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'I was guilty. I was insecure. And...I was petrified'

In 1989, when I was still in school, my father presented me with a copy of Akbar's Riot After Riot.

As the #MeToo campaign hit India, I tweeted on October 6 that, "I wonder when the floodgates will open about @mjakbar." Soon enough, friends and former colleagues from the Asian Age, where MJ Akbar was the editor when I joined as an intern in 1994, reached out. Why don't you write about your 'Akbar story', they urged. I wasn't sure if it was a dignified thing to do after over two decades. But when the messages persisted, I thought about it.
I spent the weekend replaying those harrowing six months in my mind. Something that I had locked away in a remote corner of my mind still gave me goose-bumps. At some point, I told myself that I will not be known as a victim; that those six months in 1997 meant nothing to me and do not in any way define my personality. I decided not to follow up my tweet. It is one thing to discover that your idol has the base instincts of an animal and quite another to declare it to the world. But the messages persisted. Some said that maybe my account will give courage to others to come out, too. So, here is my story.
In 1989, when I was still in school, my father presented me with a copy of Akbar's Riot After Riot. I devoured the book in two days. I then bought India: The Siege Within and Nehru: The Making of India. I had a new favourite writer.
While I had decided to be a journalist even before I knew how to spell the word, exposure to Akbar's books turned desire into passion. So that I did not lose focus, I enrolled in a bachelors' course in journalism after school. When I landed a job in the Delhi office of The Asian Age in 1994, I was convinced that it was destiny that brought me there; so that I could learn from the best.
But learning had to wait. First, the illusion had to shatter. Akbar wore his erudition lightly. A little too lightly. He screamed, he swore and he drank in the office. 'You are too small town-ish,' a senior colleague rapped me. So, I swallowed my small-townish mentality and for the next two years accepted everything as part of the office culture - Akbar's flirtation with young sub-editors, his blatant favouritism and his bawdy jokes. I heard people refer to the Asian Age Delhi office as Akbar's harem - there were far too many young women than men.
In my third year, the office culture hit home. His eyes fell on me. And my nightmare began. My desk was shifted to just outside his cabin, so that if the door to his room was left slightly open, I was face to face with him. He would sit at his desk and watch me all the time, often sending me lewd messages on the intranet network. Thereafter, emboldened by my obvious helplessness, he started calling me into his cabin (the door to which he would always shut) for conversation, most of which was personal. Sometimes, he would make me sit opposite him while he was supposedly writing his weekly column. The idea was that if he needed to look up a word in the gigantic dictionary placed on a low tripod on the far end of his cabin, he would ask me instead of walking across the room.
The dictionary was placed so low that one needed to either bend down or squat to look up a word. Once, in the autumn of 1997, while I was half-squatting over the dictionary, he sneaked up behind me and held me by my waist. I stumbled in sheer fright while struggling to get to my feet. I ran out of his cabin and into the toilet to cry my eyes out. The horror and the violation that I felt completely overwhelmed me. I told myself that this would not happen again and that my resistance would have told him that I did not want to be 'one of his girlfriends.' But my nightmare had just begun.
The next evening, he called me to his cabin and assaulted me. Tear-stricken, I ran out. Out of the office into the parking lot. I sat down on the pavement and cried.
My whole life loomed in front of me. I was the first person in my family to come out of my home town Agra to study in Delhi and thereafter work. In the past three years, I had fought several battles at home to be able to live and work in Delhi. I had refused to accept money from my father because I wanted to make it on my own. I wanted to be a successful, respected journalist. I just couldn't quit and go back home as a loser.
A colleague, Sanjari Chatterjee, had followed me into the parking lot. Why don't you tell Seema Mustafa about this, she suggested. Perhaps, she can talk with Akbar and once he knows that she knows, maybe he will back off. Seema was the bureau chief then. We both came back to the office. I went into her cubicle and narrated my story. She heard me. She was not surprised. She said that the call was entirely mine; that I should decide what I wanted to do. This was 1997. I was alone, confused, helpless and extremely frightened.
I returned to my desk. I sent him a message on the messaging system. I told him how highly I regard him as a writer; how this behaviour ruins that image of his in my mind and how I do not want him to behave like this with me again. He immediately called me to his cabin. I thought he would apologise. I was wrong. He looked pained at my protests and proceeded to give me a lecture on how I was humiliating him by suggesting that his emotions for me were not genuine.
In the last 21 years, I had put all this behind me. I was determined not to be a victim. Maybe now the nightmares will stop.
-thewire.in
Ghazala Wahab is executive editor FORCE newsmagazine