When Love Turns Into Revenge, Sex Is Porongraphy

Jilted love, extortion or plain perversion, any of which can turn your filmed private moments to porn

- Stuti Agarwal

Kavita Lal, 33, is just back from another long, tiring day at court. A hint of a smile plays on her lips today—it’s been months since that shadow lifted from her face, months since that horrible day when she felt she had been stripped in public. Nothing perhaps will put her back together like she was, before she broke to pieces. Nothing will entirely heal the lesions, except maybe time. But a kind of justice is in sight. After a long-drawn police investigation, her husband, on the run for months, is finally in custody. the case proceedings have started at the Surajpur District and Sessions Court. today Kavita can do without her ‘happy pills’, as she calls her antidepressant medicines, which she has been on to ever since her ordeal started. instead, she plans to couch down with the re-runs of her favourite Hindi serial, Ek Vivaah Aisa Bhi.

Surajpur, if you were wondering, is a small town in Chhattisgarh. Which is a good enough indication of how deep the digital life has seeped into India. And how that essential unreality—of people living their lives more online than ‘off­line’—is affecting real lives. And how it’s melting away old, unwritten codes of how to live decently, which we all breathed in from the air, almost. The crime for which Kavita’s husband is being tried is no ordinary one. It’s some­ thing that would render normal human trust impossible. Their most intimate moments together had been recorded. And once they were turned into digital data—almost all human feelings leached from those moments—they became a mere video inventory on a porn site. If you still aren’t mortified, imagine your­ self in that situation—your most private moments aired on X­rated sites and social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp.