May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (10 page)

We stood there in silence. Nirmala Kumari had lived only nine days in the burns ward. “How did she die?” I finally asked the nurse, who by that time had become very nervous. She referred us to her supervisor, who referred us to the hospital’s administrator, and at that point Renuka and I decided it was time to go home. “I felt as if I knew her,” Renuka said in the car on the way back. I felt the same. It was a tenuous connection, of course, and mostly imagined; I didn’t even know for sure that Nirmala Kumari had lived in the housing complex where we had knocked on the three doors. But she probably lived in a building that was something like it, and I knew she had been in severe pain during her last nine days in the burns ward. The morning had provided a glimpse of something that at least resembled her life.

Renuka’s lawyer friend had given her a second name, Surinder Kaur, although all he knew was that she was a young woman who had been burned by her husband two years before. This woman lived in Raghubir Nagar, a lower-middle-class housing colony on the outskirts of Delhi. Renuka and I drove there a few days later. The neighborhood was one of the haphazard settlements that had been multiplying on the far edges of Delhi, representing the hopes of hundreds of thousands of people who had left their villages to find work in the big city. A lot of scooter-cab drivers lived in Raghubir Nagar, and their little three-wheeler taxis were parked at crazy angles along the muddy lanes. The houses were small brick-and-cement blocks, all with balconies and flat rooftops providing excellent views into the neighboring homes. This guaranteed entertainment during slow afternoons and ensured that one person’s business was everyone else’s. The address the lawyer had given us was incomplete, but people we asked in the streets said they had heard there was a girl burned somewhere in the area a few years back. They knew her at the medical dispensary, too, where she had gone to have her bandages changed. After some twists and turns, an old man finally led us to Surinder’s house, a cement box that looked like all the others. A woman sitting on a string cot outside the front door directed us upward. “Surinder is very sad,” she said. “She paces back and forth and cries all the time.” We walked up a narrow staircase and out on a roof to find a young, pretty woman standing in the fading
light of the cold winter afternoon. At first I thought she might be Surinder. “I am her sister,” the woman said shyly. “Surinder isn’t home.” The two of them lived up there, in a small shed that had been built in a corner. Inside, the shed was dark and cramped and filled with the greasy smell of fried food. A string cot took up most of the room; another leaned upright against the wall. There was a small burner on the floor and pots and pans stacked nearby. In a corner were a few vegetables and bottles of milk. Along one side of the room was a black-and-white television set. The sister told us that Surinder lived on the twenty-five dollars a month that the court had ordered her husband to pay her. It looked like a grim, lonely existence. We told the sister why we wanted to meet Surinder and arranged for a time to come back. Before we left, the woman on the string cot downstairs asked a question as if she were my conscience speaking out loud. “What good will writing do?” she wanted to know.

Surinder wasn’t there when we returned, and Renuka and I assumed, correctly, that she was avoiding us. But when we arrived unannounced at eight in the morning a week later, we found her there, brushing her teeth just outside the door of the shed. She was a tall, slender and pretty woman, thirty-three years old, with pale brown skin and large dark eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, and she wore a cotton salwar kameez with an old cardigan for warmth. Her face was clear of any scars, but I could see rippled skin on her hands and neck. She was angry that we had tracked her down, and she had no intention of spilling out her life to two strangers. She had told her story to Renuka’s lawyer friend once already, and that had not changed anything. “I’m fed up with telling my story,” she snapped.

But Renuka began speaking to her in Punjabi, the language of the state of Punjab and Surinder’s mother tongue. Renuka was always a comforting presence. She listened well, and people told her things. She was also a Sikh, like Surinder, and soon Surinder loosened up. We talked that first morning, and then again a few days later, sitting on the floor of the shed. I asked the questions, Renuka translated, and Surinder told us a story that was, in many ways, remarkable only for its ordinariness. Most Indian women are not set on fire by their husbands, of course, but the life that Surinder described leading up to the burning could have been that of any poor Indian woman raised to be no more than chattel in her in-laws’ home. Surinder cried when I asked about her treatment there, dissolving into silent tears as she stared dully at a Hindi movie on the television set. “I’m unlucky that I’m still alive,” she said. “I wish I were dead.”

What follows is her side of the story, or the story, at least, that she chose to tell us. I have changed the names of her husband and sister-in-law.

She was one of several children—it was never clear how many—born into a poor farming family that struggled to make a living on the dry north Indian plains. Her parents could not afford to keep her, so at the age of four Surinder was sent to live with her uncle in Delhi. He had settled in one of the little boxes in Raghubir Nagar and had become, like his neighbors, a scooter-cab driver. In a good month he brought home one hundred dollars. The uncle was willing to accept the added expense of Surinder because he needed someone to look after his widowed father, Surinder’s grandfather, who lived in the house. Surinder did as she was told. Throughout her childhood, she cooked the meals, cleaned the house, washed the clothes and attended to her grandfather’s needs. There was no time for her to go to school, and she never learned to read and write. She claimed she didn’t mind. She lived there because her grandfather needed her, not to go to school or advance herself. In the evenings, she went to the neighborhood Sikh temple to listen to the religious songs. She told us this was the only time she left the house. She had no friends, and no other contact with the outside world.

And yet Surinder had come to see this life as satisfying. After all, she knew nothing else. “I was never so happy in my life,” she told us. “My grandfather took care of me. There was no worry. I ate, I wore nice clothes, I lived well. It was a very secure life.”

Her happiness ended with her marriage. When she was twenty, Manjit, a distant relative she had never met—he was the brother of the wife of one of her uncles—came to the door with a group of friends to invite the family to his wedding the next day. But when Manjit and his friends saw Surinder, they decided she would be a better wife than the bride who had been arranged. Manjit quickly backed out of the marriage and the next day spoke to Surinder’s grandfather about marrying her. At first I thought this tale was too bizarre to be true, but it makes sense if one thinks of a bride as a commodity that can be quickly exchanged for a better deal. It mattered not at all that Surinder objected and spoke of her “bad feeling” about the groom. The family insisted it was high time for a twenty-year-old woman to be married.

The wedding took place on September 30, 1979, ten days after Manjit had come to her door, at Surinder’s grandfather’s house. By Indian standards, it was a modest lunch for two hundred people, with
meat, under a big tent. Surinder’s dowry—furniture, a television set, a refrigerator, jewelry and cash—was loaded on a bus and taken to her in-laws’ home that night. The next morning, Surinder said, “the whole drama started. When the family saw the dowry they said, ‘You’ve hardly got anything.’ ”

As Surinder recalled, they harassed her day after day. Sometimes they would go to her uncle’s house and demand large sums of cash. If they didn’t get it, they beat her. They beat her again when her first child, a girl, was born, because she had not given birth to a boy. She was lighter-skinned than the other women in her in-laws’ extended family, which she said made the resentments worse. “My color mattered to them,” she told us proudly. “They were jealous because I was beautiful.” They treated her as a virtual slave in the house, forcing her into a cycle of constant cooking and cleaning. “Sometimes they even locked the refrigerator so I wouldn’t be able to drink anything,” she said. Two years after the wedding, her mother-in-law was hit by a truck and killed. Surinder’s father-in-law had died much earlier.

Although the deaths might have brought some peace to Surinder’s life, instead she was even more threatened by the other women in the house. She became convinced that her husband was sleeping with the wife of his older brother. He himself had told Surinder there were others. “He told me he would only come to me when other women weren’t available,” she said. “I didn’t enjoy sleeping with him.” She became angrier when she discovered that her husband was giving money to the older brother’s wife, and also to his own sister, Amrita. The sister had recently come back to live in the house because her own marriage was ending and she needed financial and emotional support. Soon Surinder was certain her husband was sleeping with his own sister as well. Although she may well have been irrational at this point, her suspicions are not necessarily unfounded. In India, psychologists say, affairs with relatives are not unusual. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, who has a middle- and upper-middle-class practice, once told me that of his patients who were having affairs, most were involved with extended family members.

