Neha Dixit

Aradhana moved around the dimly lit kitchen, softly humming a song. Her melody was punctuated by the sound of a fallen saucepan and water droplets from a leaking tap. She was between sleep and wakefulness when her phone alarm rang again at 6.15 am. When she tried to swipe it off, someone spoke from the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello? Yes, Sulakshana? Yeah, I will be at the stop at 8…

Hello? Your voice is breaking up. Let’s talk in the cab…Okay. See you.’

As soon as Aradhana got into the taxi she shared with her colleagues, Sulakshana whispered into her ear, ‘Why did you let him shoot all that stuff?’

‘What? Who?’ Aradhana was confused.

‘Just keep quiet, and don’t react. Look at this.’ Putting her phone on mute, Sulakshana opened a WhatsApp video sent by their colleague, Shashank.

Aradhana froze when she saw it. She hoped it was some kind of spam, but as she watched further, her heart sank. She nearly threw up at the sight of her naked body. ‘I thought I would die in that moment,’ she recalls. ‘I walked out of the cab as soon as it stopped to pick up the next staffer. Sulakshana got down with me.’

They took an auto back to her house.

* * *

It had taken Manish a lot of convincing for Aradhana to agree to living together just six months into their relationship. ‘It will work out well financially, and we can spend more time together,’ he had told her. ‘It will be good for us to know each other better.’ All of this made sense to her. The only thing she was worried about was that it might upset her mother. But she was all grown up now, financially independent, and she knew that she alone was responsible for her decisions.

They moved into a one BHK apartment in Greater Noida, with makeshift furniture they purchased from the local scrap dealer. That evening, Manish came home with a bottle of wine. He lit candles, and it was a beautiful evening. They stayed up the whole night, and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Manish had bought a new phone. They looked lovely in those pictures, their shiny, bright skin glowing in blissful intimacy. He came up with a plan. He propped the phone up on a selfie stick on top of a large mirror, and placed it right next to the mattress. The phone recorded a video.

When Manish made chai in the morning, they watched the clip in bed, wrapped up inside a quilt. ‘I felt so loved, I was high on it,’ Aradhana says. Manish sent her the clip on her phone too. Every few weeks, he would bring it up and text, ‘Ready for Seasons 2, 3, 4?’ Aradhana was initially uncertain, but over time she began to look forward to it. These were moments they shared, ’that were unique to both of us,’ she says. Every time they had an argument, one of them would bring up a frame from the clip, and they’d soon kiss and make up.

* * *

A year after they moved in together, Aradhana was promoted to team leader. Manish was still a call centre executive. ‘Manish was very happy for me initially but soon enough started feeling threatened,’ she recalls. ‘His friends would tease him. They would say, “Taken permission from the boss before stepping out for a smoke?”’

They had started their careers together but Aradhana got two promotions in two years, while Manish was still struggling to get good ratings at the company. ‘I was earning more and appreciated more. This got to him, I guess.’

Manish began using her debit card for his own expenses: shopping, buying gifts for his family, paying for rounds of beer for his friends. Aradhana initially tolerated this, but soon enough began getting angry with Manish’s behaviour.

Manish also started hitting her. Over the next six months, the violence increased. ‘He would hit me for just about anything — for overcooked daal or for speaking on the phone for too long.’

That’s when Aradhana decided to break up. It didn’t go down well with Manish.

* * *

She rang Shashank, her colleague who had sent Sulakshana the video. He told her that Manish had sent it on WhatsAapp to everyone in office with the message, ‘How to get the Chandu bitch laid: Season 1.’ He said that Manish had also uploaded the video online.

‘Sulakshana asked me not to go online but I couldn’t stop. I looked for the video. It was freshly uploaded, just two days back. And it had more than 2,000 views. It was there on ten websites and there was a smaller Youtube version as well. I didn’t know how to reach the websites to ask them to pull them down.’

Aradhana cried hysterically. ‘My entire life came crashing down in front of my eyes. I thought of jumping into the naala next to my house. Sulakshana calmed me down. She asked me to go step by step to resolve this.’

