Keep our anger aflame

At the end of February 2022, my best friend and I were comparing notes. Both of us had had a rocky start to the year. She was being stalked, harassed and criminally intimidated by an ex-boyfriend, and I had just undergone an awful reality check with a relationship coming to an abrupt, painful, bitter end.

- SWARA BHASKER

As I sat on the terrace of a haveli-turnedhomestay in Jodhpur, looking at a cluster of blue houses and the majestic Mehrangarh fort, I had to acknowledge that although 2022 had been perhaps the most trying in a hat trick of awful years, here I was, sane, perhaps a tad bit wiser, hopeful and, most importantly, on the other side, having survived it all. Bestie was doing well, too. I wondered about other women, and then women in general, and I realised that 2022 had been a rocky year for women the world over.

Mexico has seen a disturbing rise in ‘femicide’ or the murder of women due to their gender. In 2021 there were more than 1,000 cases of femicide and ‘disappearances’. The dead bodies of missing women would surface days later; it was a horror that continued well into 2022. Amnesty International reported that more than 3,500 women had been killed in Mexico since 2020.