When a young woman strips to her underwear and parades semi-nude down a conservative small-town street, it’s hard to focus on anything but the obvious.

Please try.

Try, just for a moment, to shift your gaze from that bare body to the naked emotion on that tragic visage: the pain in those glazed eyes, the vulnerability of the parted mouth, the defiant tilt of the chin. It’s a face that would melt a heart of stone. But as 22-year-old Pooja Chauhan discovered, India is made of sterner stuff.

Tortured and abused by her husband and in-laws, her story is commonplace — too commonplace even for token outrage. Yet, ironically, her unique protest has provoked nationwide embarrassment and moral indignation.

It wasn’t Pooja’s first attempt to grab attention. After several endeavours to register a complaint against her family, she tried to immolate herself outside a police station. But the protectors of the law coyly looked the other way. Then, snubbed for trying to give up her life for justice, she says she decided to forfeit her “honour” — in this country, a sacrifice presumably greater than death.

Yet, the real tragedy is that Pooja has been abused not just by those who promised to love and cherish her — but by us all.

• First, by her own mother, who advised her to be “patient” with her tormentors. (That’s how every well brought up girl must behave, no?)

• By the police who finally awarded her a second look, and toyed with the idea of booking her for indecent exposure, before dismissing her as “mentally unstable.” (Indeed, which sane woman would take such a brazen step?)

... contd.