains a line that scorns a woman who suggests Zambreno write a “multicultural novel.” I’ve heard that scorn from many fiction writers not of color over the years: that to write a book that is actively multicultural (which registers to me as a simple fact about American society today) is not to write seriously, but to write to a trend that will pass. I think this opinion is motivated by the same thought process that motivates the woman who wished she had an Indian name because Indian fiction is hot, just like vampires, BDSM, and post-apocalyptic dystopias.

For some of us, however, multiculturalism is not merely a trend; it is not written because it is hot; it is a serious engagement with our reality.

***

In a smart essay for The Millions, Thea Lim wrote that,

Since 1917, a total of four men of color have won the Pulitzer: N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction (Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin), and 16 women have won an NBA, one of them a woman of color.

She goes on to mention two white writers, Mary Gaitskill and Alice Munro, as female writers that write as gracefully as Diaz about their own lives. Then notes that Zadie Smith and ZZ Packer are also possible counterparts.

Within this mainstream literary fiction, there is also Jhumpa Lahiri, a writer who somehow manages to break free from the sacred/profane dichotomy, but winds up writing books in which the saris could be exchanged for jeans, where the Indian-ness is frequently bound up in name brands rather than Bengali culture per se. And yet after three such books, a common criticism of Lahiri (that I find annoying) is that she only writes about Bengali-Americans: why doesn’t she write about something else?

Other Indian-American writers who are far more prolific than Lahiri are sidelined for their social engagement in the same way that Barbara Kingsolver is, as described in a 2011 essay on Slate by Michelle Dean: not taken as seriously in the literary world. Chitra Divakaruni. Bharati Mukherjee. There are more.

Part of their relegation to a literary status below that of Lahiri’s might be bound with literary merit and use of language, but another part, from my perspective, is that these “multicultural” or “ethnic” writers write to Indian-Americans familiar with Indian culture about the Indian-American experience. I don’t think they write only to that audience, but that audience is included. Whereas Lahiri’s work, brilliant and graceful as it is about the Bengali-American experience, does not really require the reader to adopt the same familiarity with Indian culture(s). By not making that assumption, by not being “ethnic,” Lahiri more properly takes her place in the pantheon of literary greats.

***

Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton is told in the third person, which does not satisfy my hopes of getting closer to a real person in his situation, but which produces an interesting literary effect. The third-person device forces me to think about how a fatwa forced Rushdie to assume another identity that made him foreign to himself.

I relate enormously to Rushdie’s account of his life in the 1960s at boarding school in England, which weirdly enough, sounds in some respects not all that different from life for an Indian girl in secondary school in Palo Alto in the 1980s and 90s.

At the end of Rushdie’s time at Cambridge, someone throws gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture of his room. He is held responsible and told that unless he pays for the damages, he won’t be allowed to graduate. He pays. Then, when he wears brown shoes to his graduation, he is ordered to change to black shoes and also required to supplicate himself to the vice chancellor, begging in Latin for a degree that he earned.

He obeys.

He writes in third person,

Looking back at those incidents, he was always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage to his room, could have refused to change his shoes, could have refused to kneel to supplicate for his B.A. He had preferred to surrender and get the degree. The memory of that surrender made him more stubborn, less willing to compromise, to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons.

The insight that I like there is that these personal experiences of abjection and passivity turn him into someone who eventually does fights—with his whole being—for his right to speak the truth as he see it.

Some people might laugh at my juxtaposition. Rushdie? That’s who makes things bearable for you? Mindy Kaling, not the feminist icon Jezebel makes her out to be? What?

But Rushdie’s personal passages contain a level of fight born of supplication, that I think has something important to say to me as a female, as a woman of color, as a writer. And maybe he can get away with talking about this because he is not a woman and because something so profoundly political and disturbing happened to him that nobody (except perhaps Zoe Heller) can trivialize the fact that he is writing about the personal aspects of the crisis now.

Maybe, also, he can write these personal passages because he didn’t grow up in America, believing that he’s supposed to be able to succeed at whatever he wants, but unable to, and because, in fact, he has succeeded by all measures. As someone who does not find herself in a post-racial America, I take solace in a passage about Rushdie’s tendency to supplicate himself as a youth finally turning into a refusal that launched one of the most powerful battles of free speech of our times.

***

Back in the nineties, my first boyfriend, an Israeli-American, mansplaining that being a Jewish male in America is much harder than being a woman of color, finally threw up his hands in exasperation saying, “But you were just born in India. You’re American. You’re not really Indian. You don’t know what racism is.”

It is twenty years since that invalidating conversation. We have a black president, and Indian women are marching against misogyny without applause, but the most popular progressive magazines are not fact-checking stories that perpetuate lies about foreign brown people and publishers are reluctant to put teens of color on the front of YA books because those books won’t sell as well. Shortly after the Delhi gang rape in 2012, a thirty-one year old woman pushed a Hindu man onto the tracks of a subway stations in Queens, New York later saying, “I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Ignore it. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

If I must ignore these disturbing facts; or produce writing about Indian culture that fits into the sacred and profane dichotomy such that my words are familiar to everyone but me; or worse, never engage in conversations about these facts for fear of being disliked, the answer that comes to mind nowadays is different from the silent acquiescence or self-directed anger I experienced twenty years ago. I would prefer not to. 