Sulakshana called up their boss to get her advice. ‘We were fortunate that our boss was a woman. She offered to come to my house in the evening and talk about it.’

A gamut of thoughts were running through Aradhana’s mind: We had rented the apartment telling the landlord we are married. Will they call me a slut? What will my uncles back home who were opposed to my coming to Delhi say? What about my mother who always defended my decisions? How will I face my office colleagues? Will I still be allowed to continue my job?

‘I had never in my dreams thought that Manish would do such a thing. How could he have so much bitterness for someone he claimed to love? So much animosity? So much hatred? That too when he very well knew that it was a big deal for me to live with him, to even be in a relationship with him.’

They headed back home. By the afternoon, her boss, Ankita, arrived. Ankita had worked in the organisation for eight years and was a programme manager. She was in her mid-30s, extremely sensitive and efficient. Aradhana says, ‘I was hardly able to tell her what had happened. I was so ashamed of myself. She consoled me and told me that there is no reason I should feel ashamed for trusting the person (that) I loved. That acted as a corkstopper for all my exploding emotions. Honestly, my job mattered the most to me.”

Ankita told her that a similar case had come up in the company two years ago. She said Aradhana was not the first woman to go through this, and that she should hold herself together and learn to deal with it.

Ankita called up the company lawyer, who asked them to be present at a specific police station in Noida in an hour. ‘I just didn’t want to go down that road but Ankita was adamant. She said to get up and face it.’

* * *

Aradhana’s case is what is commonly labelled ‘revenge porn’, a misnomer for the nonconsensual distribution of sexual imagery or videos. There is no conclusive data on the number of such crimes in India, especially because they often go unreported. The National Crime Records Bureau data suggests that between 2012 and 2014 there has been a 104 percent rise in the ‘transmission of obscene content in electronic form’. Most cases like Aradhana’s are filed under this category.

The Station House Officer (SHO) was accompanied by the company lawyer. The SHO asked for Manish’s picture and phone number, and said to Aradhana: ‘Never do this, whether you are married or unmarried, ever again. Don’t you read the newspaper? Don’t you know how it is being misused every single day?’ Aradhana and the others were expecting a long moral lecture that did not follow. The lawyer asked them to leave and assured action.

Ankita made Aradhana promise that she would come to office the next day. ‘I was up the whole night. I kept messaging him but there was no response. I kept checking the websites two or three times every hour. The comments under the video were making me cringe and hate myself. It was nice to have Sulakshana over that night or I would have definitely committed suicide.’

The next day, a few Hindi newspapers reported the case without disclosing her name or place of work. ‘That shook my confidence a bit,’ she says.

* * *

Three months have passed. Aradhana has never called or texted Manish since that day.

Manish returned to work, but Ankita advised Aradhana against making a complaint. ‘She said that the company neither has a sexual harassment committee nor will it be wise to go down that route, since the senior bosses may not understand the situation very well and that may harm me.’

Manish was laid off within a month on grounds of non-performance.

Out of the ten websites the video was posted on, the police have managed to get only three to remove the clip. It still exists on the others. ‘I don’t know if my colleagues who received the clip circulated it further. If the police couldn’t do much, it is beyond my control too. I had to understand that.’

Aradhana has been reading articles about revenge porn online. She knows there are lawyers working on revenge porn cases in India, but for now, she wants some distance from the whole thing. ‘Maybe one day, when I am more financially secure and successful, I will become vocal about it. But right now it’s too early. I need some space. I have decided to concentrate on fixing my life rather than wasting it on teaching that man a lesson.’

*Names changed

Neha Dixit is an independent journalist who writes on politics, gender and social justice in South Asia.

nehadixit123@gmail.com 

This is an edited version of the essay originally Published on Deep Dives (deepdives.in) as part of the series Sexing the Interwebs.https://deepdives.in/why-didyou-let-him-shoot-that-an-indian-woman-sstory-of-revenge-porn-dd7acd6e55f2

(dated 3 Nov 2017) Excerpted by MA Moid.