For these women, victims of heinous crimes, a refuge at last

• Forty something Gunaprabha Bohra is always mumbling in a disjointed manner, even when she’s not on psychotropic drugs. But she never betrays any emotion when she tells you about her three daughters, sold to an Assam brothel by her husband. In between jumbled sentences, she manages to tell you that she escaped from that "hell" with her youngest, Bobby. She wants to send her daughter to a "convent school". What she doesn’t know is that five-year-old Bobby is mentally challenged, and that both of them are hiv positive.
   
• Two years ago, Kusum was fished out of the Yamuna in Delhi in an unconscious state. For a long time, her rescuers didn’t know if she was a man or a woman—her sexual organs were badly burnt and there were cut marks all over her body. Today, she keeps to herself, all the time. But when the effects of the 1,500 mg psychiatric drugs start wearing off, she starts howling and screaming violently—swearing at the men who sold her to a prostitute when she was just a child. But that’s all she knows about herself. About the burn marks? She knows nothing.

After more than a decade of meeting deadlines on the crime beat for a Delhi newspaper, Sreerupa Mitra Choudhary was often left bewildered by the sheer pain and injustices of the world. No candy-coated stories of exotic places for her. The hard-boiled reporter moved around in a world filled with rapists, murderers and criminals. For ten years, she gave words to the vice, crime, cunning and cruelty of our society.

But somewhere in between, she realised she had to go beyond this. She says: "Routine crime stories are alright if you like doing them—running after cops, going to crime spots, collecting evidence for exclusives. But what about the victims? Those poor people who don’t even have money to buy stamp paper, forget hiring a lawyer to book the guilty. All of us like sensational stories, but what do we care about the lives these criminals have scarred forever, of abused women left on the road with nowhere to go?"

Sreerupa knows there’s no "solution" to these damned lives. At best, she can give them a healing touch, an assurance that somebody shares their grief. Sometime around 1992, she started collecting clothes and other perishables from friends and gifting them to victims lodged in mental hospitals and shelter homes around Delhi. In 1997, she started Sudinalay, a shelter home for women crime victims. "It was completely need-based, the only way I could reach out...to the maximum." Sudinalay, she says, is about giving dignity to battered lives. "It’s not about investigations or court appearances, but a dedication to work for rape victims, minds and bodies destroyed by domestic violence, prostitution, helping girls ensnared by organised trafficking...the list is endless."

Driven by its motto—"Commitment to living for those who don’t know they are living", Sudinalay, or "the home of good times", is run under the aegis of the Coalition for Rural Empowerment (core). Sreerupa, as president and chairperson, looks after three shelter homes—Sudinalay, Suvela and Nityanandita. The centres help victims gradually get back to living a life anew. If Sudinalay resembles a hospital ward—all 50 beds are full, occupied by burns, rape and other crime victims—Nityanandita is like any normal home. Inmates spend their time stitching, cooking or washing clothes. In between, they pack spices, make dustbins, furniture and sugar cubes to generate income for the three homes. Of the 38 residents here, 24 suffer from TB and are hiv positive. But they know it’s still a life better than what they had on the road. Says Sreerupa: "We strive to touch the core of their suffering, to heal their emotional injuries."

Despite everything, Sreerupa hasn’t completely lost hope in humanity. The number of people who’ve come forward to help her, she says, is overwhelming. "All three homes survive purely on donations, from friends, acquaintances, even from people we don’t know at all. Doctors have also been generous with medicines and consultations." She now plans to start a home for the terminally ill. To find out more about Sreerupa’s mission, contact: Sudinalay, IInd floor, Community Facility Centre, Dept of Slums and JJ, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Sunlight Colony, Part II, New Delhi-110014; Ph: 9811141611, 9810182504.