What my stalker wanted

“I am neither Manning nor Snowden. And if you want me to be direct, let me warn you there are consequences of apathy. You can’t choose to overlook the mundane for the interesting. Facts are never interesting because none of the languages will ever be able to qualify them.

Still, if all of you want to know, my name is not all. I am also one of those accused - stalkers, harassers and trespassers. Yes, an accuser beats a flong out of you. So you already recognise me. Both for my named and the accusations they carry. We are the names we are called. You don’t have to ask for my image. I am inside you in the repository of evolution. Everyone knows the language of archetypes. Well, trust your imagination to settle any doubts whatsoever.

@kinkysinha was the story of a spinster. I was interested in them. They are vulnerable, especially the damaged spinsters. They give their stories easily. Also, vulnerability makes for great stories of pain and decadence. You get a lot of readers who are either shy of confessing their own pain or those for whom pleasure is inverted.

...but I want to tell you all that creativity flourishes in censorship. I have created an email list which can’t be banned by Twitter. Stories will travel independent of illicit pressure groups as always. Please share this where you can if like me, you feel Twitter has made a mistake on this occasion. All of you are also Politicians, Journalists, Scholars, Activists and Writers, if you find merit in my statement you can please get this published and show your support.

Meanwhile, I will post every tweet from my Twitter timeline to this blog, and this email thread, so that their attempt to suppress imagination is thwarted. This will both be a protest and an archive of resistance. I just want to tell you that indifference is also a crime. It is me today, tomorrow it can be you!

PS: They say that throughout the history anonymous was a woman. It is too much of a declaration. When I say that whistle-blowers have always been men, it is a logical fact. I can’t recall any memorable image of women in the profession of whistling. Even in the school, Games madam never hung a whistle around her neck. Women whisper while the men whistle. It is the natural order of things. Men don’t complaint whispering. But why do some women have problems with whistling?”

— My stalker 

When I deposed before the magistrate for the first time two years ago, the account of me being stalked ran into files. In a chamber, the magistrate and I sat alone as she wrote on paper the narrative full of dread and trauma, and when it was already four pages, she said to me that there is no escaping this. I can't compress the details, I said. The story lies in the details.

I should move cities, she said.

That's the only way, she stressed.

Is it?

I sat in the courtroom many times waiting my turn, watching others fight their battles. The nonchalance of the judges amused me. The book of law could aim to be fair but it is also impersonal, cold and immune to the trauma that a woman has to undergo because she is being stalked. In anticipation of a crime, you can’t put someone behind bars, the law says. He got bail at least three times. He kept on threatening me. His parents showed up at my house in December last year asking to see me. They had obtained my address from the court. I was aghast. 

In November, my apartment is Delhi was robbed. I was away in America at the time but the thieves took away laptops, cameras and hard drives. It wasn't a coincidence. 

I moved again. But how many times can I keep moving in a city? 

The first time I went to a police station was a week after the stalker had broken into my house in Nizamuddin West where I lived in a barsati. On June 26, 2014, I returned to my apartment post 10 pm and noticed the lights were on. Suddenly one went off. Sometimes you can smell the presence of other. Or notice it in little details. 

I had noticed the disarray. The light in the bathroom went off and on. I was with a former colleague of mine. In retrospect, I feel it was just the case of perfect timing because if I hadn’t gone to the other end of the room, I wouldn’t have found him standing next to the door. He could have let himself out of the door and hid somewhere on the terrace. Already, he had checked out the possible hideouts. The storeroom was unlocked. But I saw him. I asked him what he was doing there. He said he had come to meet me because I had cut him off. 

He used to be a former colleague and much younger than me. He had requested the magazine where I worked then to let him work under me. I was out travelling when he assumed I had left the organisation and wrote to me the first of many emails professing how he had developed feelings and how as we met seldom, he felt “dejected and broken”. 

This was in January 2014, and over months, the phone would ring in the dead of the night. For a few days, the silences would return. But then, the landline would ring again. At 2am, at 3am, at 4am. I didn’t unplug it then. I decided to learn to live with fear. Fear isn’t a bad thing, one of the police officers told me as he read through the emails the stalker had written.

In one that was titled “I love old people”, the tone had been sinister. 

