KOTTAYAM, india — The Suryanelli girl goes to the office in the morning with her long, wavy hair neatly combed, tiny gold earrings glinting, packed lunch in hand, like a normal working woman in India.
But once she leaves her front gate, she holds her body tight, with shoulders hunched and arms wrapped around her, and looks down. If she makes eye contact, a stranger at the bus stop might recognize her and point her out as the former 16-year-old who was raped by more than 40 men over more than 40 days. Worse still, if she dares to raise her face, she might spot the men themselves.
All but one of her attackers walked free, and it is the Suryanelli girl who might as well be in prison. For 17 years, her life has been put on hold, frozen at the night of Jan. 16, 1996. There has been no justice and no closure.
It would have been easier if she had quietly disappeared, as do most of the tens of thousands of survivors of rape in India every year. Instead, her fight for an elusive justice has marked her as a “shameless woman.”
Because Indian law does not permit the naming of rape victims or their families during trial, her moniker comes from the beautiful hillside village in the southern state of Kerala that was once her home. Yet it has been eight years since she lived in Suryanelli. Her family was hounded out because taxis and buses full of tourists were stopping outside their house.
“I did nothing wrong, but I’m the only one still suffering,” she says. “My side of the story was not heard by anyone.”
The Indian government recorded 24,206 rapes in 2011. With a population of almost 1.2 billion, India’s official number of rapes per capita does not stand out. However, the vast majority of attacks go unreported because of police apathy and cultural stigma.
Rape is often viewed less as a crime against a woman than as her shame. The general silence on sexual violence gave way in December after a vicious gang rape in New Delhi. Tens of thousands of people mourned the death of a university student so brutally attacked with a metal bar that doctors found pieces of her intestines floating in her.
With the spotlight on rape, the case of the Suryanelli girl was pulled out of cold storage, where it had languished for eight years. India’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial to be completed in six months.
On Jan. 16, 1996, she met up at a bus stand with a man she loved, a bus ticket collector named Raju. He bought them two tickets. As is often the case on buses in rural Kerala, he sat at the back with the other men.
When she got off at the place Raju had picked, he was not there. In her panic, she caught another bus headed toward her aunt’s house in a town nearby.
She reached her destination close to midnight, and a strange woman seemed to be following her. The woman knew her name, and introduced her male companion as someone who knew her relatives. The man offered to take her to their house.
Instead, he took her to a nearby guesthouse and raped her.
The next 42 days passed in a blur of beatings and rapes by a parade of strange men. She was taken to homes and hotels, in cars and public buses, driven more than 2,000 miles across two states. She was forced to drink arrack, a local liquor made from fermented coconut flowers, and sedated with pills.
Her attackers included a retired professor, lawyers, businessmen and government officials. When she thought she would die, they gave her money and left her at a bus station.
It took three years for the case just to reach a court in India’s overburdened justice system. And when it did, it was not the men who were on trial — it was the character of the girl.
Lawyers for the accused cross-examined her for days, in minute detail that seemed designed to embarrass her.
Still, the judge found all 35 accused guilty and sentenced them to between four and 14 years in prison, for charges ranging from conspiracy and kidnapping to gang rape and trafficking. None of the men served any time in jail. They all filed appeals in the state high court and walked free on bail.
The life of the Suryanelli girl, now a woman of 33, has fallen apart. Friends vanished. Relatives slunk away. Every day is an exercise in facing fear.
She has been thinking of the woman who died after being gang-raped in New Delhi. She is almost envious: “God blessed her by taking away her life. She does not have to suffer what I have suffered for these 17 years.”
