It seems somehow appropriate that I should be writing this on a park bench in Bloomsbury, in London. A quiet day in a quiet area. A few people walk by, an occasional patch of blue emerges in the sky, a stray raindrop darkens my computer screen. Sheltered in an academic cocoon, in a city far away from the one where a court hearing in my name apparently occurred last Friday.

A policeman — “quite tall, quite burly,” my mother says — visited her two days before the hearing. At 6 that morning, just after the Chennai Mail had rolled into Bangalore, the Police Control Room had called home.

Groggy and disoriented at that early hour, my mother thought at first that they had the wrong number when they asked about a case that was up for hearing in two days. Then she remembered her daughter had filed an FIR after an incident on a train... in 2005. There had been some phone calls in the interim, asking about witnesses, but they were vague, the Tamil hard to understand.

The Chennai Police sent a man over to find out what was going on. He would collect a written letter declaring that I, the plaintiff, was out of the country. He sat in the drawing room, a little dishevelled from the overnight journey, but courteous, polite. He dug around in his bag and fished out three sheets of paper and a pen. He did not know much about the case he was here in connection with.

He did not know that in June 2005, on the way to a friend’s wedding, I, 24, was in a top berth on the Chennai Mail, travelling alone, sleeping opposite 28-year-old Sanjeev Kumar from Madhubani in Bihar, on his way to take his Railway examination in Chennai. The cop seated politely, respectfully, on the white couches in my mother’s living room did not know that in the course of that night there were a few minor incidents that involved Sanjeev Kumar reaching out to touch me repeatedly. The cop, of course, would not know that at 3:30am I woke from a mostly disturbed sleep to scream and rouse the entire bogey. He will not know that the other passengers maintained only a curious silence as the Railway Police entered our bogey. That the Ticket Collector — after overcoming his initial belief that I had dreamt the whole thing up — made me write out my complaint. That Sanjeev Kumar went down on his knees to tell me I was like his mother or his sister and that he had been unable to “control himself ”. That a passenger had even followed me off the train to request me “not to ruin the young boy’s life”.

In my mind this was a simple case. I had been violated, admittedly in a small way, but I was asked whether I wanted to take action and I did. The Indian Penal Code has at least two sections applicable in cases involving harassment such as this and I intended to use them. It was simple.

But when I actually initiated the course of events that constituted “taking action”, things became a lot less simple. Sanjeev Kumar and I were herded into a room and he was treated roughly. We assumed positions of polarity almost immediately — I, a journalist for Chennai’s leading newspaper, modestly dressed, Tamilspeaking, upper caste; he, a Hindispeaking Bihari. Neatly etched characterisations of victim and aggressor eagerly sprang to life.

In the years since I filed that complaint, I have often wondered what would have happened if one or more variables in this long-drawn, weary tale were changed.

If we were on a train from Madhubani to Patna, for instance. If my only Indian spoken language was Hindi.

If I was not wearing a salwar kameez.

If I was not a journalist.

If Sanjeev Kumar was a middleaged Iyer Tamilian.

If he was of the same caste as the man who first took the complaint.

The possibilities are endless but there we were, on two ends of a precarious see-saw, which was hoisting me upwards.

I have often thought about Sanjeev Kumar over the past two years because of that filing of the FIR, and his subsequent imprisonment, his plaintive cries to me as I walked by him to file the report with the station incharge, overseeing things in triplicate detail — those memories are engraved in my mind forever as examples of the many ways in which caste, class, language, gender and power can converge on one single incident. An example of the State and its agencies intrinsically linked in a web and actively mediating between its various threads. Of how “institutionalising” does not automatically yield to an impartial process that is free from inflections of identity.

But I never really took those thoughts further. I never thought about what would happen after I left the police station. In the years since, I changed jobs, took a year off to do my
Masters, moved to London. I assumed that the police would have knocked Sanjeev Kumar around a bit, and then let him off later that same day. Vague telephone calls to my residence suggested that some archaic legal system was grinding slowly into place, but I never believed that it would have gripped the accused in its tenacious grasp and refused to let him go for two-and-a-half years. His fate did not seem like my business.

AUGUST 13, 2007

The hearing is over now. I do not know whether it was the first. Sanjeev Kumar appeared for it as he will have to appear for every hearing henceforth. The State Prosecutor was unwilling to accept the written statement, in case I challenged it later. The policewoman who has been looking into the case told my mother it would not be closed easily because I was a journalist and might turn the case into a campaign. The law would “take its course” in all its painstakingly slow brutality. They might consider a letter from me asking that the case be shut.

But as these procedures, these forms in triplicate, all the tracing of details, slowly snaked their way from procedural rulebooks into shaky existence, Sanjeev Kumar’s life is held in ebb, a tough rope bringing him back time and again to the events of a night by now very long ago.

What did I think would happen when I filed the FIR? A two-and-a-halfyear, and continuing, saga of justice delayed and a judicial system erring unbelievably in my favour? What happened that night perhaps merited a short imprisonment and a fine. Or just a fine. I’m not in any position to decide that, but I do know that in no way did it deserve a hearing process stretched out over two and more years, with no signs of wrapping up. The law took its “course” as I had hoped it would, but it also seems to have taken into unofficial account my specificities. My career most notably. In retrospect, my decision to file an FIR now seems cast more in the mould of middle-class outrage than a desire to do the logical thing. The annoying copassenger’s words come back to my mind now, their warning that I “would ruin the young boy’s life” oddly prescient — but how could I have known that then? And if I had known that, would I have acted differently? Not entered a system that placed me at an unfair advantage? Perhaps.