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• PSY the Clown vs. PSY the “Anti-American”: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity
• On Loitering
• Yellow Peril and the American Dream
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi

But for those of us who didn’t have a choice, those of us who survived the choices of men who violated our bodies, those of us who defend ourselves everyday, those of us who are still trying to figure out what does and doesn’t make us a real victim, tears aren’t enough to make us wish you didn’t have to pay.

Rumpus contributor Ashley Ford reflects upon the Steubenville rape case and her relationship with her father in a heartbreaking and beautifully vulnerable piece up on her blog.

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• We Still Have A Long Way to Go
• Holy Orange
• Kissa Yoni Ka: What The Vagina Monologues Mean In Hindi
• Tramp

At Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams tells the story of Zerlina Maxwell, who appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to say, “If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.” The sadly predictable result: “I can’t even go on my Facebook page,” says Maxwell. “It’s full of people wanting to rape me.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if during an International Women’s Day in the future we could look back on this and congratulate each other on having changed social attitudes about sexual assault?

Related Posts:

• The Sacred and the Profane
• Stop Reading New Fiction?
• “A Tragedy of Choice”
• Happy International Women’s Day!
• Holy Orange

Every olive-skinned forehead has a chalky red circle placed by the leathery fingers of holy men. They look like a collection of bulls-eyes. Black red garnets drip from earlobes to rouged cheeks. A woman walks with three small children. She is so stunning she could win beauty pageants, but she was born poor so she never will. Indira Gandhi has been assassinated. I am fifteen.

A sharp jaw is draped by a red sari. When the sun shines through it, the woman’s chin lights up like a neon strawberry. She bends over a camp stove on the sidewalk outside the Bombay airport. She twirls roasted chapattis— Indian tortillas— with her delicate fingers over the weak red flame. Her hands are speckled with the dried blood color of mehndi: henna temporary tattoos like blinking eyes on her palms when they open. The mehndi has faded over time, which means the woman participated in a wedding a week or more ago. The toasty nut chapatti smell competes with the stench of sweat and shit. My green ankle length skirt is too thick in the humidity and perspiration drips down my doughy armpits onto the ground.

I’m looking for my name on a sign. Petite men jump and shove each other to get at the white tourists who have money for motels and taxis. They call out “Rickshaw, Madame? Madame.” Their voices are low and sexual and pleading but harmonize like a choir. The men who call out “Madame” have red teeth. A boy with no legs whizzes past on a skateboard. His arms are extra long and knobby from polio. He has a collection of VHS tapes attached to the skateboard with a bungee cord. One of them is Michael Jackson. He doesn’t beg. Children approach with fingers cut off at the knuckle from leprosy. There is no blood—only bandages. They move their fingers to their mouths and say “kanna” and look into my foreign eyes. I don’t have to know Hindi to know what starving means, but “kanna” means food. The kids spit red. The women spit red. The small puddles remind me I’m bleeding. Where am I going to find a tampon?

Bombay is not just red. It’s also holy orange. A band of Hari Krishnas dance barefoot on dirt in big loose orange shirts and lungis that are like baggy pajamas. Their clothes are the orange that only the earliest morning sky knows. Their bald heads glow in the heat and they smile that crazy smile of bliss that makes me want to float on their orange cloud and never go home. The moon is amber and appears much closer and bigger here. From across the street, they come for me. I want to be orange like their lungis, not big and white because the men jump and yell while lepers scurry to surround me. Some of these men are my age or younger, boys really. My temporary sister with shiny black hair grabs my hand. She tells me her name “Jothi,” (prounced Joe-thee) means light. She says, “This way,” and interlaces her fingers with mine. Her father walks like his hips are sore or broken because they tilt as he walks in short brisk steps. He’s a doctor. He says, “Come,” and I do. His voice is nasal and hard to hear over all of the vendors calling “Pakora, pakora, pakora!” Pakora are salty orange fried vegetables in white bags sprinkled with saffron, cumin and cayenne.

Women carry giant baskets on their heads poised and dangerous but their faces are serene. The baskets are orange and brown and carry the smell of fish. Some baskets overflow with samosas and when one drops from the basket, beggar children scurry for it. Dried orange paste cakes the corners of their lips. Cars and bicycles heavy with chickens swerve around cows that rule the road. Fat, slow cows flaunt orange blossoms between their horns, swinging between them like a hammock. Their horns are painted with red and gold stars and flowers. My temporary sister wears an orange thread around her wrist that signifies that she has a brother and he tied it to her wrist in a ceremony that honors their bond. She interlocks her fingers with mine as we walk towards what looks like a toy car. The children knock on the window as our car drives away. They chase the car for several blocks yelling, “Ferungi!” which is Hindi for foreigner.

