Day I
17 April 2018
Twenty six-year-old Suresh* spends a large amount of his time fussing and fawning over his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, as we wait, sitting almost on our haunches, in the corridor outside the paediatrics ward at AIIMS Hospital. “Tu bolne kab lagegi, beta?” he asks the little one a hint of sadness in his voice. Intrigued, she looks up at him and then proceeds to punch his cheek.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard him mouth this gentle protestation in vain. Suresh’s two-and-a-half-year-old hasn’t strung together more than two words in a coherent sentence, and this is the first time in a long, long time that he’s actually worried.
“Are you worried about a speech impairment?” I ask him, even as his toddler prances around, making friends with every second patient in the ward. At one point, she swoops in delight upon the colourful beaded sandal of a burqa-clad woman who has to laughingly shove her off, telling her apologetically that the beads on her sandal aren’t detachable.
“I did not worry before. We took her to several doctors who said, maybe, she’ll just start speaking late. I’m worried because bhagwan na kare, agar jaise chhoti ke saath hua hai, uske saath bhi ho gaya, toh woh kaise batayegi mujhe? (God forbid, if what happened to my younger one happens to her too, how will she let me know?) How will she come to me and actually form the words to say, ‘Papa, mere saath kisine kuch galat kiya hai’ (Papa, someone has touched me inappropriately),” says Suresh.
Suresh’s cause for worry – that has engulfed his entire life at this exact moment – is the 11-month-old baby who lies on a bed in the OPD chamber at AIIMS, while doctors deliberate over an operating date. The 11-month-old is better known – perhaps forever impressed in newsprint – as the 8-month-old baby whose rape shook the capital less than three months ago.
The Quint, in the course of its reporting, had come to refer to her as ‘Chhutki’, while starting a campaign to help raise funds for her medical needs and for her education in the future.
Chhutki was raped and abandoned at her own home on the morning of 28 January 2018. She had allegedly been raped by her 28-year-old cousin Suraj, who lived just a floor above theirs, while her parents had gone out to work.
Suresh and his wife Geeta* both earn absolute pittances (the former is a daily wage labourer, while Geeta works as a domestic help in houses nearby) and on that morning – like many other mornings – they had left their two daughters in the care of their relatives, who share a house with them.
“There was an uncle, two aunts (Chhutki’s) and several other people in the house whom we’d trusted to keep an eye out,” Geeta had told me tearfully at the time. “If we can’t trust our near and dear ones, who can we lean on?”
Suraj confessed to having committed the crime under intoxication, but what horrified Geeta the most was that he had been casually ambling along the gully below their house, just minutes after the rape.
“He accosted me on the street as I was coming home, and remonstrated me for having left the baby alone. He kept telling me, ‘Chachi, aap kaha jaati rehti ho? Bachchi ro rahi hai (Where were you, aunt? Your daughter is crying),” Geeta told me.
When Geeta rushed up in confusion, she found her youngest crying her lungs out, lying in a pool of her own blood and stool.
Today, Suraj is in police custody, while doctors are hoping to repair the last physical vestiges of the brutal rape – the baby had suffered a tear along her vaginal and rectal wall, following which an artificial opening had been created in her lower abdomen for stool and urine to pass.
Today, they’ve said, will be the date that the opening is sealed and Chhutki gets to resume normal bodily functions like any 11-month-old baby should….
We wait a while, as Suresh’s elder daughter does a little more prancing around, then tugs at her father’s shirt collar impatiently.
“She wants to sleep,” he tells me, as he scoops up the little one effortlessly in his arms, where she proceeds to curl up and fall asleep. I pick up the drawings she’s been making as she waits for her baby sister — squiggles and scribbles on a blank sheet of paper that a kind doctor had torn out of his writing pad and given her, while on his rounds. I show Suresh the paper. “Kalaakar hai ekdum,” Suresh smiles wryly, fondly scrunching his daughter’s curls.
Geeta walks out an hour later, with the baby in her arms, and proceeds to tell us that the latter will be admitted today. “She will be operated upon the day after tomorrow.”
Geeta will be staying back in the ward with the little one, but Suresh isn’t allowed in. As his wife and daughter make their way inside the surgical ward where they’ll spend the night, he looks wistfully through the glass.
I start to leave, after having extracted a promise from him to leave right after too.
I’m positive though that he’ll stay just like that, a while longer. His two-year-old in his arms, from a distance, looks tiny.
Day II
19 April 2018
Suresh wakes me up at 8 am to ask if I will be coming down to the hospital to wait with him again. Of course I will, I assure him. He doesn’t know what time Chhutki will be operated on, but he’s anxious to be there earlier than necessary.
