“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”

— Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ cheekily sets out that life follows the plots and aesthetics of art, not the other way around. Current events in today’s climate, especially when it comes to women’s rights, have an eerie, déjà vu quality reminiscent of that.

In 2018, the narrative of Vampire, a slim novel written by Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai in 1932, jumped out from mildewed, dusty, cobweb-covered and forgotten corners of libraries and came to life on the cover of major Western newspapers.

When Chughtai — a women’s rights activist and the first feminist Urdu writer — wrote Vampire, he already enjoyed a certain level of fame, notoriety and controversy (the latter for his unwavering support of women’s rights). At the age of 35, at the height of his popularity, he decided to address the unmentionable, unrecognised and unpalatable subject of rape in conservative Muslim society. It was considered an act of literary suicide.

Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai’s 1932 novel came to life in the United States 86 years later

Vampire is the story of a 16-year-old Muslim girl, raised in strict purdah, being brutally raped by people of her own kind, ie Muslims. It is a dark, tragic, heart-wrenching novel written in the first-person. The girl tells us her horrific tale through a veil of tears. Her story has great intimacy, incredible delicacy and is written in the most chaste Urdu. Her desire to keep her experience concealed is so obvious that the reader feels embarrassed about invading her privacy.

2018 turned out to be the year when her story suddenly lit up all media. Headlines addressing sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape were everywhere. The #MeToo movement rose, gathered momentum and then erupted like a nuclear mushroom. Women suddenly felt empowered. Around the same time, Brett Kavanaugh, a judge at the United States’s Court of Appeals, was nominated for the Supreme Court. Right on the heels of his nomination came Dr Christine Blasey Ford, a shy, highly accomplished middle-aged woman who stated that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was 16. Her story echoed the narrator of Vampire, the horror story written 86 years earlier in a conservative Muslim society in British India.

Chughtai’s heroine remains nameless throughout the novel. The naive, purdah-observing girl is on her way to a wedding celebration with family and friends. She falls asleep on the train and is left behind. Awakening to find herself alone on the dark and empty train, the frightened, panicked girl encounters a member of the cleaning crew who, upon noticing her burqa, tells her about a Muslim family nearby and takes her to their home. “When I saw the curtain on the door, I breathed a sigh of relief and entered confidently into the house of God-fearing, purdah-observing people,” she says. These are people she identifies with, with whom she feels safe.

Decades into the future, in the real world, after a swim meet, 16-year-old Christine confidently enters a house in Maryland. She has been there before; inside were her kind of people who belonged to the same country club and attended the same social events, church and school bazaars as she and her family did. These were people she identified with, with whom she felt safe.

Vampire’s narrator is alarmed to find only two men in the house. She is coerced into stepping into a room to wait for the women of the house to come. She hears the two men whispering conspiratorially.

Christine climbs the stairs to go to the bathroom, followed by two drunk boys. She is aware of them whispering conspiratorially.

Vampire’s narrator is cornered in the room and violently thrown on the bed. Pinned under the weight of her attacker, she feels his hands on her neck. “He was choking me. I was afraid he was going to choke me to death. I was afraid he would kill me.” The man did not want the girl to scream. “Don’t scream,” he said. “No one can hear you.”

Eighty-six years into the future, Christine describes how she was pushed into a room and thrown on a bed, pinned under the weight of Kavanaugh while his friend egged him on. “Kavanaugh covered my mouth with his hand to prevent me from screaming. I was afraid he would kill me, he would choke me to death accidentally.” The boys raised the volume of the music playing in the room so that no one could hear her.

The narrator of Vampire, after fiercely struggling, is brutally raped. Christine manages to escape and lock herself in the bathroom.

Neither the narrator nor Christine whisper a word of what has happened to anyone. They become co-conspirators to the very men who assaulted them. The victim in Vampire weeps and covers herself up. She becomes an accomplice to her assailant’s crime; she suffers and blames herself. Her personality changes — from a happy, carefree young girl she becomes silent, brooding and dazed.

