Only Stupid Girls Get Raped
Shambhavi Roy
Gool’s urge, when she stepped into the heated, chandeliered foyer and realized it was him, was to hide behind her friend Abigail, the hostess, who’d opened the door. Coward, Gool told herself and observed the strobe lights pulsing on Amol’s body, illuminating in flashes the radical slant of his shoulder, the S of his earlobes, the sweeping arc of his arms, and his dark skin.
Abigail nudged her and said, “Do you remember that guy? Amol. Lives in Seattle now but used to be our senior in Saratoga High. He’s in the Bay Area for a wedding.”
In the kitchen—he was still visible—Gool lifted a stemless glass of red wine from the granite island around which people chatted in groups, gleaned appetizers, and inhaled the air redolent of liquor, cheese, and mint chutney.
“My specialties—cucumber canapés and chicken cornbread poppers,” Abigail said, picking up a knife and positioning herself over a block of brie on a white marble cutting board. Little squares and trapezoids of lights swimming on Amol’s face brightened as he smiled at the fellow next to him—the smile hit Gool and fractured time.
Nearly six months ago, in summer, she had opened her eyes in Amol’s unfamiliar apartment and found a penis tip circling the air above her face. It didn’t shock her for some reason, although it should have. Maybe she was desensitized, used to categorizing body parts, when she volunteered for the Medical and Pathology Program at the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto, assisting the morgue supervisor with autopsies three days a week and rotating to the ER the other two days.
She saw a moving penis tip. A taut belly. An arched torso. Neck bent backward. Face tilted up.
In a haze, she said aloud, “Is this an emergency?”
He laughed and gawked at her with gleaming, mirthful eyes. A large guy, he rallied, and his penis shot forward, aiming for her lips, but hit her neck, just below the chin. She coughed due to the choking effect and looked at her own limp body on the sofa—a pair of nameless, exposed breasts up for examination. A beach doll in a blue and pink swimsuit smiled at her from the entryway table. In a sudden rush, she leapt up and shoved him. He lurched, thanks to his awkward, unbalanced position and the pants bunched around his knees.
At the door, the metal chain refused to slide in its rail, no matter how vigorously she jerked and wrenched.
“Are you leaving?” he asked angrily, as if he might hold her accountable for the abrupt termination of the evening’s entertainment, and struggled as his pants slid farther down and arrested his movements.
When he managed to hitch up his pants, he ran, grabbed the end of her t-shirt. It ripped. The tear reached the armhole, at which point the t-shirt refused to come apart. He yanked her arm, pulling her inward, and ended up smacking his own head against the junction of two walls where the entryway turned toward the kitchen and the beach doll stood smiling. While he moaned, his head between his hands, she blundered, grappling with the chain, pulling, jerking, pushing.
Finally it slid off, and she hurried down the stoop, fixing her bra and t-shirt. On the sidewalk, in the light of the streetlamp, an elderly woman wrangled with some imaginary person and lugged a shopping cart brimming with food and clothing. Gool’s phone was still in her back pocket. She used it to call an Uber, then fidgeted, patting her cheeks, neck, and chest. Her eyes scanned the empty space behind her, the darkness between homes, the hollow behind the stoop, the shade between the coyote brushes, the checkered patterns under the crepe myrtles.
Even as a child, she’d resisted sharing any discomfiting news that might trigger alarm in her parents. They seemed to believe they could escape mutilations, diseases, and deaths by keeping a watchful eye on the passage of time and course of their lives. Anytime Gool’s sister didn’t pick up her phone, they started pacing the living room with phones in their hands, ready to dial 911, looking like monuments of anxiousness, unable to eat or sleep, until they received a text or confirmation she was alive and safe. And if something did go wrong, like the time Gool’s sister was hospitalized with food poisoning, they were miserable for months, analyzing the root cause, assigning blame. Their home was a perpetual catharsis chamber where no one would achieve catharsis because fear and grief seemed limitless. It disgusted her at times. Duty bound to live with them to save money as they strained to pay for her college, she was also duty bound to protect them. However, the ball of ache stuck in her chest throughout the Uber ride popped from her mouth when she set foot in her parents’ living room and beheld their earnest faces.
“What happened?” Gool’s mother asked, her voice so eerie that even Gool’s father, near the fridge, bolted to the door.
“I almost … Gupta Uncle’s son … he almost …” she said.
“Gupta’s son?” her father said.
“He doesn’t live in Saratoga anymore,” her mother said.
“I went to his apartment in Mountain View. He said he’d drop me home.” She sank into the sofa facing the bay window arrayed with potted plants and a wooden statue of laughing Buddha. Her parents stood, inhaling, exhaling, her mother in a blue sari with a matching blouse and her father in a dress shirt and pants—they must’ve just returned from the get-together to celebrate a friend’s fiftieth in Los Gatos. Her mother sniffed the air, appearing to detect a whiff of alcohol and piecing together the facts.
“It’s not what you think,” Gool said and lifted her arm unwittingly, which caused the ripped ends of her t-shirt to fly apart, exposing her bare skin.
“My God!” her father said, joined his hands in prayer, and swung to the wall shelf where a flying Hanuman carried the Dronagiri mountains. “Should we call the police?” he asked.
Her mother tsked. “Why did you drink with him when you barely know him?”
“Just had one drink. Was tired. Fell asleep.” Gool remembered when they lived in India and a girl in Gool’s grandparents’ neighborhood in Patna was raped. For months, fathers and grandfathers huddled together in the afternoons and discussed the incident, expressing outrage in hushed tones, while women tiptoed about the drawing room as they served tea, to avoid missing a word of the rape story. Imagine a mother’s callous expediency in dispatching a sixteen-year-old to fetch milk from the corner store at eight in the night! Imagine a father’s carelessness in not restraining a girl. And how stupid did a girl have to be to actually get raped—wearing inappropriate clothes and cackling with neighborhood loafers!
A penis tip took form in the space above her parents’ heads and moved in ever-widening circles, gaining speed, momentum. It had ridden with Gool in the Uber car and slipped into her home. Her fault—she blurted Amol’s name. Now his penis tip seemed to whirl just below the recessed ceiling lights, casting shadow on her parents, growing in girth and length. It might consume her house soon. If she wasn’t cautious, if she stoked its fire by divulging more details, it might start to lumber behind her, follow her everywhere. To police stations and courthouses. To family gatherings and weddings. Atriums and dorm rooms.
“Why did you go to his apartment if he is not even your friend?” her mother said.
Gool stood and trudged up the stairs to her room and shut her dark room to banish the revolving image.
Now, what might she say if anyone questioned her presence at Abigail’s party, her sipping a drink among strangers in an unfamiliar house belonging to the parents of Abigail’s new boyfriend, Nitin? Abigail was just one of the few from Saratoga High who enrolled in Santa Clara University, a friend who had hundreds of friends and drained herself organizing parties or online, messaging and texting, wishing happy birthday and speedy recovery to folks she barely knew.
Gool had had no intention of showing up at Abigail’s party until the boy she had a crush on, Alejandro, called and said he was in the middle of a breakup. “I’m amazed people try so hard to live when it would be so easy to be dead,” he said.
Gool couldn’t disagree, remembering cadavers squished in body bags, oblivious to pain.
“Hopefully, I’ll see you at Abigail’s,” he said.
“See you,” she said.
Picking up a small, skewered slice of brie shaped like a leaf, she scanned the living room area but couldn’t locate Alejandro. Amol seemed engaged in some grand rhetoric, his body stretched upward and hand sweeping outward in a slow, steady motion.
That summer evening, in downtown Mountain View, she’d just wrapped up dinner in a Thai restaurant with Alejandro, two of her girlfriends, their boyfriends, and Amol, who was close to one of the boyfriends. Although she didn’t know him, couldn’t recall exchanging anything more than a hi, his six-foot figure and sculpted face was a familiar presence at Indian festival celebrations in Saratoga, where her family had moved from Bangalore in the beginning of her seventh grade.
At the door of the restaurant, she was hoping to have a private moment with Alejandro when he suddenly revealed he had a girlfriend. Feeling sick as if someone had whisked her blood, she watched as he and the others who were on their way to a club in SF fuzzed in the stream of bodies floating down the sidewalk. Amol was the last one left, smiling, keeping her company.
“I can drop you,” he said. “My car is at my apartment. Just a five-minute walk from here.” She’d mentioned to him earlier she still lived in Saratoga at her parents’, just two blocks from his parents’ home.
As he led the way, crossed an intersection, and sauntered past silent homes, a steady stream of darkness fell from the sky and thickened everything in one dense mass—trees, buildings, vehicles, and people. Alejandro’s image in her mind seemed difficult to blot out. Her ears resounded with the irregular rhythm of her heart—at times struggling to beat and then racing as if about to wreck itself.
