Riot (30 page)

It's strange, isn't it, Cin? Ever since Darryl it's been I who walked away from relationships, I who ended every one of them. Poor Winston could never understand why I wouldn't marry him. Nor could my mother. Instead I fell for someone completely unsuitable by Mom's standards — married, foreign, tied to another life — and I've allowed
him
to dump
me
. Mom would probably blame it on India. You were overwhelmed by it all, dear, she'd say, this big, hot, foreign, oppressive, unfamiliar place, and you attached yourself to this man as a port in the storm. Once you come home you'll realize he didn't really mean that much to you. You'll get over it.

And that's why I've never been able to tell Mom about Lucky. She'd never understand.

Do you remember, Cin, when we were little and you used to tease me about the amount of tender loving care I gave my Barbie doll? How I'd sit with my little nylon brush and gently smooth down her golden mane, over and over again? “Give it a rest, Prissy,” you'd say. “She's a doll. She can't tell whether you've brushed her hair three times or two.” And I'd be shocked. “But I'm all she's got!” I'd reply. “If I don't do it for her, who will?” Which of course was totally beside the point you were making. But that's the way I was! And I wonder if I wasn't doing the same thing with Lakshman — stroking him over and over again, oblivious to his reaction? Telling myself I was all he'd got — the only true love he'd ever know? Was I projecting onto him the needs I imagined he must have? Oh Cindy, have I been a fool?

But I have to see him once more. There's something I've got to tell him. And I have to look into his eyes when I say it. Only then will I know if he really ever loved me.

 

Kadambari to Shankar Das

September 20, 1989

Sir, I am so scared, I am so upset, I don't know what to do, sir. Yes, sir, I will calm down, sir, I just wanted to tell you that that man Ali, sir, the chauffeur, Fatima Bi's husband, he caught me in the street, sir, when I was going to visit one of our IUD cases, and he threatened me, sir. He said he would cut off my — cut off my breasts, sir, because I had told his wife to get an abortion. Sir, I was so scared, I told him it wasn't me, sir, it was the American girl, it was all her idea, and she would be leaving the country soon, so please leave me alone. And he said, sir, you tell that American whore that if I ever lay my hands on her, she won't be catching that plane to America. Sir, I don't know what to do, if I tell her she will just be frightened, but he seems to mean it, sir. What should I do?

Yes, sir, of course, sir. You are right, sir. He is a government driver, he has a job and a family, he will never do such a thing, it is all just talk. Yes, sir, you are right, sir. I will try to forget about it, sir. But sir, please do not ask me to visit those Muslim bastis for a while. Please, sir, let me have another caseload until I am sure he has calmed down. Thank you, sir. You are my mother and my father, sir. Thank you very, very much, sir… .

 

from Katharine Hart's diary

October 13, 1989

Kadambari, who seems to have been assigned by Mr. Das as our guide to the town, took me today to the women's ward of the Zalilgarh hospital. It was just as well that Rudyard couldn't come — he was told it would not be appropriate — because I don't think he could have handled what I saw.

The hospital is a large, run-down building, dating from somewhere after the turn of the century, though buildings age so rapidly in this country that it could be a lot more recent than that. Decay and rot are everywhere — the bits of chipped-off masonry visible as you enter, the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the rusty carts on which dirty orderlies in stained uniforms wheel their antiquated supplies, the pervasive odor of waste matter and ammonia. A public hospital in small-town India is a far cry from the luxury hospital in Delhi in which Lance had his appendix removed; the only thing the two places have in common appears to be the profusion of people — people waiting to be seen, people bustling about the corridors, people standing around aimlessly, people lining up outside the dispensary and the lab. But they're a different class of people. I knew before I stepped into the hospital that this was where the really poor came; the somewhat better-off would frequent one of the two private “nursing homes” that have sprung up in the town, while the rich would simply go to Delhi. But even then I was not prepared for the horror of the women's ward.

