[The Indian
Constitution guarantees equality under the law. But for women facing a patriarchal
social order, strict caste rules and centuries of traditions, that guarantee
means little.]
By Ellen Barry
 |
Geeta led a group of women in her village in northern
an order to quit working in nearby factories.
|
On a humid, sweaty, honking
afternoon last summer, two women were making their way through the court
complex in the north Indian city of Meerut
They walked past the purveyors
of stamp papers and affidavits, typists clickety-clacking on stools,
barristers-at-law in flapping gowns, pillars of wadded files bound in twine.
It is fair to say that these two did not belong. They had the
swaying walk of village women — half-duck, half-ballerina — who have spent
their lives balancing bundles of firewood on their heads. When they entered the
office of a criminal defense lawyer, in the sweat-stained broom closet where he
receives clients, they were at first so conscious of their low status that they
tried to sit on the floor.
They
were engaging his services because they wanted to work. They lived 10 miles
away, in a small settlement where, for generations, begging had been the main
source of income. A few weeks earlier, the male elders of their caste had
decreed that village women working at nearby meat-processing factories should
leave their jobs. The reason they gave was that women at home would be better
protected from the sexual advances of outside men. A bigger issue lay beneath
the surface: The women’s earnings had begun to undermine the old order.
It
came as a surprise when seven of the women, who had come to rely on the daily
wage of 200 rupees, about $3, refused to stop. The women would have to, the men
said, blocking the lane with their bodies. They did not expect the women to go
to the police.
It would have been impossible — this appeal to the distant,
abstract power of the Indian state — if the women had not been so angry.
Geeta, the younger of the two, was born angry. Even as a child,
if her siblings took her portion of food, she was apt to throw everyone’s
dinner into the dirt. “A real bastard-woman,” one neighbor called her, eyes
widening with admiration.
“Let their ladies sit and cook for them,” Geeta would hiss to
her friend Premwati, as they walked together past their neighbors. “Our husbands
are with us.”
Premwati was a more cautious sort. In the tradition of their
caste, the Nats, a person challenging a community punishment could offer a
defense at trial by picking up a red-hot piece of iron and walking five steps
toward the temple. If her hands burned, she was guilty, and would be placed in
a hole in the ground until she confessed.
Last summer, as they fought to remain in the work force, Geeta
and Premwati made up a small part of a big economic puzzle.
In India Saudi Arabia India
Instead, the opposite is happening: From 2005 to 2012, women’s participation rates
slid to 27 percent
from 37 percent, largely because rural women were dropping out of the work
force. Of 189 countries studied by the International Labour Organization, India ranks 17th from the bottom.
This is terrible news for India, as it strains to
become a competitive producer for world markets. Economists have put forward two theories to explain the decline.
The first is that India
The Nat families were just crossing that threshold, and many
things were changing. Premwati and Geeta could feel the grip of the local
moneylenders loosening; the taste of independence made them bold. In this way,
over five months last spring and summer, the unstoppable force of economic need
met the immovable object of social control.
The cost of remaining in the work force, they discovered, was
very high.
The Bossiest Woman in the
Village
At 10 o’clock on a morning in May, Geeta and
Premwati wrapped fried bread in plastic bags and set off on foot toward the
meat-processing factories. It was blindingly hot, and stray dogs and buffaloes
lay in strips of shade on either side of the road.
To save the 5-rupee, or 7-cent, fare for an auto-rickshaw, they
walked the whole dusty distance, nearly an hour from their small community of
Nats, who are Hindus, through the Muslim neighborhoods that surround the
factories. They kept their dupattas pulled all the way down over their faces,
following the medieval tradition of purdah, or veiling, but men in skullcaps
lingered in the doorways anyway, gawking.
“What is your name?” one of the men yelled, breaking the
silence.
“Geeta,” came the reply, bell-clear.
The two met as young wives, taken away from their home villages
and deposited among strangers in Peepli Khera. Geeta, who had barely hit
puberty, landed in the grip of a mother-in-law who believed that drinking tea
made a girl greedy for extra helpings of food.
So Geeta would sneak over to see Premwati, who made buckets of
tea, watery and sweet. Geeta was scrawny and mouthy. She tended to alienate
women — maybe it was the way she called them fat buffaloes — but Premwati
calmly allowed Geeta’s insults to bubble over her. Geeta returned the favor by
stomping over and intervening whenever Premwati’s husband beat her.
“It has become a habit to take a beating,” Geeta said one day,
scowling.
In this way, Geeta had carved out a role for herself as the
bossiest woman in the village. No one beat her. “Her husband is like a chicken
— if she tells him to get up, he will get up!” chuckled the chief in the town
where she grew up.