At Amol’s apartment, a bachelor’s pad belonging to four men who worked for Apple and collectively afforded the steep rent, the melody of a classical Hindi song popular in the 1960s streamed to her from behind the textured wall. Inside, Amol introduced a sober-looking, unpretentious, unsmiling guy, who peered at her and said, “Come; sit,” as if he’d known her for long. When she revealed she was on her way home, he said, “We are not such dangerous people that you can’t sit with us for a minute—all village people at heart, including our American dude, Amol. We eat vegetarian food. Simple rice, daal, and curry.”
Another guy, Hari, apologized for the mess on the entryway table—chocolates, perfumes, moisturizers, and a tall beach doll in a pink and blue swimsuit—gifts for his relatives in India, where he would fly in a day for his wedding. Even the third guy was slated to get married to a doctor in India soon. “Would you care to try our delicious home-cooked paratha and cauliflower curry?” Hari asked and joked how he and his friends scouted cooking shows on TV and followed chefs on YouTube.
Amol let his friends know the two of them just had dinner. Then, he dug out a bottle of wine from a kitchen cabinet, poured the pale-lemon liquid in glasses, and served the first one to her. A call on his cell. He muted the phone and said, “I’m sorry, Gool. I have to attend to this office call. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes. Twenty at the max.”
After he dashed to one of the rooms, Hari said, “The sofa is not comfortable.” He fetched two pillows, stuffed them in the gap between Gool’s head and the sofa and said, “Lie down comfortably. No formalities here.” Feeling pampered and consoled, she stretched out, laid her head on the pillows, and felt a tingle of ache radiating in her muscles and bones. Although it was Saturday, she had been on her toes since reporting to the Veterans Hospital at five that morning. Her first job was to identify the cadaver they planned to autopsy by zipping and unzipping body bags, which were always, for some reason, two sizes smaller than the body, so the zipper got stuck to the skin. But she liked working inside the morgue, where her life acquired a sense of purpose, a feeling that she was the caretaker of the dead.
While Hari asked for the names of her favorite songs and played them one by one, she sipped wine, adrift on a sense of wellbeing, feeling glad that the world teemed with good people, like these young men.
The next thing was Amol’s penis tip circling her face. How did she fall asleep? Why didn’t she wake up when he undid her bra? Where did the others vanish? To a movie. For a walk. After she escaped his clutch, called Uber, and reached home, she got a text from his number: I really thought we had something going. Don’t you agree?
“I’m not even drunk,” Abigail’s boyfriend said after accidentally flinging a bottle of wine he had attempted to open, making a mess of liquid and broken glass. “I hope my parents let me live here when they return from their vacation.” While Nitin and Abigail collected shards in a pan and others offered paper and microfiber towels, Gool looked up and met Amol’s eyes—the crowd around the granite island had stepped away, clearing the space between them. He waved at her before saluting two guests who’d just been ushered in.
An unhinged chuckle escaped Gool’s lips. Where was Alejandro, who’d wanted her to come to this party? On her phone was a missed call and a text from him. “I need to go to Pleasanton to pick up my mom. I’ll still try to come. Sorry.” In a way, it was a relief; last semester, still fresh in her mind. She’d wanted to confide in Alejandro the incident with Amol because she couldn’t speak clearly with either her parents or her sister. No doubt, human lives would be far less disconcerting if everyone could find someone to trust, which shouldn’t be hard, given the number of people and all the means of communication. She’d imagined catching Alejandro alone in the corridor, after or before a lecture, and narrating the incident—how she’d gone to Amol’s apartment, although he was just an acquaintance, just someone she knew from her neighborhood. She had some wine and fell asleep. A mistake …
Alejandro had been there in her Molecular Biology class and so was his girlfriend, Melissa. During lectures, she remained pressed against him and made overt sexual gestures, plucking his earlobes, pressing his back with her fingers, and throwing her leg on top of his thigh. To avoid the couple, Gool skipped a few lectures, then was down with the flu and trapped for two weeks at home. Daily, in her parents’ eyes, she saw the flicker of the hovering penis tip. They regarded every door knock and phone ring with alarm and stood like sentinels at the window when an unknown car slowed or stopped. They seemed to have grown suspicious of her, too, as if she might dump another load of misery any second.
The day she recovered from the flu, she was jogging at night and stopped for a car to pass at the crossing of Artesia and Halliburton. The car braked, as if the driver waited for her to go first. Then she noticed the car was like Amol’s. Ultramarine and the same make.
