Shiney

I wasn’t going to touch this issue. I wait for things to strike me before I write. And these last two years, things have been striking me ever more intermittently. Perhaps I’m getting lazy, or perhaps it’s merely the lack of exercise I give my talents. But the second I saw Shiney Ahuja on the news with the headline saying “rape” I wanted to write something. Not in his defense, or in condemnation. Merely my thoughts on the way this whole circus has erupted around him.
None of us know whether the man is guilty (of the worst crime this side of infanticide) or not. None of us except for the man himself and the maid. What we know for certain is that they did indeed have sex. The man’s admitted to it (which is another entirely more convoluted sociological/psychological discussion - “why the hell would a good-looking actor, with fans, need to sleep with a maid?”), claimed she gave him consent. But when the socio-economic divide between them is so skewed, what does the word “consent” imply in that situation? Did she initiate, did she seduce him, did he imagine consent from her silence or lack of resistance? The media, of course, is interested in none of these ambiguities because they have headlines to sell. Good for them.
What is interesting however is that the initial reports from the police suggested that the maid’s physical state had no visible signs of forced entry. She claims she was bound and gagged, and thus must have struggled, but there were no signs of welts on her hands from the binding, or bruises around her mouth from the gagging etc. So why now do they now claim that there IS evidence of rape.
Then there’s the rather glaring absurdity in our constituition that the woman’s word is always given more weight in such matters. What about evidence? What about testimony? What about being innocent until PROVEN guilty? Rape is among the most heinous of crimes in my opinion. But a law that unilaterally sides with the woman is a law that doesn’t even understand the complex variability of sex amongst human beings. I had an acquaintance in college who was accused of rape by a girl that had completely consensual sex with him after a party. However she wanted a relationship and he thought it had just been a one-night stand. She cried rape. He didn’t go to prison, but got expelled from university and his reputation forever tarnished. In India, he might have ended up in jail.
Is that not a possibility here? Can it not seem conceivable to us that Shiney and his maid were having consensual sex, she thought it would lead to some monetary gains for her, he denied her what she felt he owed her, and she cried rape? I read in the newspaper yesterday about a journalist who claims that the police are not looking at the matter at all from the angle of blackmail. Shiney is a successful actor (not recently sure, but better than most in this dream-destroying town) and there seems to be an unsavory character in the form of the maid’s boyfriend.
And while I understand, and support to an extent, the zealotry of seeing everything from ther perspective of the victim, I must remind myself, that people are stranger, deeper, crazier, more twisted up inside, than they appear to be on the surface. I hope justice is done diligently and honestly. I hope they stop telling us that Shiney is being held in a cell but receiving better food and more cups of tea because of his “status”. Find the truth. Forget the pageantry.