Trigger warning: Mentions of gender based violence, rape
This plot of ‘Vampire’ by Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai is simple. An unnamed 16 year old girl who has had her nikah ceremony with a man she has not set eyes on is travelling to a wedding with her family. She falls asleep in the crowded compartment and when she wakes up finds that the rest of her family had gotten off the train leaving her behind. She is in an unknown place with no money and no way to contact anybody, and she falls into the clutches of two men belonging to her community.
Though she tries desperately to escape and physically fights back, she is brutally raped by one of the men, who then leaves his address with her and promises to marry her. She throws the slip of paper away, and in an act of self preservation pretends as if nothing untoward happened. But when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn’t know what to do.
The book deals with the dilemma of the unnamed narrator, and the conflicting emotions running through her mind. She knows she is the victim, and yet she realises that by keeping silent, she has in some way made it seems a little difficult for her. But what else could she have done? She had to remain silent because society judges is the victim and not the perpetrator after all, it is her honour, and her family’s honour that is at stake, not that of the man who raped her.
The book was written and published in 1932, but if I didn’t know otherwise, I would think it is a contemporary novel. In an extremely poignant portion, she contemplates death because she cannot bear the dishonour to herself and her family
“And when my brother finds out? Oh my God, what will he do out of anger and pride? I will not be surprised if he kills me and then takes his own life. The whole neighbourhood will gossip. And what of my poor mother? The neighbourhood women will pretend to be sympathetic but in reality, would be there just for titillation And those who are jealous of us? Our hidden enemies? They will exaggerate all that has happened.
Such thoughts chased one after another, they were so painful that I actually screamed! I now realized that there was only one solution, there was only one choice. Death! Death was the only choice, the only solution I had. Death would solve all these problems, there was no other choice.”
Have things really changed even today? Don’t we continue to hear about similar incidents even now when victims of forced to contemplate death as a way of redeeming her honour and that of her family? In the book, she repeatedly blames herself for throwing away the address of her rapist.
If she had not done so, he could have married her and salvaged her pride. Doesn’t this continue to find resonance even today, where even judges have ruled that if the rapist marries the pregnant underaged victim, he can escape with a reduced sentence or with no sentence at all.
The book is translated from Urdu by Zoovia Hamiduddin, the granddaughter of the author. In the translator’s note at the beginning of the novel she says that she had avoided reading ‘Vampire’ for as long as she could. “By the time I gathered the courage to read it as an adult, the #MeToo movement had begun gathering momentum in the world. The news on television featured women speaking up about sexual assault, and the pain, anger and helpless frustration they had borne for so long was mirrored in the pages of the book in my hand.”
She also compares the book to the Gothic novels that were very popular at the time when the novel was written. In stories like Dracula, women who had been attacked by men were neither dead nor fully alive, and for no fault of their own were forced to live their life in a no-no land.
The difference between those books and Chughtai’s ‘Vampire,’ as the translator points out, is that here the villain is not from another world- he is from within the community. In a lot of ways, that the man is from within makes it much worse. That the narrator is unnamed only adds to the power of the story.
This book could have been set in the 2020s and it would be just as powerful. The only changes that need to be made to make it more modern would be finding a way around the fact that in all likelihood she would have a mobile phone and therefore would find it easier to get back in touch with her family. Apart from that everything else that happens in the book would have happened exactly the way it out in the book even today, and is the tragedy of our times.
There is also a passage in the book where her perpetrator quotes selectively from the Scriptures justify the sexual assault. Through that incident, the author makes it clear that most often it is not the Scriptures that guide us, but our interpretation of the Scriptures- particularly the male interpretation. This book was written long before the terms Stockholm Syndrome or Secondary Rape Trauma were coined, but the book describes them very convincingly.
A word on the title of the book. Though the book was written in Urdu, the word ‘vampire’ is obviously taken from another language. The author explains it by reiterating that since Urdu uses words derived from very many other languages, why not from English too? Especially since, as in this case, the word is so evocative and descriptive. There is the vampire that exists in myths, and there is the vampire that exists within us, and we know which vampire is the more dangerous one.
It is possible that the reader might be disappointed by the ending. However, given the choices available to women in those days (and which remain the choices available even today), was any other end really possible?
This book has been published by Speaking Tiger. You can follow them on YKA here.