By August 1983, the tension in the house had become unbearable. During one fight, the husband and his sister had thrown kerosene on Surinder, and she was sure they were going to kill her. At the time, talk of dowry deaths was everywhere. A few months before, a New Delhi judge had caused a sensation in India when he handed down an unprecedented death sentence for a husband, mother-in-law and
brother-in-law charged with the murder of Sudha Goel, a young woman who was nine months pregnant. Neighbors had testified that Sudha Gole’s parents had been unable to meet demands for a refrigerator, motor scooter or cash after the wedding, and that the three defendants had dragged the screaming wife into the garden and set her on fire. In a statement made before she died, Sudha Goel said her mother-in-law had ripped off her jewelry just before lighting the match. (The husband, mother-in-law and brother-in-law were acquitted on appeal.)

On August 12, 1983, Surinder was at home with her two-year-old daughter and one-year-old son feeling weak and feverish. Her husband and his sister were there too. Around two-thirty in the afternoon another fight erupted as the husband and his sister began beating Surinder. Suddenly her husband grabbed Surinder to hold her still. His sister threw the kerosene, and Surinder fell to the floor. Then her husband went to guard the door as his sister threw the match. Surinder told me later she didn’t remember where it hit or how it ignited. All she recalled was that she ran, flaming, past her husband at the door. “He just let me go on,” she said. “When you’re burning, nobody wants to touch you.” She threw herself into the gutter. On the way to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital she was still conscious. “My husband told me that if I blamed him, he would kill all my uncles,” she said.

A short time later, Renuka and I went to see Surinder’s husband. He still lived in the house where the burning occurred, a large, rundown, two-story home on a dusty alley closer to the central part of town. The husband, Manjit, turned out to be a slight, sad-eyed Sikh with a turban and a medium-length black beard. Sometimes he was so passive that he seemed uninterested; at other times tears came to his eyes and he asked why his life was destined to turn out as it had. “My faith has been totally broken,” he said. “I just want to die.” His sister, Amrita, was a tiny woman with a little-girl voice and a forceful manner; she often took charge of the conversation. We talked in a dark bedroom that opened onto the central courtyard, where two women in the family squatted on the floor over a lunch of rice and lentils. Surinder’s two children lived there but had been sent away to boarding school, which Manjit claimed he could hardly afford. He was also upset that he had no one to cook for him. He and his sister had been in jail for more than a month before they were released on bail, and when they finally came home, his neighbors told him his children had been eating from the gutters in the streets.

This was his version of the story:

The problems, Manjit said, began right after the wedding. “She used to get angry about every little thing,” he said. His new wife had brought no dowry, and yet he had not complained. “We knew she was poor,” he said. He thought she would be happy in the house, the same one he had been born in thirty years earlier. It was old, but much larger than the house where she had lived before. And it was close to the large markets of Karol Bagh, where women from all over Delhi came to shop. Manjit’s father had worked in those markets as a vegetable salesman; he was an immigrant who had settled in Delhi after the 1947 partition of the British Empire into India and Pakistan drove him from the border state of Punjab. It was a move that would instill in his offspring, as in millions of others, a feeling that they were refugees in their own land.

Manjit’s new wife was soon complaining all the time, even though she was not treated as a slave, Manjit said, like most new brides. After Manjit’s mother died, Surinder had to cook only for her husband and two children. His two brothers and their wives kept to themselves upstairs; his sister, Amrita, came by only for visits. And yet his wife became very jealous of his relationship with his sister, even though he was just trying to help Amrita out. She had left her husband, and she desperately needed money. But Surinder hated her husband’s giving cash to his sister. “She wanted to control my brother,” Amrita said. As it was, Manjit was working night and day, trying to make one hundred dollars a month for his own wife and children. He was never unfaithful. “I treated her as nicely as possible,” he said. But still she would get angry. One night when he came home at eleven for dinner, she gave him cold vegetables and bread. When he told her to heat it up, she became furious. What kind of a wife was this? Sometimes after their fights she would go to her uncle’s home. Manjit began to wonder about the two of them. Was it her uncle she wanted? Had there been a relationship before the marriage? He began to think about it all the time.