Fatima was then taken to a dormitory room. She was given a single, thin white saree to wear, without a blouse or petticoat. It was designed to be humiliating, clinging to her shaved body, impossible to wear with any modesty. A man, who identified himself as a “purohit” of this new order, came to inspect them. He walked down the line of naked, shivering girls, squeezing their breasts, parting their legs, and examining their teeth like livestock. When he got to Fatima, he lingered, his fingers probing her cruelly. “This one has spirit,” he said to a guard. “She’ll be for the VIPs. Break her in tonight.”
Meanwhile, Bushra was taken to a different area, where the older women were kept. They weren’t shaved. Instead, they were dressed in torn, dirty sarees and put to work. Their days were a blur of forced labor. They cooked and cleaned for the guards and the “clients” who visited the camp. They were subjected to constant, casual sexual assault. A guard would bend a woman over a kitchen counter while she was chopping vegetables, rape her, and then tell her to get back to work. A client would use a woman’s mouth as an ashtray while he discussed the price of a new slave with the camp’s commander.
At night, the real torment began. Bushra was forced to watch as the younger girls, including Fatima, were brought into the central courtyard. The first night, Fatima was dragged onto a raised platform. The purohit tied her hands to a post. He addressed the gathered men, a mix of camp guards and local Hindu bigots who had paid for the show. “Behold the enemy!” he roared. “Behold the womb that breeds terrorists! Tonight, we purify it with the seed of the righteous!”
He raped Fatima first, brutally and publicly. When he was finished, he opened the floor. For hours, man after man took his turn on the platform. Fatima’s screams eventually became whimpers, then silent, ragged gasps. Bushra was forced to watch, held by two guards who laughed as she struggled and wept. They made her chant “Jai Shri Ram” every time a new man mounted her daughter. If she stopped, they would poke a burning cigarette into her arm.
This became their reality. Fatima was designated as a “public toilet,” a piece of flesh for any man in the camp to use at any time. She was kept in a constant state of undress, her body bruised and bleeding. Her mind, once bright and full of dreams, retreated into a catatonic state, her eyes vacant. She stopped speaking. She stopped crying. She was just a body, a breathing doll for their pleasure.
Bushra’s fate was a slower, more psychological death. She was the camp’s “entertainment.” On special occasions, she and the other older women would be forced to perform degrading acts. They were made to act out scenes from Hindu mythology, where they played demonic asuras being defeated and “purified” by male gods, which always ended in a public gang rape. They were forced to eat pork and beef, the meat shoved into their mouths by laughing men. They were branded on the lower back with the symbol of the ashram, a trishul inside a circle.