Of Raids And Rapes

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THE RAID

Islamabad’s police on Sunday raided a guesthouse and arrested thirteen people for allegedly being involved in sex activities. The Kohsar police station’s SHO (Station House Officer) and his team raided the guesthouse in Sector F-7/1. Those arrested included eight men and five women against whom a case was immediately registered.

What led to the arrest of the entire group was the unlucky number thirteen. Eight p-envying women are just not enough for eight v-loving men.  What led to the arrest of the entire group was the unlucky number thirteen. One might say that eight p-envying women were just not enough for eight v-loving men.

I remember living in the same sector eons ago but found it a sterile neighbourhood, almost like the whole of Islamabad. Those were the happy Zia days when Mrikan cash, a doze of a hundred lashes on one’s naked back, or official dashes to Washington were the accepted norms. That our beloved capitol would degenerate into a colony of guesthouses in the years to come, I could not even imagine then.

Perhaps all this has something to do with the suggestive name of the sector: F. Keeping up with the local traditions of that great capitol and to honour the dishonoured men and women caught red-faced in the act, it would not be unwise to re-name the sector: F-8 males upon 5 females.

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THE RAPE

The recent violence against women during the last month showed that women are not safe in this age.

One eighty-year-old woman was raped, while a widow was injured for refusing to marry a younger man.

On August 12, a seventy-year-old ‘hakeem’ (indigenous medicine man) raped an eighty-year-old woman in his ‘dawakhana’ (indigenous clinic) by intoxicating her with ‘dawa’ (indigenous medicinal concoction) in Kot Lakhpat police precincts of Lahore. Efficient to the core in such matters, the police registered an FIR (first information report) against the accused, Ahmed Din for three crimes: rape, unnatural offence and intoxication.

All three vices occur in abundance in the west; it is an accepted ‘way of life’, which their governments warn is under threat from God-fearing people—terrorists, they conveniently label them. While I am not encouraging the likes of Ahmed Din, we do not know the background of the entire story; it is a human trait that one tends to judge the act without considering the events that lead to it.

Now, I feel that the poor hakim was under pressure. Just like most of us who are computer literate, he too must have been on the receiving end of cyber terrorism as practised by the advanced nations. Do not we all receive spam that suggests that females enlarge their breasts and that males enlarge something that repeatedly brings them long-lasting pain disguised as momentary pleasure? What is the right size, how much is enough?—the fashion keeps changing.

The curse of Viagra and its cheap imitations is probably what inspired the old hakim to force the homemade concoction down the older woman’s throat. Then he raped her; I will not burden your imagination by asking you to imagine how he proceeded with the act, suffice to say, he raped defenceless old bones who could not fight back by writing a Blog against him as some of the readers unjustifiably do against me at this website.

Always serving us in novel ways, the police report mentions reprehensible ‘rape’, and then ‘unnatural act’. For some, forced sex is equivalent to having sex by mutual consent; everything unnatural becomes natural then. We are not told to what level the Kama Sutra culture from across the Wahga border influenced the hakim and exactly which acrobatic move caused his deed to be pushed into the dark category of unnatural offences. What might be termed unnatural is that he may not have said please, excuse me, or good old-fashioned thank you to the lady before he was struck blind by passion.

These days, one can never know for certain what the authenticity level of such incidents really is. I suspect that our frustrated post menopause well-to-do ladies, residing in this beloved country but possessing foreign passports, will do nothing about this episode. The poor eighty-year-old woman may not carry the kind of appeal that some younger recent rape victims do; nobody will sponsor her trip to Washington for a parade before the media.