Today I remembered two stories - one, I had heard about and second, I had read.
The first one was called 'Draupadi' by Maheshwata Devi. This plot was narrated to me by someone, so I cannot confirm the veracity of the plot. The story involves a woman who has been gang-raped by a group of upper-caste men and is thrown away in a field, entirely disrobed and naked. A cop comes to talk to her and get her statement. He is gruff with her and tries to degrade her further by commenting on her nudity. At first the woman is dazed at the hostility. Then she is ashamed. Then she gets bold, stands up, and starts approaching the cop. What my friend told me was how well the author had explained the change in the psyche - that when the woman had felt shame fully, so fully that the emotion left her body, she just became a person who had nothing more to lose. At that point, from the cop's point of view, she became fatal.
The second book is Salman Rushdie's novel, 'Shame'. It's a story so dazzling that it made Rushdie a very necessary part of my existence. Just as I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without my father and mother, without a childhood in Bombay...I cannot imagine a life where I hadn't read Rushdie.
Anyway, in this book, the character of Omar Khayyam is stepping out of the house for the first time to go to school. His mother and aunts know that he will be ridiculed because he comes from a family that has attracted some notoriety and gossip. They tell him that whatever he may feel - anger, sorrow, guilt, confusion - all that is fine. But the one thing that he must not feel is 'sharm'. Shame. And Khayyam doesn't. The novel then explores how abject shamelessness or shame can both be roots of violence.
"You live with shame long enough and it becomes part of the furniture." (A line from the book.)
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