Content warning: This story contains information about sexual violence.
In a sparsely-filled Vilas Hall theater, while my friends were preparing themselves for a night of Wisconsin debauchery, an Indian father in the heart of Jharkhand, India, told me a story.
His nephew was married some months ago in a wedding he worked extensively to prepare. The entire village was there to celebrate with music, sweets and dancing until the wee hours of the night. The man, Ranjit, and his wife and two youngest children left well before midnight, but he let his eldest daughter, Kiran, stay longer just this once.
She returned bleeding and collapsed on their doorstep at 1 a.m.
Three male relatives in their 20s perpetrated the attack, one of them being the cousin in question. They isolated Kiran from her friends as the girls were leaving to return home, dragging her to the bank of a river and beating her once it was all over.
Kiran screamed, but no one heard her.
Nisha Pahuja’s documentary “To Kill a Tiger,” filmed in 2018, follows the family’s legal battle for Kiran’s perpetrators to receive prison sentences in a country where women are raped on an average of once every 15 minutes and a father standing by his daughter is an extraordinary case.
“The amount of love I gave her, I wasn’t able to give [to] any other child,” Ranjit said. “I think she’s received all my love, and there’s nothing left for anyone else.”
It was Ranjit’s love for Kiran, who insisted she wanted her victimizers punished for their actions, that guided their family through 14 months of a harrowing legal process that caught the attention of Jharkhand’s Srijan Foundation for women and children.
Despite threats from the perpetrators’ families, ostracization from their village and a defective testimony from the investigation’s main police inspector, the family’s battle ended in a landmark verdict sentencing each perpetrator to 25 years of “rigorous imprisonment.”
The documentary builds two hours of stomach-churning sadness into a celebratory climax, where Kiran experiences her first moment of boundless joy in an amusement park with her siblings as her father watches with pride.
“I said I would kill the tiger, and I did,” Ranjit said.
Kiran is currently a successful Class 12 student, studying to become a police officer and help victims of cases like hers. She and her father held a post-screening Q&A in the U.K. last year, according to Pahuja’s interview for the International Documentary Association on Nov. 28, 2023.
As I watched the movie, I couldn’t help being stuck on the thought that Kiran’s alienation from society would extend beyond what took place during the legal proceeding itself.
In conversation with Kiran’s Srijan Foundation case advocate in the documentary, Ranjit said his daughter remained diligent toward her education during the case.
“If she accomplishes something no one has done before in our village, she’ll have proven herself,” Ranjit said. “If you become something, the stain on you, you can wipe that clean...If you’re educated, you can defend yourself.”
Ranjit’s comment was shut down by the advocate, who rightfully said there was no stain on Kiran and that nothing about the attack stained her. But as an eight-year survivor of child sexual assault myself, I know exactly what Ranjit was trying to say.
Child sex abuse survivors often face extreme psychological isolation from others well into adulthood, exacerbated in situations of indifference or outright blame from their community. To this day, Kiran “never discusses the [sexual assault] incident” with even her father.
Survivors are present in all walks of life, and countless famous, celebrated people across time have flourished beyond their circumstances.
Healing is always possible, and I know Kiran’s remarkable, persistent courage toward her situation — even as the perpetrators appeal their sentences to higher courts — indicates she will only continue climbing to new heights of greatness.
In the week since I watched “To Kill a Tiger,” I have wondered if Kiran finds herself continuously attempting to scrub off that stain. I wonder how she eats and sleeps, if she flinches when touched or has difficulty connecting with others. I wonder if she stays up until the crack of dawn like she did for her court testimony five years ago, hoping to become something that absolves herself from that nightmare.
“I keep thinking, ‘Will I fall in love or not?’” 13-year-old Kiran told Pahuja. “And if I do, how will I tell him what happened to me?”
It is the question many of us ask ourselves, something Pahuja’s documentary helps to answer: how to tell others a story heard a thousand times before.
“To Kill a Tiger” premieres March 10 on Netflix.
