Storyteller

by Zoe Daniel

  We’re lucky with the weather, which in this part of Australia can vary wildly even in the summertime. Every day begins clear and blue and not too hot. Arkie and Pearl have never outgrown the tendency to wake at dawn, so even after I get around to putting up curtains, they’re still up with the birds. The kookaburras become an alarm clock in that silvery light just before the sun.

  I’m usually the last one up. I adore the slow, lazy mornings in my pyjamas, lying in bed listening to the sound of the sea and then sitting on the front deck with a cup of coffee and nowhere else to be.

  A few days before we have to pack up and leave for Thailand, I get a call. It’s Foreign Correspondent wondering if I’m available to go to India.

  When we get back to Bangkok I have the first of the IVF injections before I get on a plane with David. He’s slightly distracted because his wife is about to have a baby. We discuss required baby paraphernalia and I agree to sell him our cot and pram. It’s a strange decision considering what’s going on behind the scenes with me, but it’s an indication of how I think things will play out. I have no confidence that IVF will work for us.

  On the plane, David and I meet Indian producer Simi Chakrabarti and Foreign Correspondent’s Mav Dineen, who’s flown in from Sydney. Unusually, apart from David it’s an all-female crew, but that’s appropriate.

  The brutal rape and murder of a young woman has sparked protests across New Delhi and attracted international attention. The story I read about in the papers over the holidays has put the country on trial, calling into question its endemic sexual violence against women and girls. In India, a woman is raped every twenty minutes.

  Jyoti, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, had been out to see The Life of Pi with a male friend. They were making their way home from the cinema at a modern, upmarket shopping centre when they got on a bus and began a journey into an abyss of pain and fear. Six men, who were apparently on a mission to run amok, raped her. She was gored with an iron bar. She and her friend were beaten, thrown off onto the side of the road and left for dead.

  ‘In the hospital I held her hand and she looked at me and started crying. I told her, “Don’t cry, everything will be all right,”’ says her father, Badrinath Singh, at his family’s simple home in suburban Delhi.

  Jyoti was flown to a hospital in Singapore. ‘The doctor said there is nothing inside her. Your daughter may survive for two days – but in fact she should not be alive at all. And I understood. How can she survive if there is nothing inside?’

  We’re talking in Jyoti’s room, a tiny whitewashed basement with a cement floor and a barred window that peeks out just above street level. A ball rolls past, followed by little feet in pursuit, as children play a game of cricket outside. Jyoti’s father sits on his daughter’s bed. He’s obviously weary of talking to reporters but he forces himself on, refusing to allow the story to die with her and pushing for some sort of justice or at least change. It’s not just about Jyoti for him.

  Against tradition and unwritten law, she’s been named in the media. He explains why. ‘It is not our fault, it’s not the girls’ fault – but because of shame they are lost in the darkness. My daughter did nothing wrong. Other girls who also suffered such atrocities did nothing wrong – but our society says they have to hide. To us that would be cowardice. I feel like a dead person. Sure I’m walking around but I’m not really here.’

  I’ve asked for an interview with Jyoti’s mother because as a mother myself I want to hear her speak about her daughter. She’s not up to it. As we speak to Mr Singh in Jyoti’s bedroom, her mother is in bed in the next room, so broken that she can’t get up.

  But one of Jyoti’s brothers tells me that she would like to see me, so I go inside and sit on the bed, accompanied by our producer, Simi. David starts to follow but I ask him to stay outside with the camera. Jyoti’s mother is so very frail. She’s wearing a sari and covered with blankets. She sits up, takes my hand and talks about Jyoti, with tears running down her face. Simi translates, also in tears.

  It seems that Jyoti was the leader in this family. Clever, ambitious and focused, she held all of their hopes. Her parents and brothers are completely shattered by her death, and the brutality behind it.

  Her younger brother tells me coldly that he wants to see her rapists killed. His icy, brittle rage is frightening. I worry for him, and how he will ever get past it.

  The crime has sparked questions about the reasons for violence against women in India, the ambivalence of the police and the courts, and the general disregard for females, who are so little valued that they’re frequently aborted, as I learnt when covering the conjoined twins.

  Some point the finger at poor slum dwellers – like Ram Singh, the bus driver and alleged ringleader in Jyoti’s case – accusing them of class-based attacks on middle-class girls.

  When we visit Singh’s tiny shanty in a Delhi slum, it’s padlocked and gated, tucked at the back end of a skinny alleyway crammed with houses. Residents peer out of doorways and then dart furtively behind curtains as we follow the snaking cement between their homes, stepping over trickles of soapy, dirty water. The bus driver’s neighbours shake their heads in dismay and reject the shame he has brought on their community. He will later commit suicide in prison.

  But as we soon see, the attacks are frequently the other way around. Lower-caste women have no power or recourse against assault by upper-caste men.

  We visit Reshma (not her real name), a sixteen-year-old dalit or lower-caste girl, whose gang rape was filmed on a mobile phone by her upper-caste attackers and then shown around her village. ‘They took turns,’ she tells me. ‘One by one they raped me. And one of them phoned their friends to come and join them. In all, I think there were twelve or more. Some men even did it twice.’