Bombay is also white. The bread rolls the vendors sell in baskets as they yell, “Pan pan pan pan” are wrapped in stiff white napkins. Milk is delivered in small bottles in grey metal baskets like in old episodes of Leave it to Beaver. I listen to my Prince “Under a Cherry Moon” cassette tape on my Walkman and walk along the gutter next to palatial marble houses. A man squats and shits in the street. I panic because I want to stare but I look away instead. I think about what it means to be white here, to have the luxury of white cotton underwear and a private poop behind closed doors. Visions of divine white toilet paper taunt me as I pass men in sandals and white turbans. They open their funny pajamas and take their dicks out and point them at me as they walk towards me. This happens so many times I lose count. It happens when I walk with my Indian host family and when it does, my sister locks hands and squeezes me tight. “This way,” she snaps. “Ouch,” I say. She pulls me into a store that sells saris and nose jewelry until the men walk past the store to the nearby marketplace. I want to ask why the men do that but I don’t. Jothi avoids my eyes and holds a green and gold sari. “How much?” she asks the saleswoman. My long skirt is white with gawdy pink and black flowers. We leave with my first-ever sari.

I’ve never been on a double-decker bus so I ride one all day and the men stare. I switch seats to wriggle out of their sight but they come closer, stand over me and clutch the handrail near my head. I wander into an indoor market and two men in turbans pinch my butt. I run to the nearest rickshaw and tell him, “Bandra Road.” When I walk in the front door, the family is sitting at a table for dinner. They are angry and silent. Later, my host brother tells me, “Women who come home after dusk are whores,” right away. He’s trying to explain why his father yelled behind their closed door earlier. The father yelled so fast, I couldn’t catch one familiar word. I can tell by my host brother’s slouch and the way he wobbles his head that he thinks it’s silly that his father yells but I’m afraid he will kick me out, send me back home. He wears American clothes a few years outmoded, but the best money can buy in Bombay. White Izod and blue jeans.

I’m supposed be in college here even though I’m a junior in high school. The first day, I am swarmed by kids. The only white girl there in my loose yellow shirt, I sit in the back of the class on a bench. Students stare and giggle so I walk to the train station where I follow children to their homes in the slums. I trust the kid who grabs my arm and pulls me into a snaky alley past metal scraps and piles of garbage. I’m pummeled by the smell of shit and piss near homes made of cardboard and dirt. Inside, I crouch in the dark around a small fire and drink spiced chai from tiny chipped glasses. The grandparents sleep on the ground on a single blanket and glance over at me. It’s so dark, I can’t tell how many people live inside. The kid giggles and his mother stares into my grey eyes for a long time and laughs. She covers her mouth when she does this. The kid writes an address on a white piece of paper. I promise to write. I never write. Two men follow me onto a train. Their bodies against mine harder and harder until a seat next to a woman was vacant and I squirmed into it. A couple stops away is a four star hotel so I jump off at the next stop and run inside where I won’t be followed, touched or flashed. I fill my backpack with rolls of plush white toilet paper. I get home after dark: white American whore.

Bombay is turquoise and gray. Monsoon rains with blue skies. Ganesh, the elephant God is on posters in homes and stores and in rickshaws promising triumph over obstacles, but in some sects of Hinduism, I am told, a woman is supposed to throw her body on top of her dead husband’s and allow the vultures to pick it clean. When I walk the streets in the morning with my Walkman, I look up at the roofs of gray buildings for the bodies of mourning women and the hungry vultures, but I never see them. I see gray hate and gray shame and red angry spit on the dirt every couple feet. I walk past cold gray shadows where the little girls are still sold out of cages. The gray spaces in the alleys filled with girls carrying gray tins begging for coins. Gray, dirty bandages on their hands. I see turquoise Ganesh on posters. Indian women feed their daughters sweets from a vendor on a train. Indian women twirl chapattis wrapped in gold and turquoise saris. They ask to buy my American jeans for their daughters. Fisherwomen keep their baskets perfectly balanced. Outside the train, families line up outside of the Indian Embassy, hoping to leave. I never write to the children from the slums.

Years later, Bombay is still fresh in my mind and in my bones. As a visitor, I was naïve and lost. When I hear bells, I still see statues of Ganesh in a cool, stone temple and smell sandalwood incense. If I sent a letter to one of the kids from the slums, it would say: Remember when I pointed to your bandaged knee and asked you what happened? I could tell by your khaki shorts and pressed white shirt that you were cutting class too. We exchanged grins. You saw the man press his hips against me and said, “We get off here,” as you reached above me to pull the silver cord. I followed you home and met your sister and mother. Lock hands with them and keep them safe before and after dusk.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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In a guest post for Racialicious, Hannah Green uses an Indian performance of The Vagina Monologues as a jumping-off point for ruminations on sexual assault and women’s rights, in both India and the US. A preview:

Dolly Thakore, one of the stars of the show, told me that she was happy to have an opportunity to perform in cities where The Vagina Monologues had previously been banned at a time when rape and child molestation were at the forefront of discussion in India. Dialogue about violence against women is opening up across India, and this play is a part of that.

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The black and white film opens with a courthouse scene where the accused, Raj (Raj Kapoor) is a young man who tried to kill a highly respected judge, Raghunath. When the judge presiding over the case asks who is defending the accused, a female attorney, Rita (Nargis) makes a dramatic entrance just in the nick of time and declares that she is here to mount a defense, while looking over at Raj with loving eyes. She begins to cross-examine Raghunath by asking him if he had any children to which he replies he doesn’t. She presses him and asks if he denies abandoning his wife and child many years ago. And then we are treated to a flashback in which all is revealed and explained.

