Sohaila in the Guardian

‘I know rape is entrenched, quotidian, epidemic. I know many people are clueless, malign, brutal. I know all this because I have seen all this. I see the trolls on Twitter, and roll my eyes at the newspaper headlines unable to sing a different tune, that insist on making me a sad downtrodden victim. But I also see some other things, things that would not have been possible when I wrote my first piece: My 80-year-old uncles and aunts showing up at my book launch radiating support and love, after almost four decades of not saying a word about the subject. My mother’s driver, hearing about my book, casually asking, “Have you mentioned your own rape?” The woman in Mumbai who wept while asking what to do about her father who loves her but is smothering her for her own protection. The hundreds of people in Jaipur who broke into spontaneous applause when I talked about rapists being ordinary men. The young man who stood up in the audience and said, “What can we do, Mam? What can we do to make it better?”’

Read the entire article by Sohaila in the Guardian online.