Twitter is my eyes on the ground in South Asia. Like in the United States, it has become a vehicle for personal testimony from the frontlines of major civil rights protests back home. As always, fatigue is part of the bargain when consuming social media. Another flood, another politician with a cringeworthy statement, another socialite in a weird outfit; it’s all routine. I scroll by, rarely clicking a hyperlink. But not for Noor Mukadam. For Noor Mukadam, I paused.
Noor Mukadam was murdered in Islamabad, Pakistan on July 20th by Zahir Jaffer, her ex. She was about my age. I learned all this from a single tweet, which was accompanied by a picture of her smiling radiantly. I also read the gruesome details of her murder, as well as the outrage of Pakistani women demanding #JusticeForNoor. Tweet after tweet from those who knew Zahir detailed his escalating misogyny. Countless female schoolmates described his violent habits and emphasized that his lack of character was no secret, but protected by the privilege of his elite family. Everybody knew. Normally, I can roll my eyes at what I already know: patriarchy’s grip on South Asian is unrelenting. This time though, I felt a familiar revulsion in the pit of my stomach, and I thought of Jyoti Singh.
To process violence that is particularly barbaric, we often return to the first time a similar crime stopped us in our tracks and for me, it was Jyoti Singh nearly 10 years ago. She fundamentally changed me. For the first time in my life, I understood that the cruelty and the violence she suffered was the point. The brutality of her assault and murder was only overshadowed by the utter depravity of her continued parading as “Nirbhaya” — fearless in Hindi — when in all likelihood, she died overtaken by abject terror. “India’s Daughter” is how she was memorialized and even that felt tasteless. How was India’s daughter allowed to suffer such a fate? What about the rest of India’s daughters? Does daughterhood not inspire a sense of responsibility by the State to protect women? Jyoti’s parents have asked for her to be referred to by her name since 2013, but Indian media rarely does. It chooses instead to use a moniker that obscures the barbarity of what was done to her and reduces her from a woman with dreams and desires to an event in time. It was vile all around. In Jyoti, for the first time, I saw myself as what I could be at the wrong place and time: a victim.
Predisposition to violence on the basis of gender inspires a fundamental indignation in women, rightly so. Rage is the mildest valid reaction to femicide and I have felt no shortage of it in every instance of indignity against women after Jyoti. But, rage as a woman is tricky. The aftermath of a particularly violent act of misogyny is often littered with commentary, questions, and sometimes criticism from those who are less emotionally afflicted (typically men). When Jyoti succumbed to her injuries, a light in me went out. Would we find who did this to her? How could we serve justice if she wasn’t alive to see it? Like other college freshmen, I took my pain to Facebook and was met with the resounding popular sentiment from a fellow male student I barely knew: nothing changes in India. The callousness of what amounted to a virtual shrug was my first realization that an act of violence against a woman itself is only the first point of rage. The rest comes when an intimately felt pain from a distal occurrence is thrust into the often unenlightened court of public opinion.
The internet is a free for all where discourse is often unpredictable and misogynistic. Morbid curiosity is innate to human nature though, so even when we are sure we will be disturbed, we can’t help but tune in. Ordinarily though, we look away once we have seen enough. We calm our hearts by telling ourselves that we already knew evil exists in the world. But, what if misogyny rears its heads closer to home? What happens when a white man murders 6 Asian women and men in your circles question whether the crime was about gender at all? Robert Aaron Long killed these women when anti-Asian sentiment was on the rise, and yet this instance particularly unnerved the Asian women around me. When you are doubly vulnerable by gender and race (see: intersectionality) you walk the earth knowing you are never one or the other, but always both at once. Accordingly, the target on your back is twice as heavy. When the “good” men in your lives begin asking how you can be so sure it was a hate crime on more than one level, you begin to wonder how the target that is so unbearably burdensome to you is simply invisible to them. Sure, it’s often not intentional, but that’s not really the point. Questioning what we know so intimately and instinctually, prompting us to defend and articulate the primitive desire to feel safe compounds the invisibility and loneliness of our pain. It is one thing to absorb the shock of yet another instance of violence against women. It is an entirely separate but excruciating ordeal to accept that more often than not, we are in our grief without communion with the men we love who love us back; it’s not because they don’t care, but because they truly cannot fathom the trauma we carry.
But Mallika, why don’t you tell them? Maybe they can learn to be there for you. Ignoring the insensitivity of asking women to bare their scars for sympathy, there is a tremendous assumption in a question like that — they will listen. Truly listen. Attunement to someone’s vulnerability is an art few people excel at, even if they wish to. And, being vulnerable is difficult enough for most people, especially for women discussing their experiences with violence. People do not forget how they felt when you don’t hold their vulnerability kindly. Proximity makes this even more confusing. We rightfully expect our friends and family to be there for us, to comfort us, and if they fall short, we are left doubly shaken. I used to rely heavily on a male friend of mine many years ago. I was (and am) a vocal person about the patriarchy and its misogyny, but with him, I was also vulnerable about my personal past and fears. I never quite felt validated in those moments but via our friendship, I still considered him a support system. That changed the day he told me that the power of what I have to say about women’s experiences with violence gets lost in the volume with which I convey it, that I am too loud about my thoughts and it dilutes the validity of my opinions. In the moment I was stunned, and many years later I am finally angry. I have to wonder how different things would be if the energy he (and others) poured into silencing my spirit was instead allocated to anything else, even something as passive as making space for me to feel my pain without judgement.
