'Digital story' takes reader to heart of rape victim's ordeal

As the words taunt, "You're not looking at the pictures of the car. Did you really look? You wanna see inside?", the reader is drawn to a slideshow of photos. The images show red stains on grubby white seat covers inside the car. This is the scene of a rape, and the graphic evidence is stomach-turning.

The reader knows it's fiction, that he or she is experiencing a "digital short story", but the experience feels journalistic, especially because it is set in New Delhi, where the real-life rape and eventual death of a student in December 2012 sent shockwaves around the world and sparked protests across India. Here, fiction feels uncomfortably close to fact.

The unravelling narrative is interspersed with different perspectives of a society grappling with the treatment of its women: the police who apathetically get the victim to hospital, the students-turned-protesters who are fed up with poor policing and governance, the surgeons who wonder why a woman is out so late at night, the parents who blame themselves for giving too much freedom to their girl-child, the wrongly accused who is brutalised, and the politicians who say little and do even less.

The short video on page three is one of the most pivotal pieces of additional media in the story: you see two policemen prodding the unconscious victim and calling her a prostitute to the ire of two witnesses, one of whom is filming the incident, which goes viral and leads to protests. All of this is clear from the text alone, but the grainy video makes the story come alive.