Death of a Daughter

She is a mother, battling against the powerful and corrupt forces to get justice for her dead daughter, to lay her down in eternal rest among the lilies grown on a hillside in a faraway land. Long after the demise, she has not been able to give her daughter a decent farewell, instead watched the lifeless body sullied and debased as repeated Post-mortems had to be conducted on it to expose the lie by the very people who are supposed to be the guardians of the law of the land. She has been called names, branded as a poor irresponsible mother, for whose sins the daughter had to die a miserable death, plied with substance, raped, and her head held under water till her thrashing body subsided into death.

Would you suffer this fate for your darling little girl? No….? Then why should Fiona?

After killing her body, even her memory is being assassinated by the perpetrators of the crime to deflect attention from their heinous crime and the media gleefully laps it up! Has the word, ‘compassion’ disappeared from the dictionary in the land of the Mahatma? Even if there was some truth in it, we humans are known to leave the dead to bury its dead. The human action of hurling abuses at a corpse can be interpreted as a desperate attempt to save one’s one own neck!

No mother however negligent deserves this fate- every waking hour a torment by the memory of those vivid bruises on her daughter’s body, each night a torture chamber of imagining the brutal assault and rape of her child by strangers who befriended the hapless girl from the very beginning with ulterior motives. No mother should be compelled to endure the agony of not knowing the thoughts and struggles of her child during her dying moments. No mother should be made to feel guilty for seeking justice on behalf of her dead girl. Then why are those snoopy moles digging into the antecedent of this brave mother? Is it to assist the cover up?

Wordly-wise or not, no young girl deserves the kind of death her daughter was condemned to, by people who had no right to judge her morality. Going by the same standards, the perpetrators of the crime and also thousands of women of such loose character should all be condemned to die similar deaths. Was Scarlett the only girl-woman with the trust of a little girl and the actions of a gown woman, the only one of our times who entrusted her life to a lover, a man no never really loved her? Who will judge the rest of the sinners and pronounce punishment? You or the enthusiastic media?

If poverty is no sin, living in a decrepit caravan can be a decent way to live for the poor, better than begging on the streets. Justifying punishment on the basis of one’s economic status is worse than the primitive law of stoning the adulteress. So, deprive the poor of access to law courts because they have to be punished for being poor!

Since when have a poor mother’s sins to be atoned by sacrificing a daughter at the altar of drugs and lust? Since when have Indians, reputed to be spiritual and homely turned rapists and butchers in the pursuit of pleasure and riches? Who are these hard-hearted fathers of young daughters who untouched by the gruesome death of a young girl of their own daughter’s age, trying to cover up the crime? Is power and wealth so intoxicating that a government goes overboard using its machinery to dodge the simple issue of arresting criminals responsible for the girl’s death?

Each day there is a ‘new twist to the Scarlett case’, apparently leading to more lies to cover up the original one. Where will this sequence of deceit end? Would the ending be different if the parents of the slain girl were rich and influential that they could rattle a few bones in the corridors of power with a snap of their fingers? Why is the government going round in circles, even at the risk of making itself the butt of aversion and ridicule at the hands of the citizens of the land? Are the stakes so high that the ministers are willing to get caught evading questions on national television, than get cracking cleaning up the state?

Everything is linked together. Those who make a few pennies more are gloating over the fact without realizing that the larger picture reveals doom for the state. Renting shacks and feeding a few mouths cannot balance the dangers of rape and fragmentation of the land, degeneration of values to accommodate tourism and the influx of aliens swiftly taking over trade and business from the locals. Can we see beyond our own noses?

- Vera Alvares