Over the years, my desire to express myself publicly and privately has been greatly diminished. I was outspoken about my personal experiences with misogyny and men’s violence against me because I believed our stories would make people listen; if men, especially the ones who love us, understood our suffering, they would be horrified too. I didn’t account for what would happen though if I told my stories, people heard them and, like my friend, remained unaffected. I think it is always brave and never simple when women bear testimony to the indignities they have suffered and thus, I still believe sharing our narratives is powerful. However, I now refuse to spotlight what I have survived as Indian woman with intent to convince soldiers of the patriarchy that our fight is a worthy one. While I resent the tone-policing, my friend’s comment left me with a valuable lesson: it should not take the re-telling of vivid, trauma porn-like stories to garner compassion for us and outrage on our behalf, especially not when we all remain subject to daily global reminders of women’s subordination. In just the past week following Noor’s death, USA Fencing kept Alen Hadzic in the Olympics by creating a “safety plan to keep him away from women” as redress for his demonstrated history of sexual misconduct since 2010. Rapper DaBaby brought Tory Lanez to his set at Miami’s Rolling Loud music festival just minutes after Megan Thee Stallion left the stage, who has had a protective court order against Tory since he shot earlier this year. The internet flooded with cruel hot takes on decorated Olympian Simone Biles and her premature exit from Tokyo 2020, ridiculing her for prioritizing her health over her competition. The flippancy with which global society treats women is obvious and constant. My personal experience is unlikely to be the tipping point for someone who remains unmoved. Moreover, I value my healing (as all women should) and cannot jeopardize it to reiterate the obvious. In the impossible choice between expressing rightful rage and protecting ourselves from further harm, there is simply no good outcome.
In all I have been forced to tolerate vis-à-vis violence against women, Noor’s murder wasn’t just another blow. Beyond the devastation of her loss, something more primal in me shifted. My friend Sania put it more elegantly than I could as she grappled with something similar: “Pakistani masculinity evokes such a deep and specific rage for me, such a deep disgust. Every time I hear of any incident of violence towards women & queer folks here or abroad, it leaves me paralyzed for days. Every time I’m exposed to the passive aggressive and dismissive narratives almost all Pakistani men hold in response, it leaves me paralyzed. This is a violent masculinity that transcends generations and nations and I am tired.”
Noor’s murder wasn’t just another tragedy, and I am tired.
In an unforgettable piece about consent and touch, Melissa Febos said, “As I’ve observed the more longitudinal effects of my past experiences — the recurrent dreams and tendency to detach from uncomfortable situations — I’ve become less interested in classifying what it was than in observing what it did to my psyche.” Noor’s murder brought me eye-to-eye with my psyche, nearly 10 years after I first started grasping the gravity of femicide. What is the observation here? What has endless exposure to personal and distant instances of trauma, erasure, victim blaming, dismissal, and silencing done to me? It renders me a ghost. The Noors and Jyotis of this world, the ones who are “lucky” enough to become a headline, leave me incapacitated. I feel, deep in my heart, an ache so specific and familiar that I am certain it must be what my female ancestors felt, too. And, that anguish separates my spiritual from my corporeal for days at a time, each time. The message is all the same: nothing is ours, not even our bodies. We are reminded constantly how fragile our existence is and how swiftly it can be taken away from us. The brutality will always be the point. Over the years, my psyche has become less preoccupied by the collective outrage over our abuse and more contemplative of all it robs us of beyond our sense of safety. It erodes our ability to trust, to forge loving relationships and our physical and mental wellbeing. We remain painfully aware of the proximity of danger because it is omnipresent, and we expend all our energy into simply surviving our days. We are deprived, ultimately, of our right to live full, free, dignified lives and instead, become ghosts before we even depart for whatever comes next.
I have no grand strategy to overcome this reality, only my personal coping mechanisms. In a world built for men, feminine joy is my revolution. When I think of all the women we have lost to the patriarchy, I think of what they must have laughed about, what they enjoyed doing, and who they whispered their secrets to. I think about whether they knew that even daring to claim more from life than their allocated share is an act of resistance. In my heart, I try to remember these women for their courage, determination, and zest for life, not for what they suffered. I think of Noor Mukadam, dancing with her lover at a wedding not knowing he would soon be her murderer. I think of Jyoti Singh, enjoying a date with her beloved in their hometown, only to be punished for daring to be outside in the first place. I think of all the women who defy the social order of the world, moving through it with the innate privilege of men and instead, became cautionary tales. In moments like this though, I also think of all the other ghosts wandering the planet, wondering when we may feel an indisputable entitlement to our existence as autonomous being worthy of respect and protection. In another world, we inhabit our bodies proudly without fear of violation. In this world though, we stand by and we hope for the best. There are more of us than we will ever know, but I’m committed to recognizing as many ghosts as I can. Maybe, if someone sees them exactly where they stand in all their scars and glory, they’re not ghosts after all.
