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Life And Death Of An Anti-impalement Activist

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Anjali Batra's mother had been convicted of murder and executed by impaling. Of course her father had not let her watch the execution, but from that day, Anjali had devoted her life to fighting this barbarous punishment. When, months later, new evidence proved her mother had been innocent, it only further fueled her passion for her cause.

In Rajistan, impaling was a traditional punishment for female criminals, and though by the late 20th century no self-respecting judge in the metropolitan courts would sentence a woman to impalement, it remained legal, and still thrived in the predominantly rural, provincial areas. This was typical of life in Rajistan. The progressive urban elites kept power through compromise with the traditional, tribal authorities of the countryside. Thus while the prime minister made significant progress toward wage equality in the cities, rural husbands retained their traditional power of life and death over their multiple wives; and while in the cities mandatory sex education in schools began at age 8, and less than half of couples with children were married, in the provinces, a girl caught flirting with a boy from a higher caste could be publicly flogged for her temerity. If she went further than flirting, she would likely be impaled.

Whenever politicians were forced to mention the arrangement between the cities and the provinces, they always represented it as an agreement that respected indigenous rights while promoting progressive values. Of course they never mentioned the bribes and corruption that sustained the system. Neither did anyone else. Those in the city preferred not to think about it, while those in the provinces knew to keep their mouths shut.

Anjali was different. Though from a provincial village, she gained citizenship in Chakrabesh, the capital city, by giving herself as a slave to a businessman who traded between the cities and the provinces, with the condition that after 10 years he would adopt her as his daughter and set her free. He was as good as his word, setting her free and signing adoption papers just after her 23rd birthday. So it was that at the age of 23, Anjali Batra went from provincial slave to citizen of Chakrabesh, a transformation almost unheard of in Rajistan.

Her life would serve as a perfect example of why the authorities made such a change in status so difficult. As a rural girl who had been made to say goodbye to her mother the morning she was impaled, she hated the political status quo. As an urban woman, she was free to voice her hatred.

And voice it she did! Supporting herself as an admin at an insurance company, she spent all of her free time at the University of Chakrabesh, talking with students about the injustice of impaling women.

"Think about this," she said to a group surrounding her on the campus quad one afternoon, "A man and a woman rob a traveller in the provinces, and they're caught. They're brought before the local chieftain, and he condemns them both to death. That's a problem right there, right!?" A murmur of agreement from the students. "Now!" she held up a finger to command their attention as she paced, looking as many of them in the eye as she could. "They take the man out in the woods and cut his throat. The woman? She doesn't go to the woods, she goes to the center of the village, and everybody gathers there to watch. They strip her naked and tie her to this frame, so she's on her knees and elbows, with her butt in the air, and they shove a stake into her body - it's about two or three inches thick." She waited, to let this sink in. Then: "But first! They slit her open with a knife between her anus and her vagina - that's where they shove the stake through. Why? Because if a 2-foot stake went through either her anus or her vagina, it would kill her pretty quickly. Like the guy they killed in the woods. They don't want that. In fact, the stake isn't even very sharp! They leave it blunt so they won't damage major organs while they shove it up inside of her." Several of the students looked sick - she knew she was reaching them. "Then, once they've got the stake in, they set it up vertically, so she's spitted on this thing, with her feet hanging above the ground. And they all just watch her die there." A moment of silence. "It can take hours." She waited several moments, letting her audience marinate in the collective guilt of their country. "This is wrong, guys!" Again she paced, looking in their eyes. "It's wrong, and we have to stop it. Write to your MPs, guys! Run for office yourselves! Protest! Make other Rajistanis face this reality. Do whatever it takes. We're going to end this!"
 
giason said:
Finally an impalement story, i hope she will end on a stake
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I'm sorry, but I think the point of this story is that she's going to lead a feminist movement that calls for the abolishment of impairment, and then she's going to have her throat slit in the woods with all her clothes on, thus our heroine achieves execution equality for women and a happy ending

Great beginning. Following with eagerness.
 
Juan1234 said:
She waited, to let this sink in.
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Did you choose those words deliberately? ;)

But it's a splendid start to your story - and God knows, things pretty well as nasty go on in the real world...
 
mp5stab said:
That's a great character motivation, and a well fleshed-out world.
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I agree, great start! There's nothing like a sympathetic character to get the ball rolling. I'm personally not a fan of impalement (a little too strong for my taste), but I'd probably keep reading. Any chance the authorities could sentence Anjali to one of those public whippings first as an attempt to dissuade her from her social activism, and to demonstrate how compassionate and progressive they are?
 
