May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (11 page)

In August of 1983 there was another terrible fight. Surinder had been behaving strangely—beating their small daughter and once even threatening to burn the child. But this time, Surinder poured kerosene on herself and said she wanted to commit suicide. “Then she called her uncle,” Manjit said, “and told him that I had poured kerosene on her and was trying to kill her.” Some days later, on August 12, Surinder was at home feeling weak and feverish after donating blood for a
relative. Manjit had gone to the hospital to pick her up and had found her there in the relative’s room, whispering in a corner with her uncle. When the two saw Manjit they stopped. “Why did they stop whispering when I got there?” he asked us. This was the proof he needed. He was now almost certain there was something between them. At home that day, his wife was even angrier than usual. Manjit felt he could no longer control her and grew more and more worried that she would try to kill herself. Finally, in desperation, he left the house and went a few doors down to an old family friend. He wanted to ask her what could be done for his wife. It was there that he heard the screams.

When he reached the hospital with his wife, the doctors wanted to know what had happened. “Whatever I tell you,” he said, “you won’t believe it.”

I had gone to see Manjit only out of a sense of responsibility, because I wanted to write a fair story for
The Washington Post
. There had been no doubt in my mind that he was guilty, but now I was confused. I assumed Manjit was lying about certain parts of his story, but I knew Surinder had not told the entire truth either. For one thing, she was not now as impoverished as she said; Renuka and I discovered she had recently had a job inspecting clothes at a garment house. I had also never been comfortable with her claim that this was a dowry case, simply because she had been burned nearly four years after her wedding. Bride burnings over dowry usually take place in the first year of marriage, before there are children. It was clear that there were more serious problems in Surinder’s marriage than a lack of wedding gifts. Kanwaljit Deol, the woman who ran the New Delhi police department’s antidowry division, told me that parents of burned women frequently cited dowry as a reason for the burning because they knew it would guarantee more police attention. Deol said her statistics proved that suicides by burning were more common than clear-cut dowry deaths, and that sometimes a woman made miserable in her in-laws’ house burned herself to get back at them. “Women are very smart,” she said. “We’ve had cases where a woman would put kerosene oil on herself, then run to the police station. It’s really crazy. Sometimes when I’m talking to women, they’ll say, ‘Well, if there’s nothing to be done, I’ll just kill myself.’ ” In Deol’s view, the story of Sita and the tradition of sati had been reinterpreted by the desperate twentieth-century bride. “Fire in particular has had this significance,” she said. “When all of us are small children, we hear these stories.” Later I mentioned Deol’s remark to Subhadra Butalia, the women’s activist
who had witnessed the bride burning. “Why should a woman burn herself to commit suicide?” she responded, infuriated. “Why torture yourself like that?”

Whatever the truth, Surinder had never mentioned that her in-laws were harassing her for dowry in the two separate statements she made to the police in the hours after the burning. She also had not blamed her husband. During her first night in the hospital, she told a police investigator and then a court representative that her husband had beaten her but had left the house before the burning occurred. Her sister-in-law, she said, acted alone. This was why her husband was charged with assault and her sister-in-law with attempted murder. Renuka and I asked her why she had changed her story for us. “My husband told me on the way to the hospital that if I blamed him, he would kill all my uncles,” she said. This certainly fit a pattern. One reason there are so few convictions in dowry deaths is that women are often afraid to implicate their husbands, or are simply reluctant to do so. Judge S. M. Aggarwal, who handed down the death sentence in the Sudha Goel case and has ruled on dozens of others, told me that even if a husband has tried to kill his wife, she may still feel it is her duty “to serve him, and not cause him any harm.”

The police investigation itself was of little help to me. Judging from the reports I saw, there appeared to be no direct evidence to support either side of the story. Not much was listed as evidence: A swatch of the clothing worn by Surinder the day she was burned was sent to a police lab for analysis and was found to contain kerosene. And on August 11, the day before the burning, Surinder had gone to the neighborhood police station and lodged a complaint that her husband was beating and starving her. It appeared from the inspecting officer’s report that the police did not interview neighbors or witnesses at the scene, and from the court file I learned that investigators apparently did not collect evidence at the house. A police photographer, however, did take some pictures of the interior. And yet the investigation took four months—a month longer than the maximum allowed. Subhadra Butalia had told me about these delays. “The police take their time and wait for the accused to bribe them,” she said. “The courts insist upon evidence, but without it, the court must give the benefit of the doubt to the accused.”

The first hearing in Surinder’s case against her husband and sister-in-law was on June 3, 1985, almost two years after the burning. Surinder herself did not testify until April 1 of the following year. The trial was
still not over when I left India more than two years after that. Court cases in India are notorious for their Dickensian delays. Testimony is never heard without interruptions: Two witnesses will testify, for example, but because a third has failed to appear, a judge will stop the proceeding and adjourn the case to the next available court date, sometimes six weeks later. Judges do not usually issue arrest warrants if a witness fails to answer a summons, at least the first or second time, so it is not unusual for a case like this to dribble on for a decade. Problems in the Indian courts are so legendary that the Indian government lawyers representing India and the victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical gas leak argued that the case against Union Carbide be tried in the United States, where they thought they could get a faster and more generous settlement. The Indian government’s own brief admitted that even routine Indian court proceedings “turn into such protracted odysseys that it is not unusual for litigation to long survive the litigants themselves.” To back up their argument, the lawyers quoted a 1976 decision by the Indian Supreme Court in which a justice sarcastically noted that the case had passed its “silver jubilee,” but that “at long last, the unfortunate and heroic saga of this litigation is coming to an end.”

