Page 97 - Till the Last Breath . . .

The first time she tried telling her father about it, she was slapped across

her face. And she just told him that a friend of his had tried to manhandle
her. He refused to believe her and told her she was imagining things. Her
own father denying her the right to get back at the people who destroyed

her.
‘He is a respectable man and a senior of mine,’ he said. ‘Dare you talk

like this again!’ He walked off.
For months, Zarah was in severe depression. Her mother thought it was

puberty which was causing it and brushed it off. She would shower five
times a day, eat soap to cleanse herself from the inside and was referred to

many doctors for OCD (Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder). Slowly, she
cured herself. She shut her mind off to all her memories and created new
ones.

Sometimes, she felt vindictive. She tracked the two army men years after
the incident. One of them died a year after the incident, three bullets to the

chest in an attack on the army base camp in Srinagar. Since he was a
veteran Kargil hero, his funeral was covered on television. She laughed

demonically, faintly similar to how those men had that night at the
farmhouse. Her father watched silently.

The other man slipped into a coma after slipping on his bathroom floor
five years after the incident and suffered a concussion. He got better with
time but would be confined to a bed for life. Seeing him lie helpless on the

hospital bed made her feel better. Telling her rapist’s nineteen-year-old
daughter what he had done to her made her feel ecstatic. When the man’s

daughter asked Zarah how she knew the whereabouts of her father, Zarah
replied, ‘I have never forgotten him. He is a monster.’ The horror in the

daughter’s eyes quenched her vengeance. She laughed when she saw the
man’s daughter confront him with her newly acquired news.

She was over it now. Her rape did take away her innocence, but it also
took her family away from her. Her father and she never looked each other
in the eye after that day.