Raped at eight months old: the child the world forgot

There are two successive phone calls from Manju* on Friday morning, March 20, 2020.

“Have you seen the news yet?” I have not, I confess.

“They’ve hanged Nirbhaya’s rapists,” she tells me in a rush. We discuss the executions for a couple of minutes, then hang up.

The second call comes less than a minute later, as if this was the real reason she’d called before getting waylaid by news of the hangings. “I’ve been given four schools to research for Pia* and Pari.* Will you look them up for me?”

She can’t read out the names of the schools herself— they’re in English, she explains — so sends me a photo through WhatsApp. The photo is of a dirty scrap of white ruled paper with the names of four public schools in northwest Delhi, copied verbatim from the internet, each letter standing shakily on its own and spelled out in large black scrawls. I promise her that I’ll help her and her husband find the right school for their toddler girls.

The two phone calls remind me of Manju’s twin realities — juxtaposed, yet inseparable.

If she were a normal mother with two young children to whom nothing had ever happened, she would maybe watch the news, including the coverage after Nirbhaya’s rapists’ hanging, with passive interest — at best, with as much investment as would a voyeur. She would send her girls to school before heading out to the affluent neighborhood where she cooks and cleans as a domestic worker, and then, after a long day’s work, return home to her separate cosmos.

Except, she’s not that mother.

A little over two years ago, her youngest child was raped at eight months old.

Even though the girl is almost three now, she’s still known as “that eight-month-old baby” — her parents, “that eight-month-old baby’s mother and father.”

‘Babies cry all the time’

On a Sunday morning in late January 2018, a 22-year-old Manju left their tiny shanty in northwest Delhi, like she did every morning, an hour after her 30-year-old husband, Gokul,* who works as a day laborer. She left her daughters in the care of her husband’s relatives, who live on the two floors beneath hers in a multifamily residential building common in India, where many nuclear groups within a larger family of siblings occupy separate floors.

There is only one floor above Manju’s, where Gokul’s 28-year-old nephew, Suraj, his wife, and their infant son live.

When Manju returned home that evening, she found Suraj oddly ambling in the alley outside of their building. “He came up to me and said, very strangely, ‘Chachi (Aunty), where do you keep going off to? Your girls were crying.’” Babies cry all the time, Manju thought. What is so remarkable about that?

Sensing that something was wrong, Manju raced upstairs and found Pari, then two years old, teetering on the landing outside, their front door slightly ajar. She heard ear-splitting shrieks coming from inside. “When I went in, my hands went cold,” she said. She found Pia lying in the middle of their bed, in a pool of her own blood and excrement.

Manju grabbed a confused Pari by the hand and stepped out to the landing, shouting out to Suraj. “Did you come into our room?” she shrieked. By then, Suraj was walking back up to his apartment. He was mumbling incoherently. Manju was barely able to make out some mention from him about calling his wife before he disappeared inside.

It was then that she realized what had happened to her daughter — and who had harmed her. “It couldn’t have been anyone else,” she said.

She told me she vaguely remembers the wives of Gokul’s two brothers, alerted by her shrieks, streaming into the apartment. They took one look at her screaming baby — at the blood and stool surrounding her on the bed — and determined that Pia must have just relieved herself.

One of the wives told her that it had happened because she had left her children at home and gone to work. Why hadn’t she taken better care of her children?

Manju scooped up her daughters and took them to the house of one of her clients, a kind woman who took one look at Pia and told Manju that she needed to go to a hospital — and to call the police.

Manju took Pia to the nearby Kalavati Children’s Hospital, where she was told what she had known all along — that her child had been raped.

Gokul met them at the hospital soon after.

Suraj was arrested that same day. After being questioned by the police, he confessed to raping the child while under the influence of alcohol.

Three days later, on January 31, 2018, Pia’s case reached the Supreme Court of India. A public interest litigation was brought before the Court asking for compensation for the family as well as for the federal government to ensure that cases involving crimes against minors reached completion within six months of a police report, a First Information Report (FIR), being filed.

Delhi Legal Services Authority (DLSA) later informed the top court that Rs 75,000 (just shy of USD $1,000) in interim compensation had been given to Pia’s parents. The Court also directed the government to acquiesce to the petition and change federal law, which it was only prompted to do when, months later — in April 2018 — details of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, India, again shocked and enraged the public. The government then responded to the petition initially put forth at the start of Pia’s trial, amending existing law to include the death penalty for those convicted of raping children under 12 years old.

At the Court’s directive, Pia — then in critical condition — was visited by doctors from Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), one of the country’s premier medical institutes, to assess the operations she needed and whether the local hospital would be able to perform the first of them. Once approved by the AIIMS team, Pia underwent an initial three-hour corrective surgery at the Kalavati Children’s Hospital to repair a perineal tear she suffered during the assault. Eventually, she was transferred to AIIMS, where she would undergo another two reconstructive surgeries.

‘She doesn’t deserve this’

The morning of April 17, 2018, people were milling in and out of the AIIMS wards, blue scrubs coalescing into the myriad colors on every patient and visitor. Pia and her mother checked into the hospital the night before, in preparation for surgery that morning. Gokul was seated cross-legged on the floor of one of the Institute’s many labyrinthine corridors, cradling a petulant and restless Pari. He turned to me. “My own brothers and their wives wanted me to take the case back. They said I shouldn’t complain against one of our own, that it would bring dishonor to my family,” he said, grieving both for his daughter and for his family’s intimate betrayal.

