Sea of Innocence

by Desai, Kishwar

  As the camera zoomed in, I noticed that her clothes were torn, and a streak of something dark, perhaps blood, was visible on one leg. She could have been drugged or drunk, it was difficult to say. Though it was dark, her blonde hair and slightly plump, full figure now seemed familiar to me.

  ‘Liza,’ I whispered, and then spoke her name out aloud again, as though she could hear me.

  She staggered along the sand, falling down and then getting up again. The person shooting the video made no attempt to go closer or help her. Though the sea was not quite visible in the dark, the steady roar of the waves as they hit against the shore and the hiss with which they receded was audible.

  Suddenly a man appeared from the side and put his arms around her. He was formally dressed in a shirt and trousers and his back was towards the camera. She struggled as he tried to kiss her and then fell down once more. Again she pushed herself up and somehow kept walking. But then he caught her and half carried and half dragged her to a row of deckchairs. Her hands moved feebly in the air as she tried to resist and she moaned as he roughly pushed her onto one of the chairs.

  He pulled her legs up towards him and pushed his hand between them. In pain she screamed, ‘No, no . . . don’t!’ But then her voice was muffled, as another man joined the first and covered her mouth with one hand, pulling her arms over her head with the other. Though she struggled to get free, it was obvious that she had been overwhelmed.

  The second man seemed to be inserting his fingers into her mouth enjoying her helplessness as she turned her head this way and that. Even though he was facing the camera, the light was behind him and so it was difficult to make out what he looked like. He was dressed more casually, in a t-shirt and boxer shorts. He seemed taller and better built than the other man. He kept merging into the darkness behind. I was reminded of the other video.

  ‘Come on, come on, baby. You know you want it.’

  The words were distant, broken, but easily heard in the silence of the night, carried on the breeze.

  The first man had now dropped his trousers and thrust himself upon her.

  As he pumped harder and harder, the girl’s legs twitched. Her body twisted and turned, though any movement from her was now barely visible.

  She began to go limp, but as soon as the first man finished, the other one walked around and lifted her legs. Even before he pushed into her, her head fell to one side, and her arms flopped down like that of a rag doll. This time she did not scream. She had probably lost consciousness. The man did not stop raping her.

  The screen went blank again.

  My head began to pound. Who could have sent this to me?

  It was a much more frightening video than the first. The first one, though sinister, might have been a bunch of delinquent kids just fooling around. This footage was extremely brutal and explicit.

  The phone slipped through my hand onto the rug as I fell back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I felt sick and nauseous, as though it was I who had been molested.

  So she had been attacked twice but this time it was far, far worse. Now I genuinely began to fear for her. Could she have really survived this ghastly rape, in silence and secrecy, especially since there was no record of it anywhere? In the press or otherwise.

  And, yet, quite to the contrary, Marian had told me that Liza had been spotted in Panjim, earlier today, looking fine.

  Could she have been sexually assaulted, and yet appear again as though nothing had happened?

  I got up and took out a bottle of whisky, which I kept hidden among the clothes in my suitcase. Right now I needed to get back my equilibrium any way possible. I poured a stiff shot into a glass and then knocked it back.

  As the familiar heat ran down my throat, my mind began to function again.

  There were at least three points which puzzled me.

  Firstly, it was now certain that someone knew I was looking for Liza, despite the secrecy that Amarjit had wanted to maintain.

  Secondly, the video came from an anonymous source, so someone wanted to either tip me off, or scare me away.

  Thirdly, Amarjit was unaware of this video, or else I would have heard from him, I was certain of that. So I would have to send it to him straightaway, and ask him to urgently email me all the information he had about this case.

  I looked outside; the light was rapidly fading along the beach, as the sun sank into the sea. My enthusiasm for going alone to Fernando’s was also diminishing. I was completely shaken up by this latest development.

  Perhaps that was the sender’s intention.

  But now I was even more determined not to give up.

  This video made it clear that Durga had been right. I had to find Liza somehow.

  Chapter 6

  The news from Delhi was not good at all.

  The young woman who had been brutally raped in a moving bus by six drunken men was sinking. More details emerged of her deteriorating condition. All her reproductive organs had been ruptured and her intestines pulled out by one of the rapists with his bare hands, after he had inserted an iron rod inside her. In the multiple surgeries that followed only five per cent of her intestines were retained. People around the country were praying for her survival, and poignantly, she, too, had told her mother ‘I want to live’.

  It was a horrific case, made more macabre by the fact that the rapists seemingly had no fear of being caught by the police, even though the bus was driven through various checkpoints in the city for two and a half hours while they were assaulting her. Had there not been pressure from the media and from women’s groups, it was thought unlikely that the men who had allegedly committed such bestial acts would ever have been caught.

  It reinforced my fears about what had happened with Liza. And I was puzzled by the secrecy around it all. Why did Amarjit want to prevent the story from coming out in the media?

  According to published records, more than eighty women were raped in the country every day. Would Liza’s case create such an international storm that it was best hushed up? Why was Amarjit delaying the arrest of those young men in the video, especially as some of them could have been identified by now? Why had he asked me to conduct an informal investigation? Could it be that the drug mafia was involved in her rape and subsequent disappearance? Or was it someone even more powerful?

