When my friends first told me about the rogue stabber, I did not want to know more. My brain said: let's pretend this doesn't exist, let's not let him ruin the precarious safety assigned to my days.
But one cannot avoid these things. Yesterday, the count went up to 11 women: even a little girl. Apparently the assaulter picks them at random, from the zooming view on his motorbike, and slashes across their bodies -- literally -- with a sharp instrument. Today I learned that the instrument is not a dagger as people suspected, but a small surgical knife, incapable of killing, sure, but edged with the promise of incredible pain.
Not just physical. There's the wound, yes, but only on the surface. The cut will heal, it will be dressed and bandaged, maybe the girl's mother will lay out fresh, comfortable sheets on her bed so she can rest, throw in a few extra pillows, maybe worried family members will scurry around the injured girl, soothing her, helping her recover until she can get back on her feet.
But then she will have to step outside again. Pain follows fear and fear is the undercurrent all female bodies carry; in fact, our trans sisters have been forced to carry it for longer, for all of us. Already women and transfolks are policed outside, parceled around by male guardians, told where we can go and where we cannot. The city is built up as a space of hostility and danger, but those of us who frequent Karachi or Lahore streets, we make a case for the discomfort: these streetsides belong to us, yes, if we stick around long enough they (and the people within them) will get used to it, will learn to accept us.
But now there's a man going around wielding a surgical knife. He does not discriminate; he does not care for age or attire; as long as you have a vagina.
Now our families' fears are confirmed, and our well-meaning friends (the ones who tell us to stay shut inside out of 'care' rather than any impulse to protect), now their points are validated. And those of us who are women are realising that all this time, we've been directing our gaze from what has always been a threat -- no, a reality -- for khawajasiras, for those who exist outside the gender binary. We have been complicit, we have made excuses where we were not directly under the laser-beam of harm.
Now what? We can continue disregarding our well-wishers' concerns, of course we're not going to stop going outside, sitting on the sidewalk, reading a book at a dhaba. But each time we do -- each time I do now (it has hardly been 24 hours) -- and a man passes by on a motorbike, I am paralysed with fear. Fear, the undercurrent, has grown stronger.
My mother and I were walking outside the Medicare parking lot -- yesterday -- note that we were outside a hospital -- and a motorbike ambled too close to us. I've had motorbikes pass by closer, but I froze. A gust of fear. Accompanied by a sharp pain; the kind of pain that shakes you, loosens your hold upon the ground you stand upon. The possibility of threat (even if it is never confirmed) layered upon an everyday sight, a man on a bike, while numbers are rising on news reports and politicians dismissing them as exaggerations by the media-- the possibility of threat now stretching its limbs from every movement at the end of the street, was feeding a related thought: you should not be out here like this. You should start rethinking this daily dhaba business. These spaces are not yours.
From one intersection where a knife is pushed into skin that jerks and splits, the air rises and expands and delivers the violence unleashed to all other intersections; from anger and pain a blade carves trauma and uncertainty, looms its creation over the entire city.
My friends and I were at a dhaba even earlier, in our favourite spot under the tree, a space where we grow silly and talk about all sorts of meaningless things, and all we could talk about was harassment, assault, sexual abuse, or about this man out on the streets with a spirit of vengeance none of us could understand. Yet, had we not, at countless other times, encountered the same kind of anger? In police stations, in public transport, with darzis and doctors and even boyfriends, even in our own homes. So why were we even surprised. We continued swapping stories, as women often do when the topic of assault comes up, and we broke only to express our distress or outrage at the stabbing biker. The unthinkable violence of premeditated harm. The violence occurring even now as we shared stories of sexual trauma instead of unwinding over chai -- the air has expanded completely, solidified with each new gash, it now permeates our most harmless hours.
What makes men so angry? If you've read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, there's a part where she digs deeper into the violent shade of men's anger: she concludes that men's violence is a way to assert their superiority; that any creature, positioned at a higher rung, is inherently threatened by the ones on the lower rung.
Still, it stupefies me. What threw this individual into such fury that he grabbed a knife -- a weapon capable of hurting another human being -- and took it outside its station on the kitchen counter or surgical table or wherever he got it from; took it outside with the intention of fastening it inside living flesh -- is he immune to the screams that spring from pain, the wail of the stretching skin, the moan of a body realising it will never be safe anywhere?
Already, women have begun altering their habits -- as if it is we who need to change our habits. The responsibility is on you, for having a vagina. So now girls are carrying knives, pepper sprays, stones*. They're avoiding being outside unless absolutely necessary; reducing their interaction with the street, taking a Careem instead of a rickshaw, having someone pick them up right at their gate instead of down the street.
Perhaps this surgical-knife-brandishing biker was spurned by a woman, perhaps someone broke his heart. Maybe his wife was a strong, independent woman who wanted nothing to do with him anymore, so he thought, I'll show you all.
We can never be thought of as separate beings, us feminine creatures. We are held collectively responsible for whatever imagined transgression is pinned upon one of us.
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Girls at Dhabas is interested in whatever we can do regarding this assaulter. But we are at a loss because we don't know what we can do. Protest? Uss se kya ho ga? Go around sharing self-defense skills? If anyone else is growing restless also, if you have seeds of ideas and want to brainstorm with us, message us. Hum kal milayn ge to discuss this; the more, the merrier.
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