Eva Inanna said:
Anyone has a flight schedule to Rajistan?
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I just noticed: Rajistan sounds like it means "Land of the Kings". That's a dope name. I'd be happy to start a gofundme for your sightseeing trip to this fictional land.
 
By the end of the first semester she spent on campus, Anjali had attracted a small following, four or five girls and one young man named Sanjeev. When Sanjeev had first seen Anjali talking with students on the quad, he had been immediately smitten. The way her black ponytail swung behind her confident gate, the passion in her dark, dark eyes - it had swept him out of his senses in an instant, and he had walked straight up to her afterward, as if disembodied.

"Ms. Batra," he said, looking up several inches into her face from behind his round glasses, "I'm Sanjeev," and he held out his hand. She took it politely and said she was glad to meet him. "I'm with you all the way."

She smiled, like she might smile at a precocious five-year-old. "Well thank you, Sanjeev," she said. For some reason it disappointed him.

"I'm a philosophy major," he continued.

"Well, we've got a lot of work to do, so stick around and tell all your philosopher friends what we're doing, ok?"

"I will!" he said, a little more eager than felt appropriate. Then, as she turned to go: "Do you like philosophy?"

She turned back. "What?" she asked it politely, but the awkwardness hurt.

"Do you like philosophy?"

"Can't say I know much about it."

"I could tell you about it..." he offered.

"Oh, that sounds nice, but I really feel I should spend all of my time on this issue, so..."

Sanjeev nodded.

"But thanks..." she said.

"No, I agree!" he blurted as she turned again. She shot back one more polite smile and left.

Over the next two years, Sanjeev was always by Anjali's side at every protest and stump speech. The movement grew, so that by the end of the fifth semester, there were 30 or 40 regular supporters and more than that many occasional sympathizers - enough to organize protests that were noticed. That's when Anjali was invited to meet Prime Minister Patel. (It's also when she lost her job at the insurance company.)

"Ms. Batra!" said the prime minister, grinning as he emerged from his office to approach her, hand extended. She rose from the couch she had been sitting on and shook his hand. He invited her into his office and shut the door.

"You are a remarkable woman, Ms Batra," he began. "You were born in the provinces, and were even a slave not long ago, and now... here you are!"

"I have one purpose," she shrugged. "Nothing else matters to me, so I succeed."

"And I wish you great success in finishing your mission!"

"Thank you." She was polite, but not warm.

"Now," he fiddled with something on his desk, deliberately changing the tone, "I would like to offer some advice. You want to abolish impalement as a legal punishment, which is admirable, of course. But you're going about it in a very confrontational way. The fact is, life as we have created it here in the cities would be impossible without the support of the provincial chieftains. Think about this: as a citizen of Chakrabesh, you receive subsidized healthcare. But almost two thirds of the funding for our healthcare comes from the provinces. This is just one example. If you make enemies of the chieftains, you bring our own world down around us."

"They have made themselves my enemies, Sir. I am asking them to stop and to be instead my friends."

Mr. Patel smiled uncomfortably. "Yes, well... obviously they won't see it that way. And the fact is, our estimates of how many women are impaled each year are in the single digits."

"Your estimates are wrong."

"Ms. Batra, please..."

"I lived there, Sir! They impaled my mother! I know what life is like in the provinces."

"Ms. Batra -" he held out his hand, pleading for calm. "I just want you to think about this: maybe we could do more good for he women of the provinces by improving their lives economically, or even making it easier for them to come to the cities. Yes?" Anjali was not in a mood to respond. "Think about it," he said, reaching across his desk to pat her hands. "Oh - and I've authorized a donation to your organization of 1,000 bentis from the party. This is confidential, of course..."

When Anjali met up with Sanjeev on campus afterward, she was in a stormy mood, even though she knew Mr. Patel's donation was the only thing keeping her off the streets for the next few months. "They don't believe us," she said. "We have to show them!"
 
Juan1234 said:
"Now," he fiddled with something on his desk, deliberately changing the tone, "I would like to offer some advice. You want to abolish impalement as a legal punishment, which is admirable, of course. But you're going about it in a very confrontational way. The fact is, life as we have created it here in the cities would be impossible without the support of the provincial chieftains. Think about this: as a citizen of Chakrabesh, you receive subsidized healthcare. But almost two thirds of the funding for our healthcare comes from the provinces. This is just one example. If you make enemies of the chieftains, you bring our own world down around us."
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There it starts! Institutional corruption. Keep your hands of the system, right or wrong! We all take profit of it, including you!