The theme of the movie, which is taken up by the villains and heroes alike, is this: If you’re the child of a bandit, are you destined to a life of criminality? Or put more broadly, does where you are born determine your destiny? But I was less interested in this question of nature versus nurture. Instead, I found myself more preoccupied by another theme contained in the film’s plot, which in my mind was reminiscent of both the Ramayana, one of the most revered ancient Hindu texts, as well as the recent gang rape in Delhi.

The flashback showed how Raghunath, a young judge, bucked tradition by marrying a widow, Leela. This was almost unheard of given that even in the early part of this century, there were still those who called for Hindu widows to be burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands because what life is there for them once their husbands are dead?

But then one night, Leela is kidnapped by Jagga, an infamous bandit. It turns out that Jagga specifically planned to kidnap Leela as a vendetta because he claimed Raghunath had wrongly thrown him in jail for an alleged rape based on a determination that as the son and grandson of career criminals, he must be guilty. Jagga plans to rape Leela, as retribution but doesn’t when he learns that she is in the early stages of pregnancy. He returns Leela to Raghunath knowing that by kidnapping her he has “tainted” her and that will bring ruin to not only her but also to Raghunath and his unborn child.

Raghunath, at first is thrilled to see Leela however, their happy reunion is soon marred because his elder sister tells him that “everyone” is talking about how Leela has brought shame to their house by being with another man. She insists that Leela and her unborn child should be thrown out before they bring further shame to the family name. Raghunath, an educated and powerful man, succumbs to this barbaric thinking and just as Rama casts away Sita for the sake of propriety, in the epic Ramayana, Raghunath abandons Leela and his unborn child. The movie follows Raj, their child as he grows up in a Bombay slum, depicting how he gets pulled into a life of crime by Jagga, the bandit, himself. Kapoor lifted the persona and antics of his tramp from the master tramp, Charlie Chaplin, and set it to Hindi music.

I eventually gave up on the movie because I was feeling increasingly lousy – it turned out I had a 24-hour stomach bug. Anyways, I was pretty sure by this point that through a dramatic twist worthy of a telenovela, the accused, Raj, would be revealed to be none other than the judge’s own abandoned son. But I remained hung up on the plight of the judge’s wife, Leela – how she was devalued and “thrown away” by her husband and society despite the fact that she was the victim. And I thought to myself, are things that different more than 60 years later? In the U.S., we have male politicians putting forth arguments about “legitimate rape.” And in India we have male politicians denigrating female protesters of a brutal gang rape as “painted” and “dented” women.

India is the world’s most populous democracy but it’s also by some measures the worst country for women, despite the fact that it was led by a female Prime Minister for many years. Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry is known the world over because it makes more movies than Hollywood, but very few of these movies actually move the genre forward. Through its mastery of science and technology, India is on a path to economic and political power but that path will prove illusory if it doesn’t take concrete steps to address the very real systemic issues it faces in terms of women’s rights, poverty, and corruption. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., as we recover from our own wounds from gun violence, hopefully the painful echoes of the protests in India over this horrific crime will rouse us and keep us ever-vigilant of those who seek to condone sexual violence against women or curtail women’s rights.

I am encouraged because over the last few weeks in India, women and men have turned out by the thousands for vigils to honor the victim and for protests to demand better law enforcement and justice for rape cases. Here in the U.S., voters “kicked out” congressional members who had backwards views on women’s reproductive rights. This makes me hopeful that despite the fact that democracies are messy and don’t in and of themselves guarantee equal rights to all their citizens, it gives its citizens the chance, even if it is a narrow one, at times, to call for justice and be heard.

Awaara, which was nominated for the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, avoided the conventional formula for Bollywood films that persists to this day, which requires a shining hero to rescue a beautiful damsel in distress from an ominous villain. Instead, in Awaara, some heroes emerge as villains, such as Raghunath, the illustrious judge, who let social pressure and backwards thinking cloud over his rationality. Meanwhile, some villains are revealed to have heroic traits, such as the judge’s son, Raj, who came up as a tramp but is redeemed by the power of love. Similarly, women are portrayed as both the oppressor and the savior, with the judge’s sister seeking to leave her pregnant sister-in-law destitute while Rita, the female attorney comes to the rescue of Raj, the lovable tramp. In my mind, the more than sixty-year-old film serves as a cross-cultural time capsule showing how women’s lives played out on the black and white screens of yesteryears. Now we need to figure out how they will play out on the high-definition, three-dimensional, screens of tomorrow.

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He says, “Sometimes, I feel like I am in hell.”

The door to the church is riddled with machete piercings. On the pews are piles of clothing—baby clothes, dresses, hats. Everything is orange, a mixture of blood and clay. It’s like they made confetti of everything—flesh, stone, wood, bone.

He says, “Let us go to the basement.”

There are concrete stairs painted white leading down. To my left and to my right are cubbies filled with bones, sorted by type. Piles of legs in one cubby, then skulls in another. In front of me there are the bones of one person laid out and under glass.

