Your Dreams Are Mine Now (26 page)

Arjun stood alone on the road when his phone rang. It was Saloni.

‘Any news of Rupali, Arjun?’ she was sobbing.

‘No,’ he sighed.

Behind him were his friends who had returned after searching in every possible direction. All of them had been stunned into silence.

In front of him the road stretched into the distance.

‘Where are you, my love?’ he sighed exasperatedly into the dark night. The silence surrounding them was dreadful.

Twenty-Five

Twenty-four hours later . . .

‘The patient was brought in unconscious. The initial tests have confirmed rape. Plus she had gruesome injuries. The idea was to leave her unrecognizable so she wouldn’t be able to give a statement if she survived.

‘She had a fractured skull and sustained severe head injuries that led to blood clotting in her brain. It appeared she had been hit on the head by either a brick or something heavy. There is also a possibility that someone smashed an alcohol bottle over her head. Looks like the men who raped her had been drinking. After raping her they tried to kill her. Under the influence of alcohol they wouldn’t have been able to make out if she was dead or not. Either way, they left her to die.

‘She hadn’t succumbed to her injuries. But she couldn’t be called alive either. The barbarity of the crime has shocked us. The patient suffered very deep cuts on her left breast and both her thighs. This led to significant blood loss from her body. But worst of all were the cuts on and around her private parts that have been disfigured beyond imagination. It appears they stabbed her more than once there.

‘As part of the first surgery, several tiny pieces of glass have been pulled out of her private parts. More surgeries may be performed, but only when her condition stabilizes.

‘In addition, one more round of surgery has been performed to treat her head injury. So far, the patient hasn’t responded to it. Even after sixteen hours, her condition is unstable and very critical. The patient continues to be unconscious and nothing can be said unless she regains consciousness. On two occasions, for a couple of seconds, her body showed some movements in distress. Those were a result of the trauma that her brain continues to be in. Three units of blood have already been transfused and two more units are scheduled for the day.’

That’s all the team of doctors had to say. After the brief from the medical team that had gathered for the press conference was over, it was the turn of the police commissioner of Delhi to update the media on the progress of the case.

‘A few men from the slum near where this crime took place happened to discover the victim when they were trying to take a shortcut to their homes. Seeing her, they immediately called 100. An FIR was lodged on the very night the victim was brought to the hospital. Prima facie it’s a case of rape and attempt to murder. No eyewitness has turned up so far. But the same men who called us told us about seeing a white van speeding away on the road nearby, moments before they stepped inside the dilapidated building. They said it was the only vehicle on that abandoned road and the driver was driving rashly.

‘During our initial investigation, one boy talked about having seen a white van, around the time of the girl’s disappearance, suddenly stopping on the roads of North Campus and pulling a girl in. From a distance, he could not notice the vehicle number. He couldn’t even confirm if that was a prank or an actual abduction. This is the same road where the victim was supposedly on as per her close friends.

‘Right now, CCTV footage in and around North Campus is being scanned to trace this white van. There is a strong chance that this van is the same as the one the slum dwellers had seen. The moment the registration number of this vehicle is obtained, there won’t be any delay in nabbing the perpetrators of this crime.’

The team of doctors at AIIMS and the Delhi police took some questions from the media that had gathered, after which the press conference got adjourned.

In the next few hours, the brutal and heinous gang rape of a DU girl had become breaking news in the national media. And in those stories, Rupali, who was still a living being, lost her identity.

In the medical vocabulary she became a patient.

In the terminology of law and order she became a victim. In the language of the media, she was a rape survivor.

And unfortunately for a large part of India, she had become impure; an impurity that could not be undone by any means. A stigma was now attached, embedded in her and had become a part of her existence. Even though she had never wanted it. Even though she had resisted it. Unfortunately, she would have to live with it—if she survived. And so that the extent of her ignominy could be minimized, she was robbed of her own identity, of her real name in those media stories.

The horror of this monstrous crime caught people’s attention. It shook their conscience in a way that they not only condemned it, but also wanted to do something about it. It made their blood boil in a manner that had never happened in the past. It invited outrage from across the country. It made way for a million voices that further led to an uproar across the length and breadth of the country. People questioned the law and order in the country and especially in the national capital. There were angry discussions on what the society had become. And then there were prayers for the girl who was struggling between life and death.

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42 HOURS LATER . . .

The outrage against the crime continued to grow. So much so, that it spilled on to the streets. Students whose lives Rupali had been a part of—Tenzing and his music club members, Saloni and her batch of friends, Arjun’s political group, and Raheema—had all come together to mobilize the crowd. They were angry and their anger took over the whole college and then the university, and then slowly consumed the city.

