![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/mumbai-1-articleLarge.jpg\")
<\/a>The slum in Mumbai, India, where one of the five suspects in the gang rape of a photojournalist was arrested.
Atul Loke for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n
As two men rushed out, the host smirked, figuring they did not like losing at cards.<\/p>\n
Two hours later, a 22-year-old photojournalist limped out of a ruined building. She had been raped repeatedly by five men, asked by one to re-enact pornographic acts displayed on a cellphone. After she left, the men dispersed to their wives or mothers, if they had them; it was dinnertime. None of their previous victims had gone to the police. Why should this one?<\/p>\n
The trial in the Mumbai gang-rape case has opened to a drowsy and ill-attended courtroom, without the crush of reporters who documented every twist in a similar case in New Delhi<\/a> in which a woman died after being gang-raped on a private bus. The accused, barefoot, sit on a bench at the back of the courtroom, observing the arguments with blank expressions, as if they were being conducted in Mandarin. All have pleaded not guilty. They are slight men with ordinary faces, nothing imposing, the kind one might see at any bus stop or tea stall.<\/p>\n But the Mumbai case provides an unusual glimpse into a group of bored young men who had committed the same crime often enough to develop a routine. The police say the men had committed at least five rapes in the same spot. Their casual confidence reinforces the notion that rape has been a largely invisible crime here, where convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away. Not until their arrest, at a moment when sexual violence has grabbed headlines and risen to the top of the state\u2019s agenda, did the seriousness of the crime sink in.<\/p>\n An editor at the photographer\u2019s publication, who was present when a witness identified the first of the five suspects, a juvenile, said the teenager dissolved in tears as soon as he was accused.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was exactly like watching a kid in school who has been caught doing something,\u201d said the editor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect the identity of the victim, who cannot be identified according to Indian law. \u201cIt\u2019s like a bunch of kids who found a dog and tied a bunch of firecrackers to its tail, just to see what would happen. Only in this case it was far more egregious. It was malevolent, what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n In spots Mumbai is an anarchic jumble, its high-rise buildings flanked by vest-pocket slums and vacant properties that have reverted to near-wilderness. One such place is the Shakti Mills, a ruin from the prosperous days of Mumbai\u2019s textile industry. When night falls, it is a treacherous span of darkness lined with sinkholes and debris, but still in the middle of the city, still close enough to look up and watch the lights flicker on in the Shangri-La Hotel.<\/p>\n The photographer and her colleague, a 21-year-old man, were interns at an English-language publication and had decided to include this spot \u2014 the backdrop for any number of fashion shoots \u2014 as part of a photo essay on the city\u2019s abandoned buildings, the editor said. On that Thursday last August, they reached the ruined mill about an hour before sunset.<\/p>\n The five men they encountered there later came from slums near the mill complex, claustrophobic concrete warrens where electrical wires tangle at one\u2019s head and acrid water flows in open gutters around one\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n None of the men worked regularly. There were jobs chicken-plucking at a neighborhood stand \u2014 a hot, stinking eight-hour shift that paid 250 rupees, or $4. The men told their families they wanted something better, something indoors, but that thing never seemed to come. They passed time playing cards and drinking. Luxury was pressed in their faces in the sinuous form of the Lodha Bellissimo<\/a>, a 48-story apartment building rising from an adjacent lot.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery boy in this neighborhood, including myself, would look at those buildings and say, \u2018One day, I will own a flat in that building,\u2019\u00a0\u201d said Yasin Sheikh, 22, who knew two of the accused men from the neighborhood. Because of his work helping find slum locations for film crews, he sometimes has a chance to interact with wealthy people, he said, and it fills him with yearning.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel really sad around them, because I want to sit at the table with them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Only Kasim Sheikh, 20, the card player who took the call, seemed to have shaken off the drag of poverty. A plump man in a neighborhood of the half-starved, he wore flashy shirts and hooked up his friends with catering jobs at weddings. He had been convicted of theft \u2014 iron, steel and other scrap from a railroad site \u2014 and occasionally provided information to the police, according to Mumbai\u2019s joint police commissioner, Himanshu Roy.<\/p>\n Some people steered clear of Mr. Sheikh. The grandmother of one of the accused men, a 16-year-old whose name is being withheld because of his age, had forbidden Mr. Sheikh to cross their threshold. But her grandson craved nice things; that was his weakness, his grandmother said. Mr. Sheikh \u201cwore good clothes, he had a nice mobile, obviously he would, because he was a thief,\u201d said Yasin Sheikh, the neighbor.<\/p>\n When another of their friends, a 27-year-old father of two named Salim Ansari, spotted the interns in the mill that day, the first thing he did was call Kasim Sheikh to tell him that their prey had arrived.<\/p>\n Nothing to Lose<\/b><\/p>\n During the year since the Delhi gang rape, sexual violence has been discussed endlessly in India, but there are few clear answers to the questions of how much is it happening or why.<\/p>\n