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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• Eleven

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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“Even for those with the determination to endure these films and find value in them, the experience, whatever the intellectual payoff, is inevitably tinged with a feeling of troubling complicity and fallenness: Am I self-hating? A misogynist? A sadist? A pervert? Is human nature really so ugly, so capable of ugliness? Did I enjoy that? Does having gotten something out of that movie make me a “a bad person”?

Read more here.

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