We entered it from a dank corridor, dimly lit by a flickering neon tubelight. The ward was essentially a single long room, and I was drawn short by the sight as soon as I stepped in. The narrow metal cots were all occupied, and there were women on the floor as well, some on thin beddings, some stretched out on their own faded cotton saris. Overflowing refuse-bins spilled onto the floor, where bloodstained rags already lay, so that I had to pick my way over garbage while avoiding stepping on bodies, and vice versa. It was hot, and there was no fan; perspiration dripped down my arms, and the stale smell of sweat from dozens of bodies mingled with the chemicals in the air to make me gag. Many women moaned in pain; only a few seemed to have IV's on their arms, dripping morphine into their veins. Some stared emptily at the ceiling, where darting lizards and geckos provided the only distraction.

I was there because Mr. Das thought I would be interested to see some of the kinds of women Priscilla was trying to help: women who had had difficult childbirths, women whose ill health did not permit them to bear or look after more children, women recovering from botched self-induced abortions, the whole female chamber of horrors in this overcrowded and desperately poor country. But after a few perfunctory minutes with such women, exhausted figures who responded listlessly to my inarticulate questions, I moved numbly on. Kadambari wanted me to meet someone else altogether, someone whom my daughter had had nothing to do with.

She lay wrapped like some grotesque mummy on a cot in the darkest corner of the room, moaning involuntarily with every second breath. “Sundari,” she said briefly. “My sister. She has burns over seventy-five percent of her body. She is not yet nineteen years old.”

Sundari opened pain-wracked eyes when she heard her name, and smiled weakly to acknowledge her visitors. “Sundari, you know, means beautiful,” Kadambari said. “She is very beautiful, my sister.” And indeed, what I could see of her face seemed quite unlike Kadambari's, with a delicately lovely nose and lips, but from under the swathed bandage, I caught a glimpse of the warped dry burned skin of her neck.

“Tell her your story, Sundari,” Kadambari said, her voice ungentle, commanding.

“No, it's all right, don't bother her,” I protested, but Kadambari was insistent. Sundari looked at me without moving her face, her eyes raking me with a regard that combined defeat with yearning, as if she wished I could reach out to her and pull her out of the quicksand into which she was sinking.

“I got married last year,” she said in a feeble voice, her bluish lips barely moving. “Kadambari helped arrange it. My father had to take a loan to pay for the wedding. He gave the boy a Bajaj scooter. Rupesh. That is his name. He is — he had a job, as a peon in an office. A few months after the wedding, he lost his job.

“We were living with Rupesh's parents. His father is old and sick. His mother ran the house. I had to do whatever she told me to do. Help her cook the food, chop the vegetables, clean the kitchen, empty the garbage. And more. Massage the old man's feet. Help clean him. He could not even get up to go the bathroom. It was disgusting.

“I had never done some of these things before. Rupesh seemed to like me. He kept telling me at night how beautiful I was. So I asked him, couldn't we go away? Live by ourselves somewhere. He was shocked. He said his duty was to his parents and so was mine, as his wife. His mother overheard us and slapped me. I looked to Rupesh to protect me but he just turned his back and let her slap me again. From that day I realized I was alone in that house.

“Every day the beatings got worse. Nothing I did around the house was good enough for my mother-in-law. She was screaming at me all the time. If the floor wasn't clean, she beat me. If anything was unsatisfactory about the food, the plates, the way the bed was made, it was my fault. If I didn't run to my father-in-law every time we heard him hawking and spitting in the next room, I would be called a lazy and ungrateful witch and beaten again. Rupesh learned to turn his eyes away from me. He told me I had to obey his mother at all times.

“When he lost his job they treated me even worse. They said I had brought bad luck upon my husband and his family. They said I was born under an evil star, and that my parents had bribed the jyotishi to alter my horoscope so that it seemed to match Rupesh's. Then they started complaining about my dowry. How little it was, how it was less than my father had promised when the marriage was arranged. None of this was true, but if I said so they screamed at me for talking back to them and beat me more.”

