By Vivek Freitas

Fifteen-year-old Scarlett Keeling was murdered in the shallow waters of Anjuna Beach over a month ago. The resultant media frenzy was about the police cover up -- the police initially said that she had merely drowned, and had not been raped and murdered. It was a spicy, scandalous story about one of the world’s most favoured tourist spots. Yet, what was it that made this case so exciting? Was it the police cover up? Or was it the rape and murder?

It is my impression that most people seemed to accept the murder as inevitable -- many said that she should have had enough sense to be wary of such characters. Others went to the extent of attempting to charge Fiona MacKeown, Scarlett’s mother, with criminal negligence. The police cover up is not that shocking in country ridden with corrupt and lazy cops. So, why was the Keeling case so fascinating? Why did it have that strange feeling of being familiar and distant at the same time?

I believe this has something to do with the special place Goa occupies in the public imagination -- a land where delicious and horrendous things happen. I will use a discussion of Bollywood to provide a sense of how the media ‘others’ Goa, which has led to keeping the Keeling case alive in the press as well as in our minds.

Bollywood operates in the realm of fantasy, a domain where common people go to see uncommon things. In this regard, the trope of the ‘item number’ is of particular interest. It usually consists of a luscious female model (who has nothing to do with the plot of the film), dancing provocatively for a male protagonist. Because of the way the camera works, the audience assumes the viewpoint of the male protagonist thus enjoying, with him, the pleasure he gains from watching this dance sequence.

It is quite clear that the woman is objectified as a sexual object. The name ‘item number’ reveals, literally, the overarching acceptance of such objectification. It is, therefore, not uncommon to hear of a budding actress who is willing to put herself through the item number rigmarole just to get a start in the industry. Bollywood makes no bones about objectifying women, and we, both male and female audiences, seeming to happily accept this objectification.

So, the question becomes: do these positions we assume as audiences have any bearing on our everyday lives? Yes and No. Yes, because there is no shortage of proof that men objectify women or that women objectify themselves (the model who performs the ‘item number,’ for example). No, because we retain a distinct divide between the fantasy world of Bollywood and the ‘real’ world where we base our lives on ‘good and traditional Indian values’.

This bizarre brand of schizophrenia, ironically, is most apparent in the behaviour of leading actresses themselves. For example, Aishwarya Rai and Bipasha Basu will entice us with the most sexually provocative dances on screen, but always make it a point to tell interviewers that they are ‘simple and traditional Indian girls’ in their private (and ‘real’) lives. Promoting such an image seems almost an obsession with Rai, and to some extent, I think, accounts for her popularity -- she epitomises the functional schizophrenic, simultaneously the ‘item girl’ and the traditional daughter-in-law.

Goa’s constructed ‘otherness’ is, in many ways, similar to Bollywood’s ‘fantasy world’. It is the place where we go to indulge our ‘other half’ -- the half that seems to enjoy sex and is not necessarily bound by ‘traditional Indian values’. For most urban youth, Goa very simply means the place were drugs are freely available and where ‘the good times roll’. For many, a visit to Goa is viewed as a rite of passage and the film Dil Chahta Hai reflects this idea very clearly. The three boys go off to Goa to have a good time, which they carefully and systematically proceed to do. Saif Ali Khan’s character also happens to fall in love with a foreign woman and stays in Goa longer than the others. It is quite clear that he has had, or at least intends to have, sex with this woman. She robs him and he returns to Mumbai, having learnt his lesson of ‘love.’

Just as the item girl has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, Goa is seemingly removed from the rest of India. Its sole function is to provide our young people with a place to let off steam, to sow their wild oats, and then come back as functional members of society. Like Bollywood’s item numbers, Goa is where we indulge our sexual fantasies, an almost mythical space where we’re supposed to have lots of fun, but not too much fun. Too much fun means we might draw attention to our wayward ways, like Rakhi Sawant, for example. We must project an Aishwarya Rai kind of schizophrenia: have our ‘fun’, but be sure not to get too carried away. We are, after all, ‘traditional’ Indians.

How does the Scarlett Keeling case fit into all this? I believe that the case is very similar to a Rakhi Sawant controversy. When it happens, it is all over the news. Suddenly, we are forced to face the danger of the licentiousness that is latent in our quotidian habits of indulging in fantasy worlds. We condemn the licentiousness of the moment and then forget about it. Such things are necessary, every once in a while, to remind us that we don’t tolerate ‘bad behaviour’, that this kind of behaviour happens to exist only in our fantasy worlds.

On the flip side, if we had only Aishwarya Rais, life would be pretty mundane -- watching an item number would be boring if we knew that at the end of the day, the girl is nothing but a good housewife. We need the sense that her ‘item-ness’ might actually be true, and cases like a Rahki Sawant controversy or a Scarlett Keeling murder provide us with just that sense of possibility.

Ironically, then, we take a perverse pleasure in purposefully condemning ‘wayward behaviour’, be it too much sexiness, or murder. The schizophrenia must continue, and we love it when such cases (which allow us to indulge our own schizophrenia) are brought to the fore. The real reason for an interest in the Keeling case is, quite simply, to reassure ourselves that Goa really is a place where ‘crazy’ things happen, and that if we go there it won’t be boring. It is an added bonus that the police decided to cover up the murder -- this demonstrates the possibility that even if things get too out of control (and one secretly hopes that they will), the police will cover them up and restore the idea that such things never really happened.

I am suggesting a direct equivalence between licentiousness on the silver screen and rape and murder in real life. But the two are, in many ways, not comparable. One involves a bloody act of violence and the other an innocent and nonchalant trip to the cinema. They become comparable because of the ease with which we view, condemn, and forget about both of them – the titillation of the item number and the equal titillation from a story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl. Both events take place in an ‘other world’, not bound by the rules and realities of daily life. In the Keeling case, it happened in mythologised and ‘othered’ Goa, and to top it off, it involved a foreigner. We needn’t think about the real violence and brutality because we have nothing to do with it. In effect, we condemn such acts in order not to think about them more deeply, to put them out of our minds. Their sole function is to remind us of the possibility of an alternative, dangerous, and sexy life.

This ‘alternative’ life is everywhere in the media today— deodorant advertisements that promise the attention of fawning women, Sprite ads that advocate being honest with women about having two girlfriends at the same time, and moped ads that ask, ‘Why should boys have all the fun?’ For most people, these promises are fantastical notions of cause and effect, but because they remain merely in the realm of possibility, they are acceptable notions, nonetheless. Is this a sign of a changing and progressive society? Are we really expanding the horizons about what we can achieve in life? Or are we, as I suggest, extending the boundaries of our schizophrenia indiscriminately, and all-pervasively, to be the driving force of our lives?

On one hand these are ‘good’ signs (as our thriving consumer market would like you to believe) of an American like obsession with an individual right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’. On the other hand, these signs also point to the fact that we avoid the ‘reality’, that much contested concept, where people are brutally raped and murdered, women continue to be objectified, and all our condemnation of such ‘bad’ things only serve to strengthen our desire for delicious fantasies, and the status quo.

We need interruptions in this smooth, glossy world of hyper-schizophrenia— not intermissions. We need a populace that understands ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ in the theatre of our lives, and not one that shies away from the multiple-personality-disorder-like existence that is India today.

(Vivek Freitas is a freelance editor and writer)