  My suspicions were being raised because the morning newspapers contained equally grim editorials about discussions taking place in the Goa parliament on all these subjects. While one minister feared that Goa was becoming the rape capital of the world, another member of parliament had spoken of how, in a period of three years, almost every week there had been at least one death of a foreigner in Goa. The highest number of victims were British, followed by Russians. While many of the deaths were assumed to be accidental, it was also suggested that at least some could have been drug related. And it was pointed out that many of those who died were young.

  So it was not surprising, another editorial noted, that when the Central Bureau of Investigation was called in to consider the Scarlett Keeling case, they found LSD and cocaine were openly and easily available on Anjuna beach, where the 15-year-old had spent much of her time. In fact, in one of the shacks, cocaine was kept under the plastic tablecloth on the kitchen table. Lines were cut and doled out from there, and on the night that poor Scarlett stumbled into the shack at around 4 am, reportedly quite intoxicated, an eyewitness recounted her being offered even more coke.

  A helper at the shack allegedly confessed to the team that he used to chop lines every night, to be snorted by guests as well as other staff members – everybody from the cook to the barman to the shack manager. And around Christmas and New Year, extra cocaine would be brought in to fuel the parties. All of this would be hidden away in the kitchen, and taken out as required. It seemed to be a time-worn tradition.

  So, I thought back to Scarlett’s mother’s allegations. She had said that there was an open drug trade in Goa, in which politicians, the police and the shack owners h
ad all colluded. She had accused them of forcing Scarlett into taking hard drugs. But later the din caused by these accusations died away.

  Perhaps it was inevitable. The situation turned into a farce when the then Home Minister of Goa claimed that all the allegations were lies and Goa was actually a drug-free zone.

  But off the record everyone accepted that there might be some truth in the accusations made by Fiona MacKeown.

  I wondered if anything had changed at all in the last five years.

  Trudging along the smaller Vagator beach, I knew it would be another harrowing day. Yesterday’s video kept playing in my mind over and over again. I heard Liza’s voice in a non-stop loop in my head, begging the man to stop, and wished I could erase the sound from my thoughts, but it just got louder and louder. The mobile phone bearing the video weighed like a ton of bricks in my handbag.

  And when I shut my eyes, I could hear the screams of the girl in the Delhi bus. Why had these young girls become the innocent targets of such bizarre violence?

  I watched a young fair-skinned girl build a sandcastle near the sea. She was dressed like a tiny Barbie doll, with her matching yellow bikini top and bottom. Very sweet and innocent, but how long would it last? And at what stage would she be converted into a plaything, a sexual object? Just a few years ago, a 9-year-old Russian girl had been raped while playing on these very public beaches.

  No matter what our daughters eventually became, it was the rapidity of their sexualization that was troubling. I thought of all the victims of violence that I had met over the years. Their bodies were never seen as their own. It seemed almost as though girls today were caught between peer pressure, commerce and tradition, depending on which part of the world they grew up in. At one end, extremely liberal attitudes could be responsible for their sexual exploitation, and at the other, they lost their childhood due to ironclad tradition.

  Either way they would be victimized by their own culture. Young girls in the US and UK had been known to have sex and even babies as young as eleven, while in some parts of India little girls were forced into child marriage when they should have been at play or in school.

  I wondered whether we could really protect them from growing up too fast? Or was it, as I had found in Durga’s case, a constant negotiation with societal norms?

  My mind kept going back to the story of Scarlett Keeling.

  According to her diaries and emails later published in newspapers, she had been sexually active for a few years before she died. But how much of this apparent seeking out of sex was actually voluntary? She admitted in one of her emails that her Goan boyfriend treated her as though she were only interested in him for the ‘sex or the money’. For a pretty and sensitive 15-year-old to be made to feel so mercenary and manipulative would have been frightening. She was, after all, still a child, who needed emotional reassurance.

  Just a few nights before she was killed, an email she sent out read:

  I wen to a beach party . . . last night took sum md an lsd and xstasy I was soooo fuked man an the police raided it an . . . I got dragged away by some weird man an everyone else had legged it an I was fukin buzzin man so I got a taxi back [to a shack she used to go to with her family] and slept ther but the boys showed me some hardcore porn movis on a phone then they all took it in turns tryin 2 rape me an I feel so shit right now . . .

  It was the story of a young girl leading an artificial and very adult life, where she was seemingly pushed frenetically into one disturbing situation after another.

  My gloomy thoughts persisted, so I went to my favourite shack where I could get a good view of the sea and ordered some scrambled eggs and a bottle of beer. It was still early in the morning but I needed to either be more optimistic or become completely numb to everything happening around me. I sent a message to Marian to tell her I was back at the cheerfully named Yankee Doodle.

  My reverie was broken by a sudden blast of a Bollywood track played loudly on a mobile phone. It came from a group of Indian college students who were sitting close by. Equally suddenly, a boy and a girl leapt up and began dancing, complete with suggestive pelvic and bust movements, as per Hindi films.