Good episode, Juan, setting out the conflict.
 
Yeah, this is really getting interesting! I admire the way you've established the characters and heightened the conflict.

I'm afraid I won't be able to finish it unless I keep pedal to metal. Sorry. :oops:

I hope you'll keep writing, because I would like to keep reading!
 
That summer, Anjali led a group of 12 students (Sanjeev, another boy, and 10 girls) out from Chakrabesh into the neighboring Dumbala Province. Dumbala was east of the capital, the furthest neighboring province from where Anjali had spent her childhood, to lessen the risk that she would be recognized. The others were from Chakrabesh and had no such concerns.

Of the 13 in the group, nine were, in fact, students of either anthropology, sociology, or political science, so they had little difficulty pretending that they were participating in a summer program to learn about life in the provinces by living with provincial families (whose hospitality was legendary), conducting interviews, and taking pictures. All the while, they kept their ears alert for talk of upcoming impalements.

A little over two weeks in, they awoke to news flying around the village that a boy and girl had been caught naked with each other in the night.

"What will happen to them?" Anjali asked urgently. Her elderly hostess shrugged, not indifferently, but powerlessly.

"The chief will decide," she said, keeping her saddened eyes on the breakfast she was stirring.

The guilty pair was hauled before the chief's house, an attractive edifice, and bigger than the others, if still small by urban standards. The boy was in a long, drab shirt reaching his knees, and the girl had hastily wrapped a dirty blue and red sari about her. Anjali wanted to hear the sentence, but most of the village watched from the distance of their own homes, so she she waited.

It was obvious when the chief pronounced the sentence. The strong men who had hauled the pair before him nodded and bowed dramatically, and the girl collapsed to sit beside her legs with an audible groan. She was quickly yanked to her feet and led behind her lover to the village center, where the villagers finally began to congregate. When there was a dense crowd around them, one of the men raised his voice, holding the boy by the back of his neck. Anjali's fingers trembled as she began recording video on her phone.

"This man," he began, "has violated the purity of a girl from a higher caste than his own! He has therefor been sentenced to lose his offending member!" There were no gasps, except from a few of the students Anjali had brought from the university. Quickly the boy's shirt was bunched up at his armpits, revealing he wore nothing beneath it, his arms were pinned behind him, and he was forced to kneel before a wide tree stump. He girl wailed as he was forced to spread his knees wider and wider until his penis rested on the stump's surface and his scrotum pushed up under it. In the eerie moment of silence that followed, he glanced frantically behind him just as an ax swished down in front of his belly and embedded itself firmly in the stump, parting his manhood from his body.

The girl's implacable shrieking and the boy's cry of agony were easily audible above the muted reaction from the assembled villagers.

"Justice is served!" proclaimed the leader of the men carrying out the punishment. The boy was then shoved into the arms of his family, who whisker him away to their hut to tend to his wound. His severed member remained in a mess of blood on the stump.

Next they turned their attention to the girl. Anjali's heart raced and her hands shook has she held out her phone to capture the proceedings in video. She had never gone to see an impalement, and she wasn't sure if she could handle it. Her mother's face would not leave her mind's eye.

"This woman," the man shouted, "has given her body to a man unworthy of her! As she has seen fit to display her secret parts to such a man, she will now display them to us. As she has taken wrongful pleasure with her feminine parts, she must have that pleasure taken back from her. She is sentenced to receive thirty lashes upon her bare vulva!" Again, the students were the only ones surprised.

"Take off your sari," the man order her, and she obeyed through her tears, leaving her in her petticoat and short blouse, with her midriff exposed. "And the petticoat." Again she complied, revealing her smudged white panties. "Knickers too." With fresh tears, she slid off her panties and stood with her hands over her womanhood.

"Now!" the man raised his voice again. "Kneel, and press your chest to the ground." She obeyed, but with her chest more to her knees than to the ground. "You must present your vulva to me unprotected so that I may strike you. Parth with count to four," he gestured toward his partner, "and then I will strike you. If the stroke lands cleanly and squarely on your vulva, it will count as one of the thirty. If not, I will still strike you, but it will not count. Each time you will have the count of four to present your vulva for the punishment."
 
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