As reciting his callous talk left a bad taste in her mouth, she drank some water before recapping his further bluster thus— rape, my foot, isn't it sex by default? What a fuss as man but tends women to get laid! Bet if they are not on the lookout for one-night stands with all and sundry, day and night that is. And yet they feign indifference if courted! Why not, they want to be pushed into the act for them to give in with an air of injured innocence. If only man were to press on, asking him to spare them, won’t they crave for him at their core? Oh, how they push for the climax faking resistance! It was in a woman’s nature to sham shame, gloating over her good fortune of getting laid. Well, he was no fool to take them at their words. Why does he appear to be one? Privy to their proclivities, won’t he brush aside their pro-forma objections? Won't he give them what they crave all the while—sexy fare on the sly. Wiser to their false sense of outrage, he came to favor more of them as a service to the weaker sex.”
Listening to her, even as the judge and the lawyers, not to speak of Gautam, were dumbfounded, Suresh wished that mother earth had caved in underneath his feet.
“Oh how disgusted I was with that fiend then,” she continued after a pause, as though she herself needed time to digest what she herself had to reminisce for her testimony. “Involuntarily hating his very presence, nay existence, unmindful of my own safety, I pounced upon him. As he lost control at the wheel, the Mercedes collided with a roadside tree. When I regained consciousness, finding him unconscious, I got panicky. Slowly as I extricated myself from the wreckage, he began moaning feebly. What a relief it was! Why, his death would've compromised my own position further. Hiding at some distance, I had seen him come out of the car and manage a lift back to the city. Noting the registration number of his car, I too managed to hitchhike back to the city.”
All the while, Suresh could not desist himself from staring at her in admiration as the rest were too bowled over by her spirit to take their eyes off her.
“Reaching home, I tried to figure out my future,” she continued her tale of woes after having some more water. “My first impulse was to put all that behind me and get on with my life. But then, I realized that while I lived in guilt, he would be outraging many more. So, I decided not to push my shame under the carpet, but to make him accountable for his guilt.