Surinder’s trial was but one small scene in the immense tragicomedy of the Indian criminal justice system. On April 1, 1986, she took the stand in a dilapidated courtroom, in the middle of a long morning of other cases, and calmly stuck to the original story she had told to the police, but not to me: that her sister-in-law acted alone after Manjit left the house. The case was adjourned to May 1, when Surinder identified the sandals and shawl she was wearing on the day the burning took place. The police inspector who recorded her statement in the hospital and the constable who sent the evidence to the lab also took the stand. The case was adjourned to July 8.

By this time I had written the
Post
story and was working on other assignments, but I employed a Delhi lawyer, R. L. Verma, to keep track of the rest of the trial for me. After each hearing he sent me reports, which grew increasingly farcical. On July 8, another inspector testified; then the case was adjourned until August 8, at which time ?. K. Sud, the defense attorney for the husband and sister, refused to cross-examine Surinder because her uncle, whom he considered crucial to the case, was not present. The case was adjourned until October 27, but on that day the uncle once again did not turn up. At the next hearing, on December 11, a doctor from the hospital testified about the
nature of Surinder’s burns, but the cross-examination could not take place because Surinder herself failed to appear. The next hearing was set for February 11, 1987. This time Surinder appeared, but her uncle did not. Even if he had, nothing would have happened because there was a lawyers’ strike that day. The next hearing was set for April 1, when Amrita sent a medical certificate saying she was ill. Under law, all court proceedings have to be held in the presence of the accused, so nothing happened that day, either. On the day of the next hearing, May 18, the lawyers were once again on strike, this time over the lack of court fee stamps. Court fee stamps, which look like little postage stamps, have to be put on all motions, briefs, and other documents filed in the courthouse. For some reason, the courthouse clerical staff had run out of them, and all legal activity had ground to a halt.

After six more months of similar delays, the judge finally lost his patience. On November 11, he wrote out a detailed order asking that the cross-examination of Surinder be closed, and then set the next date for December 10. But on that date, the defense moved an application that Surinder be recalled for cross-examination after all. Verma, who had been following the case for one year and nine months, could not resist some editorial comment of his own. “So the rigamarole has started all over again,” he wrote. “And this is only the trial court. Years will roll until the matter reaches the Supreme Court.”

The delays continued into June of the following year, when the presiding judge was transferred to another job. The case was then sent to a different court. Surinder showed the burns on her arms to the new judge, who adjourned the case until September 14. I was back in the United States when I got the next letter from Verma, who informed me that on September 14 the judge had abruptly adjourned the case until after the first of the next year.

I tried to see Surinder before I left India in the summer of 1988, but I learned that she had moved to Punjab. Verma was able to talk to her when she appeared at her hearing in September, though, and he wrote me that she planned to remarry. She told him that her husband had already “remarried”—even though there had been no divorce—and that the husband’s new “wife” had given birth to a daughter. The second wife apparently was caring for Surinder’s children as well. Surinder asked Verma if she needed to file a lawsuit if she wanted to legally divorce her husband. “In fact, she was probing me for legal advice,” he wrote to me. That afternoon, she turned up unexpectedly at his office with more questions about her case. This didn’t surprise
me. In two years of sitting in on Surinder’s hearings, Verma had grown increasingly sympathetic to her; Surinder was clever enough to recognize a well-connected lawyer who could help her.

What really happened on August 12, 1983? Is it possible, as Surinder maintained, that the family’s resentment against her had been building for years—first because the dowry wasn’t enough, then because her firstborn wasn’t a boy, then because of false suspicions of an affair with her uncle? Did the husband and sister-in-law want to get rid of her so they could control the house—and find a new bride with a large dowry? Or, as the husband’s lawyer maintained, had Surinder planned to burn herself only a little bit and then blame her husband and sister-in-law? Is that why there were no burns on her breasts and face? Did she become horrified when her plan got out of hand? Sometimes I have thought it might have been a combination of both scenarios. In the fury and confusion of the fight on August 12, maybe Surinder did pour kerosene on herself, did threaten to commit suicide—and then, in a rage, her husband or sister-in-law threw the match. Or did they pour the kerosene, and did Surinder then light the match?

To this day I still wonder what happened and I suppose that I always will. If I were forced to decide, I would have to agree with the defense lawyer, as odious as that is to me, and say that her burns were self-inflicted in an attempt to frame her husband and sister-in-law. But my judgment is based on instinct, not evidence. My guess is that the husband and sister-in-law will be convicted, and then the appeals will go on for years. “In burning cases, usually the sympathies are with the wife,” explained K. K. Sud, the lawyer for Surinder’s husband and sister-in-law. “The presumption is that a woman would not want to burn herself, or to disturb her home and children, by making a false accusation against the husband.”

The truth is that I never really trusted Surinder. In the beginning I felt so sorry for her that I gave her some clothes and a little money, but gradually I began to feel manipulated. She begged me to find her a job, but I discovered she had one already. She told me one story and the police another. She said she couldn’t read and write, but Verma told me he had seen her engrossed in a Sikh religious book while she waited for her case to be called. A lot of the neighbors complained that she was a troublemaker. Certainly she was physically aggressive, and she boasted that she won her frequent fights with her husband. “After two slaps from me,” she said proudly, “he couldn’t even get up off the floor.”

None of this disproved her story, of course. Nor did it prove that her husband and sister-in-law were telling the truth. Surinder Kaur, however unlikable, and no matter what happened, was a casualty of the centuries-old custom of dowry, dangerously transformed by the forces of urbanization and a consumer society. Rather than eliminating dowry, modernization had instead made it lethal. In essence, Surinder Kaur was forced to live in several centuries at once—with the result that she nearly lost her life. It was something I understood better when I encountered the story, and the growing legend, of Roop Kanwar.