"Worried because they hadn't heard anything for days from the widow in the neighbouring apartment, Mrs Silver said to her son, 'Timmy, would you go next door and see how old Mrs Kirkland is?' A few minutes later, Timmy returned. 'Well,' asked Mrs Silver, 'is she all right?' 'She's fine, except that she's angry at you.' 'At me?' the woman exclaimed. 'Whatever for?' She said, 'It's none of your business how old she is,' snickered Timmy." the email said.

Every morning I’d wake up and search for myself on the internet. The person who stalked me created fake Twitter profiles, blogs and hundreds of emails were sent out to every editor and journalist tagging me as a dissenter, who should be punished for not keeping quiet about the fact that I was the victim of stalking by a man who was delusional and hated me because he thought I was a misandrist. 

He offered me his virginity over email. The emails had become bizarre. I chose silence. I didn't think it would turn into a case of stalking and defamation then.

I was under surveillance. I had learned to sit still, and wait through the nights. A set of knives by my side, I trained myself to listen to the slightest disruptions. I learned to see in the dark, to hear the slightest noise, to wait through the night with a knife in hand. I taught myself to fight. I learned to sleep light. Fear is not bad. It teaches the art of stillness. I imagined the worst. I prepared myself for the worst. I learned to navigate through the “ifs”.

After he was released from police custody the first time, he created fake twitter profiles. He emailed threats and called me a “whore” and kept a file ready in case he was arrested again. The police showed it to me. I developed PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). I was tired of being on high alert. But I refused to leave the city.

When the warnings came, I read through them clinically. I looked at the law. I read through cases. I wasn't going to give in.

He had been arrested twice and released on bail within a year. He was lurking in the deep dark Web. He was smart. He knew the law was not on my side. He played around with it. With the social network being the order of the day, I woke up on most days to see my own photos posted in the name of “Kinky Sinha”.

I was the “lonely, damaged spinster” and a misandrist who would be punished for being a woman and who had reported a man for breaking into her house. I was also tagged as a dissident and according to his narrative called Romances of the Wild that he posted on the internet, I have a terrorist boyfriend. 

The stalker would sign off as “Jai Hind. Jai Bharat”. He warned me against consequences. He wrote to another woman saying I was a hater of men. He wrote to hundreds of people claiming himself to be whistle-blower. Whistle-blowers don’t send texts saying they want to photograph you in the nude, etc. They don’t break into your house, abuse you, defame you, and impersonate you. But I would not respond. I had read and encountered enough psychopaths already to know better. 

He used proxy servers to send emails. These were routed via London. He imagined himself as a freedom fighter who accused me of using influence to get a fake Twitter account suspended that used my “publicly available” pictures and abused me online. This, he considered his right to freedom of speech and expression. 

In a patriarchal society, the sense of entitlement runs deep. There’s no logical explanation for any of this. I was imprisoned in my own house, checking windows and doors, and looking under the bed, and tugging at the locks to make sure they were secure. Calling me a “lonely, damaged and a spinster” and a “harasser” and calling himself a whistle-blower and writing “they say throughout the history anonymous was a woman" was defamation. I read through stories of women being stabbed by their stalkers. I read through stories of acid attacks on women who spurned advances of men they didn’t like. I spent days struggling with these threats. 

In his natural order of things, women are lesser beings. They are to be controlled, and put in place by men who are enraged by rejection, and unrequited love. Their rage is justified by patriarchy. Their misplaced sense of entitlement stems from social conditioning, I understood. 

When you grow up as a woman, you are expected to fall in line, and to fight years and years of entitlement of men is not an easy task. You are expected to be vulnerable so they can protect you. And you need to accept that protection because as some of my "feminist" friends say that the rules of the games have been set by thousands of years of women living under patriarchy. I refuse to buy into that argument. Get out of the matrix. 

It is like they have drawn these circles around you. You cross the circles chasing your freedom, and you are pulled back, abused, called names by men, who don’t see you as a human being.

As a woman, you are forever forced to think about your honour, and modesty. Rape and other attacks are weapons of choice for men who can’t get past rejections. It is a power game. They can’t take it. They react. 

My stalker had dehumanised me. 

He is a misogynist. He is also a sadist.

But I have chosen to live my life and fight back.