  We do the interview in a room at her grandmother’s house. She can’t be at home any more because she’s the target of so much village gossip, and worse. When we arrive there’s a mob of police waiting for us. They’re not here for her protection – they’re concerned we’re covering her case. Seven of Reshma’s accused rapists are from powerful upper-caste families.

  She’s being bullied and intimidated to withdraw her complaint, and she tells me that she fears being killed. ‘In Haryana this happens to lower-caste communities. You can clearly see that in most rape cases the girls are lower caste. My father said we would complain and he took me to the police station. On the way there, the boys threatened him. They said they would kill us both if we complained. So we came back home. From then on Papa was very disturbed.’ The pressure and shame were too much for Reshma’s father, who killed himself.

  Her lawyer, Rajat Kalsan, says her fear is real. ‘Yes, she’s truly speaking … she’s truly speaking because from the caste that the accused belong … they are both from the dominant caste. The chief minister of Haryana is from the dominant caste, the police chief of Haryana is from the dominant class and most of the ministers, high police officers, administrative officers are from the same caste. That is why our girl is saying that she may be killed.’

  Reshma is very young and our communication is limited – she speaks only a little English. Yet we manage to talk about a few things, like what she plans to do with her life. She wants to be a lawyer. For the moment, though, she’s just a frightened and shy teenage girl.

  She comments on my jewellery. My bracelet, a gift from my father, carries charms to represent moments in my life – a giraffe for Africa, a crocodile for Darwin, a crying baby and a pearl. She studies a bronze disc that hangs around my neck on a leather strap. It’s the charm that I bought in Cambodia, the one I took with me to cover the stampede, a symbol of female empowerment.

  I take it off and give it to her when we leave. ‘For strength,’ I whisper.

  Gang raped at sixteen, and then to lose your father to suicide: how do you ever recover from that?

  Jyoti’s case has given women and girls like Reshma the courage to speak out.

  The actor Leeza Mangal
das, who is making a hard-edged, gritty film about rape, sums up the prevailing mentality. ‘What makes rape such a prevalent crime is that most men don’t think that they will ever have to face consequences. They just do not anticipate a fight.’

  So what’s changed?

  ‘Even in the last year there have been cases of extremely brutal, awful incidents of rape that didn’t create the sort of revolution this one did. So now with this one case – how many leaves can fall on a roof before it caves in? In this case maybe was the last straw.’

  Mangaldas’ film revolves around a violent revenge fantasy in which the victim physically takes on her rapists. But in the real world, the victims are only seeking basic justice.

  Zahira (not her real name) was thirteen when she was gang raped and tortured. She’s now twenty-one. Like Reshma, she stays behind closed doors because of shame and persecution by the community. For eight years she hasn’t been to school. ‘I have lost all my friends and I have lost my childhood,’ she says when we talk at the house of her lawyer. She studies by correspondence.

  Her case is still in the courts because one of the six accused, the upper-caste nephew of a politician, remains free. Yet she has paid for eight years for being a victim. ‘He needs to get his punishment. He is free because some people are trying to save him because he has a lot of money. But I will not give up. We are not the ones who are wrong. We can’t bring back what we have lost, but we can fight at least. We tolerate everybody’s words, we get taunts and nasty comments when we venture out, so that’s why I want to be strong, come forward and show that I can fight for myself.’

  Zahira and her family have faced constant threats and intimidation to drop the case. Money has been put on the table, but the family will not accept it. ‘This fight that we are fighting,’ her father says, ‘if it results in a good law, or those guys get severe punishment, then at least there’ll be fear in everyone, so such crimes will not be repeated. That’s why we fight – not just for us, it is for everybody, for other women, for the country.’

  The family walk home flanked by police. Everyone stares as they pass.

  EIGHTEEN

  David and I land in Penang very late on a Friday. We check in to our hotel at about midnight and I hop in the enormous claw-foot tub. It sits at the centre of the giant black- and white-tiled bathroom, positioned under the gentle swoosh of a black metal ceiling fan. The room is furnished in old Penang style: classic printed textiles and dark wood with elegant photographs of Georgetown life. Out the windows, lights sparkle off the water and around the city as it sleeps. The shoot is not even underway and I’m already exhausted, but I can’t resist such an inviting bath in such a lovely room, even if it is the middle of the night.

  Penang is one of my favourite places. The last time I visited was when I did the interview for the job in Bangkok with such mixed feelings. Rowan and the kids were with me and we explored Georgetown together, me pushing Pearl in a pram and Rowan carrying Arkie on his shoulders. Now I’m about to come out the other end of the posting and my feelings are equally conflicted.

  Since India I’ve been juggling IVF around breaking news that sends me out of Thailand at short notice. I’m now waiting to see if the long and draining IVF process has worked. I’ve gone to Penang against doctor’s orders to rest, but feeling that I have no choice.

  I crawl into the soft bed, which is covered with crisp white linen and a quilt. I feel rotten, with the symptoms of my previous pregnancies strongly evident, so I’m hopeful, but I know it could just be the side effects of the IVF drugs.

  The next morning I wake up vomiting and a home pregnancy test is positive.

