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The following essay comes in the aftermath of the Bombay high court setting aside a 2021 trial court acquittal and convicting Tehelka founder Tarun Tejpal of rape and other offences under the Indian Penal Code. 

My parents nearly named me Chhaya, the Hindi word for shade; welcome in Delhi’s scorching summers. It always felt as though she’d already existed in their minds. Respite from the heat, a cooler version of me.

Shadow twin. My father was a journalist; he would play a game with me where he flipped through the pages of a magazine or a newspaper and asked me to name the men whose pictures we saw: ministers and their political affiliations, who belonged to which party, who was a cabinet member, who led the opposition? He had trained me for these quizzes for as long as I could remember, since the time my mother became pregnant with me. He would come home from work and regale her belly with tales from the newsfloor: political intrigue, breaking news, editorial clashes, tomorrow’s headlines.

And yet, my first lessons in politics were not from Parliament.

My first lessons were in male rage.

I grew up terrified of men’s anger. I’ve written before, when grieving my father’s death, about who he became when he drank, which was most nights we spent together. He was a slender man fleshed out by rage, smashing everything, including my mother, onto hard surfaces and into unyielding walls. Obliterating the world around him until he fell into a stupor of sleep. Morning would transform him, once more, into a loving angel filled with guilt and forgiveness. I saw glimpses of this rage in others I loved. A boy who should never have been working lived in my home for a while to look after me after my parents divorced. I was a child of five, he was 16. He touched me and masturbated over my sleeping body every afternoon until my grandparents caught him in the act. That day, I saw him, this boy, my playmate and caretaker, my first abuser, beaten by........

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