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For The Sake Of Some Silence

Much of Bombay, I find, is talking these days about one of two things. One, the rise in onion prices. Two, what happened to a young woman called Jayabala Ashar. Both these are close to millions of hearts in a way that other recently newsworthy and arguably more esoteric issues -- President's rule in Bihar, say, or talks with Pakistan -- are not.

After all, who does not use onions? Could there possibly be a vegetable more basic to Indian menus than they are? When I buy a plate of bhelpuri, or the uniquely Bombay, uniquely delicious Frankie, I routinely ask for extra kandha: I like the crunchiness and the bite. In the past, the guy making my meal has quite happily poured on heaping handfuls of chopped onion. For the present, that's very much in the past. The other day, I watched sadly as the man at Churchgate sprinkled precisely six extra bits of kandha on my Frankie before handing it over. It just wasn't the same.

Of course, some of us more privileged sorts can afford to be light-hearted about expensive onions while we hope their price will soon come back to earth. Many others cannot. But there is nothing at all light-hearted about Jayabala Ashar's predicament. Early one morning last week, a mugger confronted her in a suburban train. When she refused to give him anything, he actually pushed her out of the moving train. She fell beside the tracks and the train ran over her legs. Both will be amputated.

If that's not horrifying enough, there are two other facets to this episode that will serve. The first is that Jayabala lay there on the tracks for 45 minutes, then on the platform at the nearest station for another 45 minutes, before she was taken to a hospital. She might have bled to death.

Luckily, she is alive.

Not so is a girl I knew slightly in my college days. Travelling through central India some years ago, she got off the train at a small station to fetch water. The train started and she ran to get back in. She stumbled and fell on the tracks, where the train ran over her legs. Some people at the station lifted her onto the platform. But there was nowhere else to take her, not one medical facility within swift reach. So over the next couple of hours, lying right there on the platform and quite conscious of what was happening to her, she bled to death.

How many such incidents occur every day, all across this enormous country? Certainly accidents happen, crimes happen. We all know that and accept the risks as we go about our lives. But this vibrant young girl might have been alive today if there had been even a basic hospital in that little town. But then a facility as simple as that is unknown to so much of India. Think about it: she died only because she had an accident far from a big city. What does it mean to know that if Jayabala Ashar had been pushed out of a train at, for example, Tadpatri, Andhra Pradesh, she probably would not be alive today?

Still, despite the delay in getting her to hospital, at least Jayabala did get there and is alive today. As far as I can tell, she is also showing a remarkable spirit in the face of what happened to her.

Yet, you think, it need never have happened at all had there not been the second facet to the incident I want to muse about here. Jayabala says there were three other women in the compartment at the time, watching the whole drama unfold. They said not one word. Not even a "Stop that!" to the mugger. And because they chose silence, Jayabala will soon have no legs.

And yet, at least she is alive. The most famous victim of such a silence, Kitty Genovese, is not. One day in 1964, she was stabbed repeatedly and killed in front of her New York apartment. All through her brutal murder, she was screaming for help. A later investigation showed that as many as 38 neighbours -- that's right, thirty-eight -- heard her screams. Several of them came to their windows to watch. Not one tried to help Kitty. Not one even called the police. None of them wanted to "get involved;" the murder of a young woman on the street right outside their windows was "none of their concern." Haven't we heard those phrases before?

The killing of Kitty Genovese caused consternation all over the USA. Not so much because her attacker was so brutal, but because so many people who might have helped rescue her instead did zero. The soul-searching and outrage went on for months, even years. As author Andrew Bard Schmookler wrote in the Baltimore Sun nearly thirty years after the murder: "[The neighbours'] inaction was a national scandal. Their indifference raised the question: What kind of society have we become?"

That question could have been asked here, for the soul-searching is on in Bombay too. What kind of society have we Indians become? Superintendent of Police (Railways) K Ramachandran told The Times of India: "The public should change its attitude and become more humane." Saira Menezes writes in Outlook: "What has shocked Bombayites even more [than the crime] is the indifference of fellow commuters. ... Has Bombay lost its soul?"

I don't know if it has, or if there was one for Bombay to lose, or if it matters. But introspection like that hits home because I suspect most of us see ourselves in the railway compartment Jayabala was in that morning. Not so much in her place, but -- and for me this is without doubt the most devastating thing about this incident -- in the shoes of those women who looked on. Their startling failure to react is deeply troubling. But what troubles us more is that few of us think we might have behaved differently.

I want to say, like we all want to say, that I would have spoken up, shouted, perhaps even grappled with the man as he was shoving Jayabala towards catastrophe. But to be true to myself, I have to admit I am not sure. I am not sure how I would react in that situation. I hope I would do something, but I simply cannot be sure I would. That is not a pleasant admission to make to myself. All over Bombay, I imagine, there are people quietly making such admissions to themselves, coming to their own personal terms with this dilemma.

And still, this is not a process that began with Jayabala's tragedy. Every day, we must come to terms with sadnesses: less dramatic, perhaps, but in their own way, just as devastating as hers. The scrawny, filthy man who sometimes sprawls on the pavement near my office: we busy folk simply step over or around him and our lives go on. The bearded madman who roams near my home every morning, shouting incomprehensible words till he wears himself out. The women who step through a green-black filth to fill their pots with the drops of water that escape from the drain of an apartment block. That's right, the drain.

In India, we learn to ignore such sights. We learn that we must look past, or around, or over them -- but never at them. We learn that we must live with them. Each one of us learns these lessons, finds our own particular level of comfort with them, realises that they need no more than the usual silence.

So a mugger pushes Jayabala Ashar off a train, and we find that three women watched that to happen in silence. It surprises us, but it really need not.

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Dilip D'Souza