  The Malaysian election has been long awaited and should have been done and dusted by now, but there’s been a politically motivated delay. The government has left it as late as possible to call the poll, which finally falls in May.

  We’re shooting a feature on Penang because it’s been held by the opposition since the last election in 2008, the first time the ruling party’s stranglehold on government was really challenged. Malaysia’s Barisan Nasional coalition has been in power since independence almost six decades ago. The political system is heavily skewed in the government’s favour, with a series of gerrymanders that mean it needs far fewer votes to win its rural heartland seats than the opposition needs to win the urban constituencies where its main support lies. The mass media is entirely government controlled and blatantly anti-opposition.

  An apolitical pre-election campaign by the pressure group Bersih has focused on corruption within the electoral process, including repeat voting, stacking of voting rolls with the names of fake and dead voters, and ballot-box stuffing.

  Nevertheless, the election is expected to be the closest ever and Penang provides a neat profile of how the opposition would govern if it managed to take power.

  I meet their chief minister, Lim Guan Eng, on the hustings. ‘I think it’s important that we’ve got … a record of good governance that delivers,’ he tells me. ‘And I think it has given us not only credibility, but also confidence that we can do a better job at the federal level.’

  Lim is mobbed by opposition supporters as we follow him around one of Penang’s many wet markets. Meat vendors lean across to greet him with bloodied hands and fruit sellers snap smiling photographs with him in front of piles of bananas and pineapples.

  As Penang is very much opposition heartland these days, Lim is preaching to the converted in his criticisms of the ruling party, which has warned voters that electing the opposition will compound division in Malaysia and cause potential racial violence. Lim says, ‘Instead of being a contest of principles, ideas and policies, they have turned this into a contest of who can lie better, who can hate deeper and of course who threatens fiercer. I think it’s not what the people want. What the people want … is a better vision for Malaysia because Malaysia deserves better.’

  It’s horribly hot and Lim is wiping sweat from his face with a washcloth as he makes his way around the market. David is in the middle of the scrum and our fixer, Alan, and I loiter nearby, watching the crowd as it moves with Lim en masse up and down the narrow aisles between stalls.

  The Penang chief of Barisan Nasional, Teng Chang Yeow, admits that this campaign has had its unpleasant moments, particularly in relation to the exploitation of fears about racial division. ‘This country is formed from very different components of races,’ he tells me, ‘so the chaotic situation can be easily exploited. Both are playing such games. I don’t deny that, yes, we are part and parcel of the game. I know it’s not right.’

  ‘But is there actually a risk of unrest or is that just a political tactic, as you say?’ I ask.

  ‘Part of it, part of it. Because we are cautioning the people: look, this country is so divided now.’

  I’m still not feeling well. A second pregnancy test has shown a positive result and I’m trying to take it as easy as I can until I can get to KL and make time for a blood test. I’ve sent a hurried email to ask my doctor what he thinks, and he has replied – congratulations. I smile inside but there’s something holding me back. I’m not quite ready to believe it.

  We keep shooting. David, Alan and I hit the road into Perak state, part of the rural heartland that was once made up of safe government constituencies before falling to the opposition at the last election and then reverting to the ruling coalition after post-election defections.

  I’m feeling pretty uncomfortable, with a lot of lower abdominal pain, but I don’t think much of it because I had similar sensations during the early part of my pregnancy with Pearl. And I enjoy road travel. It allows me to see where and how people live, giving me a sense of place and a deep understanding of what I’m reporting on.

  We stop in a small fishing village and meet a local candidate, Chua Yee Ling, who is taking on a knife-edge constituency for the opposition. ‘Ini kalilah, Ubah!’ – ‘This time, change!’ she calls out as together we head upriver by boat.

  At the last election the opp
osition took the seat she’s contesting by just 550 votes. ‘Malaysia, over fifty-five years, we are only under one ruling government, and you can see cases like corruption, and the imbalanced development of the urban cities and the rural areas,’ she says. ‘So this is a fishing village, one of the rural area constituencies where the people here, they are looking for work, development and more job opportunities because most of the young people here, they can’t find jobs in their home town and they have to go to Singapore, to other countries … It’s a sad thing because they have to leave their home town, leave their parents, so this is one of my challenges as well. How to actually develop the place and we can have more job opportunities for the young people.’

  Perak is a farm-based state and while about a quarter of its population is of Chinese descent and will probably vote for the opposition again, it remains dominated by Malays, who traditionally vote for the ruling coalition. Barisan Nasional’s bright blue flags and posters dominate the state’s roadside campaign booths, which line the verges as we drive through villages and towns.

  We meet Yusuf Tohir, an elderly ruling party supporter who’s manning a booth. ‘We, the residents of Pokok Asam, 100 per cent support BN because a lot of aid has been given to all the villages here.’ The government has handed out cash in the lead up to the election to shore up its support base. Low income earners like farmers have been a key target.

  Considering everything that skews the electoral system in Malaysia, it’s hard to make a prediction about who will win. I continue to believe that it will be difficult for the opposition to get over the line, but developing both sides of the story is not easy because of limited access to the government. They’re not very interested in talking to the foreign media.