“Well, none of them are here, are they?”

Not a single family member came to visit Pia while she was in the hospital. “I’m never going to get over that,” Gokul said. “Even if you didn’t want to get involved, shouldn’t you have seen your own niece? She was lying there for weeks!”

Gokul was a timid father, a far cry from the figure of maternal scorn and vengeance that his diminutive and young wife had begun to embody. Manju sat in on every one of Pia’s medical examinations, spending nights with Pia in the hospital bed before her daughter was taken into surgery.

Gokul couldn’t bear to see his little one like that, he said — under gloved hands and scalpels. “She doesn’t deserve this,” he said often and softly, his face hidden behind his fingers.

Pia’s rape had caused a perineal tear: a laceration in her vaginal and rectal wall, causing her to urinate and defecate from the same “opening.” Doctors at AIIMS had sealed that laceration and created an artificial opening in her tiny lower abdomen for stool to pass.

The surgery that day would finally close that opening, after doctors determined that her normal functions would be restored. But her doctors decided at the last minute to wait, and the surgery was rescheduled to the afternoon of April 25.

When the day finally came, I was allowed to see the baby before her surgery. Pia, still not even a year old, had been bathed and cleaned in preparation; she looked absolutely pristine, swathed in blue robes that she swam in. She wasn’t crying, but she held onto her mother with a vice-like grip. It would be months before she would let go, perhaps, after she’d regained some sense of safety, even allowing herself to be lifted into the air by strangers again.

Moments later, a nurse came into the room to retrieve her, and she was escorted away.

It was her final surgery. On April 27, Pia went home in the arms of her parents, cowed down by sheaves of cotton and bottles of antiseptic provided to clean her wounds. Manju and Gokul resignedly made their way back up the stairs to their apartment, returning to the scene of the crime with the devastating realization that they could never trust anyone at home again.

An (almost) echo of Nirbhaya

The story of the eight-month-old baby and her horrific rape traveled overseas and made headlines around the globe, inviting both disgust and pity — much like a similar case out of India that shocked the world six years before.

On the evening of December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student boarded a bus at New Delhi’s Saket. She was gang raped by a group of men, other passengers, as the bus continued on its route around the sleepy metropolis for hours. She was eventually thrown out of the bus and died in the hospital several days later. Her story sent a tsunami of shockwaves across the country and — almost overnight — prompted India to overhaul its criminal justice system. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013, also known as the Anti-Rape Bill, was born, changing a number of existing laws around rape and sexual offenses, such as broadening the definition of rape and instituting an automatic presumption of “no consent” at the victim’s word.

The woman student became known as Nirbhaya, meaning “fearless” in Urdu.

Nirbhaya’s trial may have reached a relatively swift conclusion by India’s legal standards —convictions were handed down the following year, in 2013 — but appeals rolled on for years. Nirbhaya’s rapists were eventually hanged on March 20, 2020, at dawn.

“If Nirbhaya’s trial reached a verdict, Pia’s will too, won’t it?” Manju asks me over the phone. “I want Suraj to be punished. And I want it to happen before Pia grows up,” she says. “I don’t want either of my daughters to harbor any memory of this.”

The media, for its part, had already forgotten. The cameras went away, and the steady stream of reporters petered out to a trickle. By the time Pia was released from the hospital, the story of the eight-month-old baby born to poor parents, who was allegedly raped by her cousin and lived, no longer interested the news cycle.

While Pia’s case had the same markers of a Nirbhaya-level cultural shift, her case did not result in death. Nirbhaya’s body — violated, bloodied, and discarded — was thrown out into a cold night, on a street where no one stopped to help her. Her eventual death only catapulted that collective sense of grief into universal rage that galvanized the entire world in calling for justice. But Pia survived, her recovery too long to sustain the public’s outrage on her behalf.

Horrifically enough, the public’s disparate responses to varying degrees of sexualized violence speaks volumes about its voyeuristic tendencies — as well as its lack of sustained empathy. The more graphic, the more immediate, the more “brutal” the details of the rape, the more excitable the public interest. The converse is sadly true.

Justice remains an elusive dream

In the last two years, Manju and Gokul have been to at least eight hearings, their personal testimonies often spilling over into subsequent hearings. Manju’s testimony was given intermittently over five months in 2019.

The next court date for Pia’s trial has been pushed out due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were told April 16, but it cannot happen anymore,” Manju tells me over the phone, after we talk about the execution. She sounds exasperated, but by now, she’s used to waiting. Sometimes, she waits two to three months between summons. At that speed, a verdict could be some time off.

Manju anxiously wants to know if they will be asked by the judge about what punishment they think should be given to the accused.

When I tell her that that probably wouldn’t happen, she sounds disappointed. “I want him behind bars for life.”

Manju remembers by the end of the phone call that she doesn’t need the school names right away. “The [coronavirus] scare will mean no admissions right now,” she muses.

I can hear slivers of daily life on the other line. “I’ve learnt to cook palak ki subzi (spinach curry) in the past few days,” I hear Gokul joke. “Necessity is the mother of all invention!”

Manju wants me to hear Pia’s voice. She holds the phone to Pia’s ear, who stutters, “How are you? Won’t you come soon?” in sing-song Hindi, parroting her mother. Somehow, this young rape survivor, nearly three years old now, speaking in full sentences makes me realize, like nothing else could, just how much time has passed.

*Names of the survivor and her family have been changed to protect identity