  Their spontaneity was the perfect example of another glaring hypocrisy, or at least, that is how I felt. The girl who was dancing with abandon expressed a freedom which probably did not really exist for many like her. Because – while girls were allowed freedom up to a point, their sexuality was still something which the family controlled. And any transgression could mean the severest of punishments, even death.

  Had both Scarlett and Liza – and now this poor Indian girl in Delhi – become victims of this fatal perception of what girls should and should not do? Or was there something deeper, larger and much more dangerous and organized, which made Liza’s case different, as Amarjit had hinted?

  While I tried to sort out my thoughts, Marian arrived.

  I insisted she shared my scrambled eggs and beer, as usual overcome with pity when I looked at her skeletal frame. No doubt she felt equally sorry for my rather generously proportioned figure, which could politely be called voluptuous. She took a tiny bit of toast and egg onto a plate, pushing it around without permitting a morsel to actually reach her lips.

  This morning she seemed fairly distracted, opening and shutting her handbag and smoking far more than she should have, even by my standards.

  She looked more and more worn out. In a few days she would, no doubt, disappear in a puff of smoke. She was barely twenty-four, but seemed much older. Her sister’s disappearance really seemed to be taking a toll. There was no doubt that her apparent vulnerability prevented me from asking the really tough questions, Indeed, I felt at a distinct disadvantage trying to cross-examine someone so frail and despairing.

  I also felt frustrated, since I couldn’t tell her about the latest video, or the previous one. I was still waiting for clearance from Amarjit.

  He would have seen the beach video by now but there was no response so far. I imagined he might have also been puzzled about when and where the video had been shot – and crucially who had shot it? That person, after all, could be very valuable for us and an important eyewitness.

  Marian’s uneasiness had been transmitted to me, and I too began to feel a little queasy. Excusing myself, I went out of the shack to still my anxiety and to try to call Amarjit, but there was no answer.

  Giving up, I joined Marian once more. After eating our breakfast, we walked together along the beach towards Fernando’s.

  On the way she suggested we should take a small detour and climb up the densely forested hill, just bordering the shacks. Perhaps, she said, I should also look around the small guest house in which she had shared a room with Liza. However, she cautioned me that people might not be very helpful and that I shouldn’t feel disheartened if no one parted with any information.

  ‘There is a general desire to avoid trouble. Everyone here is closely connected to each other; you may have noticed that – especially the beach boys, the police, the shack owners and many of the workers. Some of the politicians in Goa were beach boys once upon a time, or have connections here, too, so they have their own compulsions. They have all grown up in the same village and gone to the same school. And now they work for each other. Doing the good stuff and the bad stuff together. And because it’s their own bad stuff, we, as outsiders, can’t criticize anyone.’

  Obviously since she had stayed here with her sister; her sadness was very apparent today.

  ‘And so while things are going well, they all become your best friends. But when things go wrong, they simply forget about you, and you are blamed for everything. Particularly when you need their help. That’s when most of them develop amnesia.’ She sounded very bitter.

  When we reached the guest house, up a tiny winding path, she said she would prefer not to enter, and would wait for me outside.

  Almost hidden beneath her large straw hat, she wandered down to a nearby grotto containing a statue of Mother Mary, and sat on the
cement bench in front of it. The grotto had been painted a dazzling white, and the sculpture itself, set in the recess, was colourful, dressed in blue robes, cradling a plump baby Jesus. As with most Christian icons in this part of the world, the colour of the skin and hair was much darker, the cheeks were highlighted in an unnaturally healthy red, while the baby Jesus had a shining halo of bright gold. Someone had taken a lot of care over the upkeep of the grotto. It had been built just last year, according to the blue plaque.

  Marian’s hands were clasped together as though in prayer. Still feeling a little unwell myself, I couldn’t prevent a surge of sympathy.

  I could understand how Goa could make one turn to religion. Yesterday even I, a strong atheist, could not resist lighting a candle inside a church. My mother would be thrilled at my foray into spirituality, though she might not be very happy if I became a Roman Catholic.

  I noticed another sign that stated the grotto had been donated to the area ‘By the kindness of Mr Victor D’Silva, MLA’. It was a name that cropped up quite frequently in the local papers. I made a mental note to find out more about him and why he had chosen this slightly rocky outcrop for a grotto. It was an odd location.

  I walked up to the optimistically named Cozee Home, a gravity-defying, steeply built set of rooms painted in lurid blue. The complex was screened by a thick cluster of palm trees, so that it wasn’t easily visible till you were upon it. The entrance was decorated with bright orange plastic marigolds, and a large wooden cross.

  Two very svelte-looking women in skimpy bikinis, with beach bags and dark glasses, brushed past me on their way out of Cozee Home, but for once I wasn’t envious of their figures. I was just worried about them. I hoped they would have a safe and happy day on the beach.

  Obviously nothing would alleviate my morose mood today not even the colourful sarongs and fish keychains dangling on one side of the desk. Usually I was attracted to kitsch like a magpie towards a shiny coin, but it had little effect on me today. Rows of lights twinkled over a framed poster of Jesus Christ looking heavenwards on the wall behind the reception desk. The owner of Cozee Home seemed determined to emphasize his Catholic roots.