I ask the guide why this one set of bones is encased.

He says, “Well, this woman, like most all the women, was raped during the genocide. And when they finished, they raped her with a machete—all the way up through her skull.  So we honor her.”

I want to know about this.

The first time I am raped, by a boy named Billy, I am babysitting. When the woman I am working for comes home, the house is a mess, so she calls my mom and tells her that I did not do a good job and I don’t get paid.

After that boys seem to know when and where I am babysitting. That’s because I tell them. And sometimes Billy, the original, brings a friend. Billy is cute and popular. When he tells everyone what he did, I am secretly hoping it is because he likes me. I have just turned 13.

The violence and humiliation change me. My brain turns to fog. Reading gets hard, math impossible and when my history teacher gives me an A for letting me wrestle him, I am relieved.

I have a strong feeling that I will go to Rwanda from the minute my friend Betsy tells me about her trip. She tells me about Ubushobozi, a project she visited which teaches head-of-household teenage girls how to make bags and to weave baskets to sell. I ask Betsy if the girls want to make yoga mat bags for my studio. The girls have never done yoga and think I am nuts but they make me the bags anyway.

Another year passes. I don’t know why or when—I just feel like I will go. And then photos start appearing on Facebook of the girls doing yoga. A young woman starts coming to the project once a week and teaching classes and the girls are hooked. When the new age music comes on, they get very serious.

But then the teacher just stops coming. So I think now is my time. I can go over and train them to teach so they can have class whenever they want. I ask my students here in the states if they will send me and within an hour I have most of the money. I spend two more weeks fundraising and then get on a plane and go. I don’t read any books, look at a map or plan. I get a hotel off Trip Adviser, a prescription of Ambien and go.

One of the first things I notice is there are no old people in Rwanda. Everywhere I go, it seems I’m the oldest one. It’s Day Four of the training and Selme asks to be helped into a handstand. Selme is the weaving teacher. I love her. We have a long hug every morning and she smiles at me in a way that my face doesn’t even know how. I think she is in her forties, which is old in Rwanda, but it’s anyone’s guess, as they don’t keep track of age.

I am relieved to be with a grown up. The kids have taken all my attention but they’re tired so she’s taking advantage. Selme has given birth nine times and since I taught her the Kegels she calls me the good doctor. Handstand it is. And after a few minutes of her trying to kick up, I say ok Selme, that’s good for today. She doesn’t speak English, the translator is passed out, and so keeps going and throws her body into a handstand. Victory.

The kids rouse from their impromptu naps on their mats and stare and laugh in disbelief. I feel Selme’s hips in my hands and get a rush of the pure adrenalin that she is running through her system and simultaneously become aware of the depth of my damage and the possibility of healing.

At 13, I never hear anyone use the words “slut, whore, bitch,” until they are said to me, about me. Brain damage, in one area of my skull. Straight A’s in the other. I still go to Disney World every year with my grandparents and stay at the Polynesian Resort.

Today, in yoga class, I make a big mistake. I’m teaching and I notice that one of the boys is not able to comprehend anything. So I grab him by his ankles to shake out his legs and try to loosen him up, get his energy moving. And he tenses and remains frozen. His eyes are glazed over and his classmates are laughing at him. He is suffering from something and I can’t get in. I put my hands on him and then I know his story. And now I’m having a hard time. I feel sick and there’s a camera crew in this kid’s face and I just need to move on to the next pose. I am only going to see this boy a few more hours total before I leave and there isn’t time to guide him through what needs to be done.

I never thought about this. I never thought about the people who I would leave in the dust, no progress, just their stories in their bones, now in my hands. I wonder if leading a yoga teacher training is the best possible idea I could have come up with. I am in over my head.

In the morning I arrive at the studio and it is packed. Word has spread and it seems we have some new trainees. I look to the front of the room and Faustin is leading the class in the Classical Sun Salutations that he has just learned yesterday in a language that he does not speak. I don’t know what Faustin’s real role is at the project. I’m told he is the gardener. But there is no garden and this is a project for teenage girls. I suspect he is being protected from something and watching him teach, I am so grateful. I will go back just for him.

I feel myself pouring back in. In and down. Filling out my flesh and then beyond the flesh. I feel the long journey of wherever my Spirit has been ending, in real time. I was told more than once while there that Rwanda is a place where you can see the progress in real time. I never thought it would include my progress.

Then I see Byuka has translated the class I wrote on the board into Kinyarwandan. Byuka is 15, head of household. Lives in a mud hut. Never done yoga. She is healing. Her brain works like crazy. My brain works too. Not the way I want it to but it works and watching them I know I can heal more, faster, better. It’s occurring to me that before my own damage there was a different kind of person in the works and remnants remain.

I can summon her back up.

It is a process of shining the light into the dark corners.

Honoring my bones, all the way up to my skull and down to my toes.

***

You can learn more about and support Megan’s work in training yoga instructors in Rwanda here.

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And then I wasn’t.