I looked around for some water to give the poor girl, whose dry lips barely moved as she spoke, but I could see none. She struggled on. “I was miserable, crying all the time, unable to sleep. When Rupesh came to me at night he no longer said I was beautiful. He did not stroke my cheek as he used to. He took me by force, very roughly and very quickly, and turned away.

“One day I threw up in the morning and was beaten for that too. But in a day or two it became clear I was not sick, but pregnant. For a few days the beatings stopped. Rupesh's mother even began talking of the son her son was going to have. Then a new nightmare began.

“Rupesh's mother had a relative who worked in one of those new clinics that do amniocentesis. He slipped me in without my in-laws having to pay anything. The doctor inserted a big needle into me. It hurt a lot. A few days later Rupesh came to the house looking as if he had been whipped. My sample had tested positive. The baby was going to be a girl.

“The beatings started again. My pregnancy was no longer an acceptable excuse not to do the chores they wanted me to. Rupesh looked more and more woebegone by the day. And his mother started saying, ‘What use is this woman who does no work around the house and cannot even produce a son?'

“One day last week I was working in the kitchen rolling the dough for chapatis which my mother-in-law was making at the stove. I remember Rupesh coming in with a can of kerosene for the stove, and my mother-in-law picking up a box of matches. I turned back to my dough when I felt a splash on my sari. The next thing I knew my whole body was on fire. I screamed and ran out of the kitchen and out the front door. People came running. If I had run the other way, into the house, I wouldn't be here today.”

Her dry lips parted in a sad and bitter grimace. “Perhaps that would have been better for me than — than this.” Her eyes, the only mobile part of her face, took in the room, the bed, the other patients, Kadambari, and me. “Why did my neighbors bother to save my life? What did they save me for?”

I turned to Kadambari. “And Rupesh and his mother? Have they been arrested? What are the police doing about this?”

“They say it was a kitchen accident,” Kadambari replied. “There are a few dozen ‘kitchen accidents' like this every year in Zalilgarh. What can the police prove? It is her word against theirs.”

I looked sadly at the young girl, knowing she will be disfigured for life, and worse, that she will either have to go back to live a pariah's existence in the very family that tried to kill her, or return to her own parents, who will feel the disgrace of her broken marriage and face a mountain of unpaid debts from the wedding and the hospitalization of their daughter.

“The baby?” I asked. Sundari closed her eyes; it was the only way she could avert her gaze.

“She miscarried, the day after the burning,” Kadambari said. Kadambari spoke into my silence. “She was a good student and wanted to go to college,” Kadambari said. “But my parents felt she had to marry before she became too old to find a good husband.”

“A good husband,” Sundari whispered from the bed.

When we left the ward Kadambari was strangely more communicative than she has been so far. “You see, Mrs. Hart,” she observed, “
this
is the real issue for women in India. Not population control, but violence against women. In our own homes. What good are all our efforts as long as men have the power to do this to us? Your daughter never understood that.”

I wheeled on her then. “You're wrong, miss,” I said in my most schoolteacherly manner. “Priscilla did understand. Her whole approach was based on her belief that women need to resist their own subjugation. That when they are empowered, they will no longer have more babies than they can look after. She wrote that to me very clearly. I am surprised you could have worked so closely with her and not understood what my daughter believed in.”

Kadambari looked unabashed, even defiant. “A lot of people,” she said slowly and softly, “did not understand what your daughter believed in.”

She would not explain what she meant, and the rest of our journey back to the guest house passed in a strained silence. When we arrived I thanked her for having introduced me to her sister. Rudyard emerged at that point and insisted she stay for a cup of tea. He always had a tin ear for my signals. In the circumstances, I could scarcely excuse myself. So I sat down in one of the rattan chairs in the guest house's verandah, and while the tea was being made, I told him what had happened.

“God, that's terrible,” he said. Then he turned to Kadambari. “Tell me, this sister of yours. Will she get well?”

“The burns will take a long time to heal,” Kadambari replied, “but the doctors say she will live.”

“She won't have much of a life, Rudyard,” I began. “Her—”