Christine, too, becomes an accomplice to her attacker. She, too, suffers, but is afraid to tell anyone. Her personality changes — from being outgoing and carefree, she becomes silent and unhappy. Her schoolwork suffers, she struggles in college, she has difficulty adjusting to her life.

The victim in Vampire says, “I hide it like my own sin, for I know that even though it is not my fault and I am innocent, I would be the one who will suffer the consequences of this heinous crime. I would be the one who is gossiped about. I am the one who will not be allowed to live a full life. Society distances itself from women such as me. Not just men, but women want to distance themselves from me; their delicate sensibilities are violated and disturbed by my presence. They who have been fortunate never to have undergone something like what I had to go through, convince themselves that what happened to me is my fault, that this only happens to those who deserve it, that my fate is somehow my own character flaw. I know I will not receive justice in this world; the light of Ahura Mazda, the god of fire, sunlight and life has been extinguished by Ahriman, the lord of darkness, death and destruction. But on Judgement Day, Christ, the miraculous life-restorer, will give life to truth and honour. They will speak to the Almighty on my behalf; they will invoke my story in words more powerful than the melancholy melodies of David and the sighs of the martyred Imam Hussain’s mother. Angels will weep, prophets will shed tears and the light of God will shine again.”

Christine, too, keeps her secret hidden, sharing it only with her husband, a few friends and her therapist. When Kavanaugh becomes a federal judge, she — holding a PhD in psychology and with a powerful career of her own — thinks about exposing him, but hesitates. When Kavanaugh is nominated to become a justice of the Supreme Court, the dam breaks. She comes forward with her story and then follows a storm of harassment. Ugly rumours label her a liar and a stooge of the Democrats. Reporters at her door and threats to her and her family’s lives force her to leave her home and move to a safe house. She takes a lie detector test. She presents a most compelling case to a group of older, white men who ignore all evidence and make this into a political partisan matter. Throughout the ordeal she remains composed, controlled and ladylike.

Kavanaugh, meanwhile, comes in with an angry, red face. He cries, he screams. Entitled and arrogant, he refuses to take a lie detector test, not wanting an FBI investigation. Women activists and public demands force a limited investigation by the FBI. They do not talk to Christine, her therapist, the two other women who have also accused Kavanaugh or his male colleagues from Yale University who confirm his drunken behaviour. The only person they talk to is the friend who egged him on while he attacked Christine.

This incident, that has haunted Christine since she was 16 years old, creates barely a hiccup in confirming Kavanaugh’s nomination. Christine must now live with this latest humiliating chapter of her assault. What the narrator of Vampire said — that society will not let you live after they find out — is now happening to Christine.

Chughtai was the first to talk about what is now called ‘secondary rape’, when the victim is assaulted once again by society. Christine is now undergoing a witch-hunt led by the leader of the so-called free world; he mocks her openly to a jeering, laughing crowd of thousands who shout and boo with him. Christine is assaulted once again, not by a crowd of thousands, but of hundreds of thousands who witness all this on television.

When the narrator of Vampire says that “she who has been assaulted will be remembered for seven generations after her death”, she is talking about Christine. History will read that Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite Christine’s accusation. People will continue to disbelieve her. Perhaps, like the narrator of Vampire, she too will have to wait until Judgement Day when the ancient God of light will be on the throne, when Christ will give life to truth and honour, and rise and speak on her behalf. Angels will weep and prophets will shed tears.

Chughtai’s literary, timeless and timely classic Vampire lives and breathes even today. Literature, more than history, reminds us that some aspects of human society are universal; they raise their ugly heads regardless of who we are and where we live. These horrors committed against women are not by strangers, monsters and vampires, but by the very people they have reason to trust. We need to remember and fight these hideous aspects of the human race till kingdom come.

The writer is a physician, the granddaughter of Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai and author of the short story collection Her Mother’s Daughter and Other Stories

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 7th, 2019