When I reach, Suresh is nowhere to be seen, although Geeta steps out of the ward for a minute to ‘show’ Chhutki to me. “I put her in blue hospital robes. Isn’t she looking pretty?” she asks eagerly. For a family who can barely afford more than one set of clothes at a time for their kids, I know Geeta is delighted at the novelty.
Geeta asks if I have seen her husband. I tell her I have not, but I tell her not to worry. I’ll wait with her.
We are soon told, after Chhutki’s blood has been drawn, that her haemoglobin isn’t as high as the doctors would’ve liked and that they would rather operate early next week – spanning a safety net of a few days and multiple doses of glucose.
I wait with Geeta, as Suresh calls soon after to tell me he has been running around buying medicines for the baby and dropping Chhutki’s older sister off with his wife’s mother who is visiting. “I am glad you stayed,” he tells me over the phone. “Main nahi aa paya, lekin aap jo meri jagah rukh gaye waha pe, mujhe bahut achha laga (I couldn’t make it, but I’m glad you stood in).”
Day III
25 April 2018
Today, I slip in unnoticed and see the baby who has been given a bath and looks, I think fondly as I caress her, absolutely pristine.
I tell Suresh when I step out and he informs me this was Chhutki’s first bath in three months. “The doctors asked us not to bathe her at all – only sponge away dirt – so as to not risk damaging her bandages.”
The eight-month-old had to have her abdomen bandaged – which served as makeshift diapers – changed 20-25 times a day. In the first month, Suresh had confessed he bought balefuls of cotton by the week, because the worry that they would suddenly run out and Chhutki would be in pain would keep him up at night.
“The first time we brought her here, after... after it happened, and they took off her clothes and examined her so clinically… I burst into tears,” Suresh said quietly. “Aasoon kaise nahi aayenge, ma’am? Meri bachhhi ko main aise nahi dekh sakta (How could I stop my tears? I can’t look at my daughter like this).”
Suresh and I take turns in two things – buying bottled water from a shop right outside AIIMS to keep ourselves hydrated while wait – and in calling Geeta to ask if the baby has been operated upon yet. I realise I have never waited in the waiting room of a hospital ward for this long. A reporter and the father of an 8-month-old rape survivor quietly sipping water and sitting in companionable silence.
When Suresh does break our silence, it is to hit a nerve,
“Three months ago, ma’am, everyone I met said they’d stand by me. Neighbours, cousins, well-wishers, strangers I met on the streets — they were constantly coming to our house and offering all kinds of help. But today, there is nobody. I guess people forget.”
I involuntarily scan the long line of ailing or waiting strangers sitting around us, and say nothing. I cannot see any of the people he mentions either.
There are times when Suresh – a small-built man – breaks into a fit of anger as he reflects on the silence. “Why is Modiji silent? Why doesn’t he speak about anything that is happening? This is no country for girls anymore!”
Another time, he wonders at how strange it will be to go back to pasting cement and cutting up blocks on Monday after devoting three entire months to the care of his little one.
Geeta calls from inside the surgical ward to tell us the surgery has begun. It is 3:45 pm. We wait some more, and I throw random platitudes like, “Thik ho jayegi (she will be fine),” and Suresh says, like I’m used to hearing now, “Jee, didi” with clinical precision.
We wait. I scribble gibberish in a notebook and doodle, as Suresh watches over my shoulder. The sound of men and women eating ‘tiffins’ out of store-bought dabbas in the labyrinthine corridor, as they wait for their children in the surgical ward, is deafening.
Geeta calls, after what seems like an eternity, at 5:30 pm, and she talks to Suresh who relays to me with a sad smile that his daughter has been operated on. I feel a rush of gratitude, I’m not sure why. It feels like the culmination of many, many months of waiting — like three months had suddenly encapsulated into this one infinitesimal moment. I look at Suresh to see if his face reflects the same overwhelming gratitude.
It doesn’t.
“This process is over, bhaiyya. Are you not glad?” I urge.
“The thought of my little girl lying there with three tubes sticking into her is more horrific than I could have ever imagined. She (Geeta) said there’s one in her nose – perhaps for oxygen? – and two in her little arms, one for glucose and the other for blood,” Suresh says. “I just hope they take the one in her nose out first. I don’t want it to hurt.”
I think it struck me at that exact moment that the battle was far from over. That three days hadn’t really summed up three months in a climactic bow.
That the hurt and the pain and the anger weren’t confined to a fight against the nephew who’d raped and abandoned their daughter while they weren’t home one Sunday morning. That it included the fight to get her breathing tube out. That it included more waiting, beyond a hospital corridor, in corridors of courtrooms and legal aid offices.
That even when everyone else who’d stuck around ultimately drifted away, they would have to do some more waiting… and then a little more.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told Suresh.
(*Names changed to protect privacy)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)