Confessions of a Cat-holic (156)

Part of my duties in running for student council was that I needed to knock on every door in the freshman dorms to distribute flyers with our platforms. I needed to persuade every engineering student in my year to vote for me. Luckily, there were only around 300 students in my year distributed across only four buildings so the task was not daunting at all.

I truly enjoyed meeting and greeting many of my peers in the engineering school. There was an Indian guy in Carmen. His name was Riddhi Sohan Dasgupta, a name which I could never forget. His name was pronounced as "Reedi", yes that Reed of my uncle-in-law Michael Reed.

We had a conversation in front of Lerner hall one day and he was all friendly and nice. He told me to drop by his room when I had time to talk about school and student affairs, even though he didn't go to SEAS. I believed he was enrolled at Columbia College. But anyhow, I happened to find out where he lived when I was 洗樓ing for election. 洗樓 meant a process of cold calling in person, aka knocking on the door for promotional purposes.

Riddhi's roommate was also Indian and he was in the engineering school so I was in their dorm room for around 30 minutes, nothing unusual. Riddhi just happened to be more talkative than average, that was all. His roommate was like a terrorist, timid, brown haired in an all black outfit showing no emotions on his face and not willing to express any opinion except nodding lightly when I gave him a flyer.

The next day, Riddhi started going around the school telling everybody that I gave him head in the elevator of Lerner hall. I was like, what? What the fuck? This was an insult to anyone's intelligence. That Lerner hall was glass-walled and so was the elevator. That fucking elevator was fucking transparent, for god's sake. How could I give him head in a transparent elevator at one of the most populated hang out place on campus, Lerner Hall? And that fucking Lerner hall was only 3-storey high, how the fuck could I give him head in a 3-storey transparent glass house elevator? I found his fabrications very disturbing. It wasn't just about me. I would find his stories disturbing even if the victim of his story was another girl. But it just so happened that I was that unfortunate girl in his stories and I believed his creativity was a test to human tolerance and reasonings.

I was of course very upset to find out what had been said about me behind my back. Luckily, my friends were by my side the whole time. I always had my brunch and dinner at John Jay with Kelly and Natalie, sometimes occasionally with Sammy too, a Korean girl who fell in love with Ed because she was clueless about the prevailing trans and gay culture in Hong Kong. We usually had a table with her friends from Stuyvesant and I liked to join their conversations, even though I didn't go to their high school. There was a girl named Alice who said she had the same problems as well. She told me that there was another guy who intruded her privacy and smeared her reputations by fabricating totally baseless stories with serious sexual offense and implications. She told me she had reported it to the student affairs office and that guy was banned from taking the same class or having contacts with her for the next four years on campus. She said that was helpful and she encouraged me to do something about it too.

And so I consulted my friends and then I decided to also report my case to student affairs office on campus. I told them what Riddhi had been doing to smear my reputation by telling totally untrue stories between us. He was then banned from taking the same class or entering the same building for the rest of four years. Columbia also said that they would have a record for Riddhi in regards of this. But please, those inconsequential arrangements and penalties could never compensate for the psychological harm and reputation damage I suffered from his rumors and baseless fabrications.

Could reports on sexual assaults do me any justice at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3y0tzLtgzg