Sakshi Malik: Feared my wrestling career would end after I refused to give into Brij Bhushan’s demands

At the break, I was running the plays in my head. I knew she (Canada’s Ana Godinez in the 2022 CWG final) was slowing down and I was going to get an opportunity to attack.

That’s exactly what happened. I blocked her and saw an opening. It was a very small window. As a wrestler you understand when your opponent is standing still for a fraction of a second too long. You notice when her arm is not going down fast enough to block your attack. It’s just something that you observe instinctively. It’s like when you are driving down a busy road and you know exactly when and how much to turn the steering wheel when you see a gap in the traffic.

She didn’t make any obvious mistake. It was just that I had grabbed her left hand with my right, and in doing so, controlled her movement. In desi kushti, we call that a dasti. And because she was slowing down, she didn’t get her right hand down in time to defend. Her left foot stayed in place for just that little while longer than it should have. I used that moment to do a single-leg takedown.

It was one of the first techniques I’d learned in my akhara in Rohtak, and I’d been practising it nearly every day for nearly two decades. Shoot low, get your hand to the back of your opponent’s knee and pull up while pushing your head into her chest.

As she collapsed underneath me, my hand went from the back of her leg to trap her right arm behind her. I knew I couldn’t let her escape. I knew that if she somehow got out of this position, there was no guarantee I’d be able to catch her a second time. But there was no way she could have. I had all my weight on her and with her right arm trapped, she had just the one free arm with which to push me off.

I’d been in similar situations before. I knew what she was going through. There’s a moment of shock when you know you have been caught in a bad position. You try to fight it but you know very quickly that you aren’t going to be able to. Then your muscles relax, as I felt hers did, just that fraction of a second, telling me that she had given up, just before the referee slapped the mat to let everyone else know that I had secured the pin.

That was it. I had won the one medal that I wanted.

I called my family. Satyawart had been watching the match in his akhara in Rohtak, and when I was 0-4 down he had walked away from the TV because he couldn’t bear to see me lose. He had only come in a couple of minutes later, after the shouts and cheers from inside the akhara told him how the match had concluded.

As we talked on the phone, both of us were thinking ahead.

I was thinking I was back in the game, and planning ahead for the Asian Games. If I did well there, I would be able to go to the Olympics and maybe even hope for a medal there. Little did I know that I’d just wrestled for the last time in my career.

X—X—X—X—X—X—X

No place to hide

The day I was dreading came to be at the Asian Junior Championships. After congratulating me on my win, he went back to his room while my roommate and I returned to ours. Once I was back in my room, he sent word through his physiotherapist Dhirendra Pratap Singh that I should come to his room so that I could call my parents on his mobile phone and speak to them.

I started to think about what I would do if Brij Bhushan Singh did make a move on me. I told myself that if he said such and such a thing to me, then I would respond in a certain manner. If he tried to grab me, I had to push him off and kick him. I played out all these scenarios in my head.

I tried to pretend that I knew just how I was going to handle any possibility, but in truth I was terrified. Eventually though, the physio, Dhirendra Pratap Singh, came up to my room and accompanied me to Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh’s room before leaving.

Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh connected me to my parents. It seemed harmless enough. When I spoke to them about my match and my medal, I remember thinking that perhaps nothing unsavoury might happen after all. But right after I ended the call, he tried to molest me while I was seated on his bed. I pushed him off and started to cry.

He stepped back after that. I think he realised very clearly that I wasn’t going to go along with what he wanted. He started saying that he had put his arms around me ‘papa jaise’, as a father would. But I knew that that was not what it was. I ran out of his room all the way back to mine, weeping all the way.

When I got back to the room, I was in a state of shock. I felt physically nauseated. I didn’t just feel violated, I also feared that because I had refused to give into his demands, it would mean the end of my wrestling career.

I told just a few people about what happened. When I returned to India, I told my training camp roommate, Anita Sheoran. I told my mother, too. Although I didn’t intend to spread the story, it did.

Everyone knew what had happened with me at Almaty. No one spoke out about it.

Neither did I.

(Extracts from ace wrestler Sakshi Malik’s memoir ‘Witness’, co-authored by Jonathan Selvaraj)