Behind the picture

The image was stark. A photo, shot into the sun, of two bodies hanging from a tree. Both female. The girl on the left had her back to the camera and was dressed in a green satin suit. Her arms hung by her sides in an illusion of relaxation. The girl on the right was facing the camera. The rope around her neck had cut deep and her head was askew, her neck possibly broken. She wore a red top with white decoration in the lower half and purple trousers. Her hands and feet also hung free. To the left of the tree at its base sat a small group of women. Slightly more to the rear stood men and boys. The press and media scrum had not yet started, and two murdered teenagers were about to become very famous.

Looking at the image on the Facebook page triggered memories of other pictures of trees bearing unnatural fruits. From the American Deep South, of two black men, their arms smashed to stop them trying to climb the ropes that had strangled them. The crowd, many facing the camera, were gleeful, happy, having a good time with their smiles picked out by the flash. America again — a man hung after boiling pitch had been poured over him and again the throng, the spectators and possibly the murderers, celebrants at the blackest of masses.

Behind the picture of the lynched girls, there was a lack of toilets. They had gone to the field because there was no latrine at their house. The men who killed them would have been well aware of this. There would need to be several of them to do what they did — four or more. They would have, perhaps, pre-planned to the point of obtaining the rope they used to finally kill the girls. Perhaps, they bought it at a local shop.

They raped the girls before they killed them and then chose to put their bodies on display as trophy or a warning — it is impossible to know. But they made a conscious decision to advertise their act. There was no attempt to hide the bodies. These were proud men, confident in their immunity to the law and due process.

Sideslip westwards to Lahore, Pakistan, and a bloodied pavement close to a courthouse where a pregnant woman was beaten to death by her family because she married the man of her choice rather than theirs. A tangled story emerged. Her grieving husband had killed his first wife to clear the way for marrying the now-dead woman.

A crowd was present at the killing. Cellphones took pictures of it as it happened. The police were notable — either for their absence or their failure to intervene to protect the woman. No member of the public attempted to prevent the killing.

The murder in Lahore may not have been pre-planned in the way that the murder of the girls in India was, but the ever-present latency was sparked by the moment, and two lives snuffed out by blows to the head with a brick.

Behind these pictures, there is a common image and a shared curse. Whether lynched or beaten to death, the women shared the curse of being women. The men shared the curse of not being white. The women are commodities to use and discard, the men objects of hatred and marginalisation.

The two cultures — subcontinental and American — may be a world apart, but the underlying sense they share is that some lives are cheaper, less worthy than others, and that taking those lives is a matter not only of little consequence but overt joie-de-vivre; lives reduced to a sordid and terrifying ambush in a field, or the blinding flash that would have been the last thing that the woman in Lahore saw before there came a blessed darkness and the end of pain.

It is anecdotally said that America has gone from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilisation along the way. Civilisations are vast, civilised man being a rarity within that vastness. And the barbarism that is the precursor to civilisation never goes away — in large part because not enough people want it to.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 5^th, 2014.

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