In 2010, an eleven-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas, was gang raped by more than twenty men, repeatedly, over the course of four months. It was a crime of ever-increasing magnitudes, each new detail about the rapes more horrifying than the last—the abandoned trailer where a lot of the rapes took place, the sheer number of assailants, the video evidence, the way the town reacted, the way journalists reported the story. Every time I think about the case, I get nauseous. I am nauseous now. Revulsion is a reasonable response.

Consent is complex and that complexity can be uncomfortable but legally, a minor cannot give consent, even if she gives consent. Morally, we know that if a man hears an eleven-year old girl say yes, what he should really hear is no. If more than twenty men hear an eleven-year old girl say yes, what they should really hear is no.

Eleven is desperately young but it’s also so close to adolescence, to the whole world changing, to new ways of understanding, new ways of wanting. No matter who an eleven-year old is, though, there is no version of that age where a child is capable of making an informed decision about sex, let alone a gang rape with multiple assailants over the course of four months, which is what happened in Cleveland, Texas.

We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. We get so wrapped up in these shallow narratives about children being preternaturally advanced, about little girls wearing make up and dressing provocatively and seducing the camera, about little girls maturing faster, developing sooner. We forget. They are children, babies really, if we would allow them to be.

In the trial of Jared Len Cruse, one of the accused rapists, his lawyer Steve Taylor said, “Like the spider and the fly. Wasn’t she saying, ‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?’  I’m sure he thought he was quite clever. He made this statement while questioning Chad Langdon, the lead investigator on the case. Taylor thought this might be a feasible defensive tactic. He thought he could plausibly assert that an eleven-year old child had the wiles to seduce all those men and that her complicity would somehow negate any guilt on the part of said men.

Langdon replied, “I wouldn’t call her a spider. I’d say she was just an 11-year-old girl.”

Taylor, having not quite reached the bottom of his ethical barrel, told Langdon he hopes such an accusation never befalls his teenage sons as if that might somehow make any part of the situation acceptable. Fortunately, Taylor’s strategy was unsuccessful. Cruse was found guilty. He will be in prison for a very long time. Most of the assailants in the case will be in prison for a very long time. They call this justice. And still, there will be more rape cases and more defense attorneys blaming victims of all ages and believing that’s a viable strategy because, historically, it has been.

We don’t know how to talk about children anymore. Even when the Cleveland, Texas case first gained national attention, we were at a loss for finding the appropriate language. There was no vernacular to accommodate everything terrible and wrong about the crime. We were careless. The New York Times, in one of their first articles, was concerned about the town and how the town was affected. The town’s citizens wondered where the girl’s parents were, and worried, of course, for those boys. Everyone everywhere wondered how such a horrific crime could happen. And still, we were talking about a girl who was eleven.

Over at Jezebel, Katie J.M. Baker posted about Steve Taylor’s remarks and a commenter discussed an eleven-year old girl to whom she is loosely acquainted. Of the girl, the commenter said:

She continues to dress like someone twice her age at family events, like Thanksgiving, where she was dressed as what I can only describe as a “sexy secretary” with a tight, shiny satin red shirt and a very tight pencil skirt with heels.

and

What can you do, really? I’m not her Mother. I’m not even her sister. But I feel like she could find herself in a bad situation if this continues. On the other hand, it feels distinctly un-feminist to tell a girl how she should dress or act because it suggests that any blame would lie with her.

We have no idea how to talk about children anymore. While I don’t believe there was any malice intended by the commenter, while I do believe she is, as she noted in her comment, conflicted, her words are still full of misplaced concern, victim blaming and this pervasive cultural belief that women and girls dressing provocatively leads to women and girls “finding themselves” in “bad situations,” instead of what actually happens— bad situations finding women and girls no matter where they are, how old they are, what they are wearing, or how they are comporting themselves.

This is of course compounded, in this instance, by the fact that we’re not actually talking about women. We are talking about girl children. Eleven-years old. No matter what they say or how they act or how they dress, eleven-year olds are children and we have twisted ourselves up so much that we have no idea what that means or, worse yet, perhaps we don’t care what that means.

It’s strange, this eagerness we have for placing the culpability for sexual violence everywhere but where it actually resides. I’m done with conversations about rape that do not place the responsibility for rape with rapists. I am absolutely done with questions about what the victim did or did not do to make themselves so vulnerable instead of what the predator did as he (or she) preyed. I am done with conversations about what potential victims can do to prevent rape instead of what rapists can do to stop raping. I am done with conversations about children and sexual violence that try to rationalize issues of consent and sexuality.

I’m not sure if misogyny is so culturally embedded that we cannot bear for rapists to bear the responsibility of their actions or if we’re terrified of our own vulnerability, no matter what we do to protect ourselves. Maybe we don’t know how to talk about children or even think about children because we don’t want to remember how little we once knew or face how much we would someday know.

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***

During the last period of the day, the students who played sports walked to the back of the gym and toward one of two doors, one for the girls locker room, one for the boys. Girls like Tina A. didn’t play sports. They sulked toward study hall, making fun of the required white shorts and light blue shirts we all had to wear. I played tennis. While I warmed up my serve or volleyed with an easy-going teammate, the boys practicing on the outside basketball court in their tank tops and shorts would openly stare at me and nudge each other between lay-ups and pass drills. I had no idea why they were looking until one night, Jeff T. and Ron G. called me from Jeff’s house. I sat on the edge of my bed, the base of my cream and gold Princess phone on the floor, its coiled cord pulled taut, the heavy handset pressed close to my ear.