The scene was similar at each and every epicentre of protest. The gathering at the vast space in front of Rashtrapati Bhavan was the biggest of all, seeing which the Rapid Action Force (RAF) had been installed next to the state police. From tear gas pistols to water cannons, the law and order machinery had prepared itself to deal with the situation at hand.

A gathering of thousands at this one place was a sight to behold. Every single sound, be it the frequent voices over the hundreds of walkie-talkies in the hands of cops, the centralized loudspeaker installed over the RAF’s
Vajr
van, or the news journalists reporting live, all of it added to the chaos. But the one sound that dominated and suppressed every other was the thumping hum of the crowd.

It remained undefeated.

Traffic that evening had come to a complete standstill. On a few key roads that led to the epicentres of the protest, the only vehicles allowed to enter were either the media vans or the police patrols. Everything else was in a deadlock.

Then came the moment when the much-anticipated occurrence happened.

It rained. Heavily.

Large drops that were powerful enough to disperse the crowd, to make people run away from the open streets and seek the nearest shelter, fell in sheets. The scene became even bleaker. Yet it wasn’t able to break the newfound will of this nation’s youth standing united for a cause.
How could a spell of rain break those who’d already prepared themselves to face the monstrous water cannons?

Besides, they were anyway waiting for the rain . . .

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60 HOURS LATER . . .

Things had changed. But not for the better. They had further deteriorated. The tests that were being conducted at regular intervals exhibited this. The numbers on the test reports, which were supposed to be closer to the normal range, were instead drifting away—some far below the minimum, some far above the maximum limits. More powerful drugs and higher doses had made their way into the arsenal of the nurses in the ICU.

The doctors didn’t have much to say. So far, at different points in time, they had said the same thing in many different ways, just to make it different from what they had said before, just to make it less painful to absorb, just to keep the hopes alive. But beyond a point, you don’t have much to say, especially when the test reports say it all.

The doctors had never promised the moon, but now they were not even showing the silver lining. So they resorted to their default statement.

‘We are doing our best. And everything else is in the hands of God.’

No wonder the walls of hospitals hear more prayers than those of churches. But Arjun was not sure whether he was going to pin one of his own to the walls of the ICU in AIIMS. If everything was in God’s hands, then what had happened to the girl he loved was also the same God’s will. Why did He let that happen in the first place? What wrong had she done for which she deserved to become a feast for those monsters? Why had nobody come to save her?

Once again, the higher power had failed him.

He wasn’t sure whether he should beg God to save her or hold him responsible for the events that had taken place in the past sixty hours. So he did both. That’s the nature of a tragedy that threatens to take away the precious love of your life. It makes you do anything and everything, and sometimes even contradictory things.

So he abused the God in whom Rupali believed in and appealed to him as well.

Frustration and helplessness took its toll on his mind. Hunger and sleep had long escaped his life. Even though his body demanded them, his heart and mind were not at peace to look after his body. Whatever little rest he had got on the bench outside the ICU the night before made him even more restless. He had nightmares—of doctors and nurses running and trying to save Rupali. The visual of her lying unconscious on the ICU bed, with a dozen tubes piercing her body never left him in peace. It was exactly the way he had seen her, earlier in the day, when he was allowed to step inside the ICU. She was put on life support system, the doctors had told him. Machines were keeping her body alive. A thick tube that was externally connected to a ventilator ran insider her mouth, another one ran inside her right nostril, then there was one more than penetrated inside her neck. He had seen those units of saline, blood and sedatives that hung over her head. The urine bag that was tied to a corner of her bed and that white bedsheet over which showed the patches of blood that time and again was seeping out of her dressing. He had seen the monitor behind her bed that was continuously generating numerous multi-coloured graphs—he had no idea how to read them. But something in them told him that things were not well. And then there was this continuous beep generating from the monitoring machine that made this entire set-up look so delicate and critical. Those beeps continued to echo in his dreams. He wanted to run away from them. Then he heard Rupali in distress, calling out to him. He heard men around her. He wanted to save her. But for some reason, he could not make out from which direction her voice was coming. He woke up suddenly, a scream died in his throat as he saw the surroundings of the hospital.

On the one hand, he was burning from inside to avenge Rupali’s misery; on the other, Rupali’s critical condition was testing his endurance. Awful anger and constant fear had made their space in his heart. A combination of both was more bitter than anything he had felt before. It made his life miserable and, to add to it, time crawled and tested his patience. Even after two days, there were no answers to his questions; there was no end to his suffering.

In some moments when he couldn’t digest the horrific reality of what had happened to his love, his blood boiled. He wanted to help his close friends who had joined the police in trying to hunt down the criminals, the beasts. He wanted to join his agitated party members who had called the mass protest against the system demanding justice. But every time he thought about it, he imagined his worst fears coming true. He imagined Rupali suddenly wanting him there and him not being around. And that made him step back.