At that moment, a car on Junipero, a side street, swung onto Halliburton and sped toward her. Not waiting for the car to decelerate, she ran across the road, sprinting all the way back to her front door, where, lungs thwacking her ribs, she whirled to check where he was. Apparently, nowhere. Perhaps it wasn’t his car. She was freaking out for no reason.
A few days later, her mother brought home the news that Amol had a new job in Seattle. His entire family was moving—Amol’s mom’s extended family lived in Seattle, too. Their home in Saratoga already had a realtor’s sign on the front lawn, with hopeful buyers expected to crowd the street over the weekend.
One night, Gool overheard her mother say she was glad they didn’t call the police on Amol. “Nobody will believe she was blameless. She went to his place, had a drink and fell asleep.”
Key aspects of the incident changed in Gool’s dream. She was completely sloshed, letting her body sink deep into the upholstered sofa, letting her knees level up to her face. Her bare ankles and painted toenails served as trinkets, attractive visual treats for Amol’s appraisal. He was a casual shopper drawn by an irresistible allure, a man trying out new clothes in a fitting room, although he didn’t intend to buy anything. She woke up angry. The incident seemed like a squirt of ink in a jar of water, a volatile, moving thing that mingled with the fluid environs and mutated with time and the angle and quality of light.
On her laptop, she watched and rewatched Christine Blasey Ford deliver her testimony. And then the nun in Kerala who was raped thirteen times before she lodged a complaint. Why after thirteen? some people questioned. Did she relish the first twelve?
In lectures, she seemed unable to latch on to the professor’s voice, which appeared to float to her from some distance and drag out, as if in slow motion. Even the images of other students—their nods, smiles, hands stirring on notepads—seemed disembodied, obscure, gliding past or through her without touching her in any way. She had a feeling that everyone was porous—unable to process stimuli. No one would know if anyone was screaming. Nausea roiled her gut when she focused her eyes or tried to make sense.
Close to her Molecular Biology project submission deadline, the professor asked her to see him in his office. One of her groupmates had reported her utter disregard of basic team rules—not contributing a word to the final report, not even for propriety’s sake. Unless she refuted the charge, the professor planned to give her an F. She didn’t. “Just try to do well in the finals,” he said.
Now, just as she started typing a message to Alejandro to let him know she wouldn’t stay at Abigail’s for long, Amol and Abigail’s boyfriend, Nitin, accosted her suddenly. Appearing eager to put in a good word for Amol, Nitin said, “Gool, I’m glad you know Amol, my buddy!” He patted Amol’s shoulders. “He used to stay here so often that my mom started calling the first room down the hallway ‘Amol’s bedroom.’”
“How are you? How are Uncle and Aunty?” Amol asked Gool. The note of authenticity in his voice, his aura of magnanimity, nobility, and forthrightness, struck her—his vanity and pride standing atop the foundation, the solid bricks, of her fear and shame. She imagined other bricks laid side by side, forming a marvelous pedestal to support a colossal ego.
“They are fine. Thank you for asking.” She veered to Nitin and said she needed to head out.
Nitin grabbed a bite-sized samosa and dipped it in mint chutney. “You just came,” he said as a blob of mint chutney fell to the floor.
“Still angry?” Amol said, loud enough to attract the attention of everyone in the kitchen despite the music. He slumped, sheepish, then let out an ardent sigh that seemed to envelope his tall, handsome figure like a charm. Then suddenly, his shoulders drooped, as if trying to please her might be an impossible task, and he looked all humiliation, which was pure entertainment for everyone. Chuckles echoed, everyone empathizing with Amol and eager to compliment him for being so spirited as to seek a girl who clearly didn’t think he was worth a look.
Gool waved at Abigail, stuck in a corner of the crowded living room, then darted to the foyer, grabbed her coat, and rushed into the dark, drizzling night.
“She’s gone?” someone said just as she shut the door. The silhouette of three men danced against a window while Lil Nas X sang and colored lights spurted, illuminating the cold mizzle. She hastened to her mother’s car, which she’d borrowed for the evening. The cloudy, layered sky rained on distant Saratoga mountains, on trees, electricity poles, street lamps, and the dark, black-box-like neighborhood homes inside which people must live in the clutches of fear and guilt.
Wasn’t she duty bound to go to the police? Yet, she felt resistance, an inability to pry open her lips, as if she’d been through an accident that might require an autopsy. She would be the subject of it. And the folks conducting it would be no experts, gleeful bystanders, who wouldn’t know anything about autopsy procedures, wouldn’t know the necessary precautions—make incisions carelessly, inflict wounds on internal organs, and spill the contents of her gut.