Boys had called me.

“You have the biggest bush in the eighth grade,” Jeff told me, in a tone I would one day recognize as lust. “And the nicest tits,” Ron countered. I had often heard boys in Algebra II or in the hallway outside of Honors English make rude comments about how Carrie Little’s name should be changed to Carrie Big or how flat-chested Amy Saunders remained after the summer. I was relieved not to be in a category of complaint or ridicule but I was surprised to hear these boys had given more consideration to the hair under my shorts than I had.

It was the first of many phone calls, and I probably hung up on them, but not after feeling both embarrassed and a little flattered. For the most part, I ignored their confessions and grinning stares because I was afraid of what might happen if I let them hold for too long.

On the first day of seventh grade, Ron G. was the tallest boy in my first period class and wearing a Mountain Dew t-shirt. My mother never allowed me to wear t-shirts to school and jeans only on Friday, so in my experience, Ron, as he took his seat in the front row, carried with him a tinge of the forbidden. By high school graduation, he would be married with two small children. Jeff was the first boy I French kissed, an agreed-upon appointment established by a note passed during Texas History.  In the school annual, his dimples give him a look of innocence he does not deserve.

***

I am writing here of interrupted memory.

I do not recall how I ended up doing what I did behind the gym with those boys, who initiated the afternoon ritual, if a note was passed to me by an eager boy during Algebra, a folded piece of paper with a small triangle sticking out with the word, “Tug,” written in determined pencil. Perhaps, and I suspect it was something more along these lines, a tough girl in tight jeans, maybe even Tina A., had tired of the way my matching sweaters and skirts, my penny loafers and pink lip gloss stood against the coarseness of her Joan Jett anger, her untied shoelaces and effortless flip-offs. I would not come to know the word ingénue or its meaning for years. My mother called girls like Tina “dirty,” and those girls called me “bitch,” not for what I did, but what I didn’t consider. I’m sure Tina dismissed and taunted me for being what she had never had a chance to be herself, and I, curious about her hard edges and thick eyeliner, felt that stepping into the dark recesses of her territory was the only way to ensure she never threatened mine. In short, I was afraid of her, of what she knew, but I was also afraid of my own not knowing. I was afraid of why those girls were considered losers just because they played a different kind of game.

***

Mrs. Andrews’ class was fourth period, lunch period, an hour and a half divided between A, B, and C lunches. While the first hour of our class ended, and Mrs. Andrews told us how to apply our toenail polish before we took a bath so that any polish on our skin would soak off or be easily removed, the boys from B lunch had finished their dry chicken fried steaks and gathered in front of the gym. I looked beyond Mrs. Andrews, where she stood before us with her hands on her hips, to where the boys stood, and watched as one shot out beyond the huddle then chased the one who had pushed him, saw them toss their heads back in laughter, unaware that their post-lunch ritual was being observed.

I was always staring out windows in school, wondering what might be going on beyond where I was and what I knew. I’d watch the lone girl clutching a folder to her chest as she hurried to class, the basketball coach strutting to the gym, the choir teacher’s husband bringing her lunch. I could exist in two places at once.

***

It started between fifth and sixth period, when I’d rush from the stuffy classroom of Mrs. Richmond’s Algebra II to the locker room for tennis practice. The boys in Algebra always leaned out of their desks to check out the visible panty lines through Mrs. Richmond’s tight, cream pants. Forget quadratic equations and solving for x, those boys were all bush, all the time. A thirteen-year-old girl could only feel like a blank slate compared to Estee Lauder and voluptuousness—a blank slate that could be carved upon by the desperate, probing fingers of quickly developing boys whose voices, muscles, whiskers, and sour scents hinted at something darker. I didn’t want to fall prey to the threat; I wanted to control it. How little I understood, how naïve it was of me to think I could.

Even so, for a period of about two months in the spring of my eighth grade year, I met one boy at a time behind the gym, just outside the door to the girls locker room. The sidewalk back there was the edge of the campus, against it only an expanse of empty field. All the tennis players, football and basketball players, every cross country member knew about my daily make-out sessions and deferred by going through the gym to the locker room, even the girls, because behind the gym, I was letting some guy I knew only by name or the fact that the year before he had sat behind me in Physical Science to French, feel, or finger me.

The first was Ron G., who had to lean down, almost doubling over to reach my five-foot frame. Jeff T. got a turn, so did an extremely developed, held-back thug named Bruce who was known to go with Tina A. There were dozens of others. A family friend, a boy I had been afraid to kiss only two years before in his backyard, got the longest turn, a whole week and felt ashamed, I could sense. Most boys had bad breath or too much Polo cologne or were too timid to do more than kiss or were too aggressive and fast and so only got one brief fling before I moved on to the next one.

I’d step into the locker room and change into my white shorts, the light blue t-shirt before heading out to the tennis court. I’d stand at the base line waiting for the first serve, the boys lurking on the basketball court, our shared secret like a lob, a ball high in the air. Eventually, it would come down or be hit back with a force that made it impossible to return.

And then, it stopped.

Maybe someone who lived in the houses across the street from the athletic fields saw what no one at the school could see or even think to see and called the office. After all, the kids who made out were usually office workers who ducked into teacher supply closets. They were the couples who openly defied Mrs. Andrews’s requests to “get your hand off of her mmm-hmmm.”

I had no boyfriend.

I had boys, a long line of them wanting to know who would be next.

***

As the year drew to a close, Mrs. Andrews started letting us leave a few minutes before the bell. We finally convinced her of the threat of long lines in the cafeteria and having to eat quickly. Ever mindful of our etiquette, she would not have “her girls” eating improperly, stuffing our mouths. To Mr. Tanner, the vice-principal, the problem was what we stuffed into our mouths. He would not let a lunch go by without telling us that the pizza and cheeseburgers, the chicken fried steak and fries would make us fat. Then none of the fine boys seated around us in the cafeteria would like us anymore.

And while being first in line at lunch had its advantages, we were focused on the walk to lunch. Some of the girls had boyfriends in B lunch, and most of us had at least one crush out there, so the extra time gave us a chance we were rarely allowed due to the random scheduling system that left best friends in different first periods or the same wise guy duo in the back of every English class. The walkway during lunch was also unsupervised, no teachers keeping guard the way they did in the hallway, no coaches on watch, no “hands off” reminders. Mrs. Andrews’s girls walked toward those boys, arms swinging. We pretended they meant nothing to us, that we hadn’t been writing their names in the notes we passed during third period or that we hadn’t written our first names next to their last names in our most sophisticated cursive just to see how it might look. Some girls stopped to talk to their boyfriends. Others, the lucky ones, heard their names being called from a huddle of boys. The rest of us carried on to lunch, hoping that tomorrow might be our day.

I was in a category of my own.

***

Since the lock-down of the gym’s back doors and a coach on guard between bells, the boys had been eyeing me in secret, aggressive ways. After all, I had been the x in their algebraic desire, and now it was as if all the answers they had once been able to easily flip to in the back of the book, those pages that had made it easy, had been ripped out. In Mrs. Richmond’s class, we had been learning about rational numbers (2, 3, 5) and irrational numbers (3.14159 . . . ). Rational numbers were created when I, one, plus one of them, one, added up to a clear sum, but when the constant was removed, the sum became an irrational one, like pi, their lust going on to infinity.

It could not go on forever.

The pre-lunch walk to the cafeteria had shifted to one of dread. I hurried past the boys, ushered through their line by leers and lewd remarks.

***

That day, Mrs. Andrews let us out even earlier than usual, and I felt the pressure of those extra minutes. By adding five minutes to the equation, the operator was no longer an addition of two constants (their aggression + my avoidance), but rather a multiplication of them. As I pushed through the double doors, I looked toward the gym to notice that the boys’ backs, even their shoulders were turned against us as if in collusion. Later, I would come to think of it the way Coach Farnsworth had explained the Alamo during Texas History—an ambush.

I sped up, my head down, my attention pressed toward the sidewalk. The boys stayed turned from me, hushed, and I thought for a moment that they had tired of me, that I could finally get by.

I didn’t get by.

Jeff T. was behind me, grabbing my arms and knocking my books and purse on the sidewalk before pulling me into the boys’ bathroom. No one ever used that bathroom; it was too dark, too dank, too dirty. I stumbled backwards into the stench of urine and fear, his open mouth on mine, his hands under my shirt. Other boys followed, at least ten of them, behind me, beside me, their bodies in my face as they grabbed, pulled, shoved tongues in my mouth and hands under my shirt, unlatching my bra, taking turns holding my arms behind my back while another’s sweaty palm splayed over my mouth to cover my screaming. I could not breathe, either from a hand over my mouth or a mouth over my mouth or the suffocation from the stale urine and released aggression.

A window above the door was cracked open, a sliver of light I kept my eyes on, perhaps to separate myself, exist on the other side of the door, exist in two places at once. I struggled against shadows and my own body’s inability to shut itself. Somehow, I broke free but only threw open the door before more hands and arms were pulling me back into the sweaty circle. My refusal, my near escape had angered their assault, incited an even more egregious attack. They were taking what they had been denied. After all, I had already given it to them.

This round, as one or two held my arms behind my back and others held my legs in a wide stance with their own black-tennis-shoed feet, hands went down my pants, my panties, and then fingers, one hand at a time, were inside me.

***

I do not remember getting free from those boys. Maybe that’s why when I think of it, I do not exist in two places at once—I’m nowhere but in that bathroom, struggling.

I do remember that the punishment for the boys in the bathroom was running extra miles at practice.

Some of them, I knew, loved to run.

***

Thirty years have passed, and I still dry my hands before flipping on the switch of the disposal.

***

Listen to Jill read her essay:

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“The stories we tell ourselves happen often to be about dying, in the most romantic, sometimes pat, often campy and necessarily truncated ways. But these stories tie up their loose ends. There’s a beginning, a climax, and a reckoning. The victim, the villain, and the refrain refresh themselves. The song remains the same, in order for us to live.”

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