As
the women approached the factories that morning, they pulled their scarves over
their faces against the smell, a stomach-turning odor that wafts off
tallow-rendering vats and suggests rotting meat. Over the last five years, with
the market for flash-frozen buffalo meat booming in Saudi Arabia Egypt China India Meerut
For this reason, about five years earlier, Geeta and her friends
had been drawn into the labor force, supplementing their husbands’ seasonal
earnings as wedding-band musicians. Inside the boundary walls of the factories,
they broke rocks into rubble and carried cement mix in shallow pans, balanced
on the crowns of their heads, to stonemasons building interior walls. Some
washed meat pans; some assembled cartons; some carried bricks.
Geeta and Premwati found the work boring, and also terrifying.
The women of their community live by rules: If an older man approaches, they
cannot sit on any surface above the ground, so it is not unusual to see them
suddenly slither down off cots and chairs. They are forbidden to have physical
contact with men from outside the community, with the exception of physicians
or bangle sellers.
At first they went to work with their stomachs knotted with fear
that a strange man might grab their hand. At this prospect, even Geeta’s nerve
collapsed. Once, while carrying a load of mud at a factory that crushes bones
for animal feed, she slipped and fell into a 10-foot trench, her leg buckling
beneath her. But when the factory’s clerk, a Muslim, reached a hand down to
help her up, she jerked away, as if his touch would scald her.
She lay there in the mud, at the bottom of the ditch, until
Premwati arrived to help her clamber out.
As the weeks passed, though, their fears ebbed. At the
construction sites, they watched migrant workers from Nepal Bangladesh China
At night, returning home,
they withdrew sweaty, folded bills from their blouses. A hollow-eyed woman
named Pooja announced, with some surprise, that her husband and mother-in-law
had stopped beating her. “When you earn money,” she said, “you are of some use
to them.” As for Geeta, it became clear to her that the men swarming around the
factory grounds were not making sexual advances.
“When you start working, your heart opens up,” she said. “Then
you’re not scared anymore.”
At this point, the women began to make changes to their
appearance. Geeta took note when the other workers recoiled from her, and began
to wash twice a day, with soap. She bought seven-foot lengths of cotton, the
brighter the better, and paid tailors to stitch it into billowing pants.
Premwati, whose husband spent most days stretched out drunk on
his rope cot, felt, for the first time in years, that she was standing on solid
ground. With her earnings she married off three children. One last son needed
settling. Then she could exhale.
Geeta’s plans were wilder, more improbable. Though she had never
been taught letters or numbers, she worked her cellphone constantly, using a
system of vigorous trial and error. In the financial cooperative that the
village women had formed, pooling their resources and extending loans, she
proved to be an excellent, if frightening, debt-collector. She began making
payments into a life insurance policy with such a generous payout that she
sometimes daydreamed, a little wistfully, about her husband’s untimely death.
She took advances on her salary, which were interest-free,
rather than patronizing the local moneylenders.
Then, last spring, she attracted attention by building a second
house for herself, of rosy, freshly kilned brick, abutting the compound of
Roshan, the village’s most powerful man.
Far From the Modern World
When Roshan, the Nat chief in Peepli Khera, is ready to perform
an exorcism, he starts out by asking a coy question: “Do you want to see the
real drama?”
Then he trembles. His eyes roll back, he arches his tongue
against his teeth like the goddess Kali, who communicates to him through a
string of wooden beads that he holds up to his ear, as if it were a cellphone.
Nat families who are mistrustful of hospitals — that is, nearly all of them —
come from miles away to see Roshan, who claims to be able to evict the jinns
that have inhabited their bodies.
Asked how many of his patients survive, he barks laughter. “How
do I know that? If they survive, they survive.”
In the half-light of evening, Roshan surveys the settlement, his
chest thrown out. He has the high cheekbones of his nomadic ancestors, who made
a living walking tightropes to entertain the Mughal courts. His lips are
speckled and plump as cuts of liver. This is his dominion — about 40 miles
northeast from Delhi
Villagers live in a few dozen houses arranged around a
whitewashed temple. A plaque notes that the temple was built by Roshan’s
family, though no one needs to be reminded, and anyway, only two adults here
know how to read. No one uses a surname or knows his or her age. One man, asked
how old he thought he was, responded, “I don’t have any teeth left, and I am
about to go.”
On a recent morning, a woman
named Usha, her leg shrunken from polio, held a 4-month-old baby who was
suffering from vomiting and diarrhea. His limbs were wasted, and he looked up
with the slow, narcotic gaze of a very old man. His vertebrae pressed sharply
out of the parchment skin of his back. He was too weak to cry.
Three of Usha’s children had already died. The three who had
survived infancy were sitting on the ground near her, eating dry toast from a
plastic bag. One was so hungry that he grabbed a raw, half-peeled potato,
speckled with rot, out of her hand, and bit into it. When a passing neighbor
asked why they were so dirty, she grimaced.
“We are poor people,” she said hoarsely. “We were born in dirt,
we live in dirt, we will die in dirt.”
Roshan’s proudest moment occurred decades ago, when a police
officer, sniffing for bribes, made the mistake of venturing into the square and
grabbing his cousin by the neck. Roshan, then a young man, picked up an ax
handle and hit the officer hard in the face. Since then, he likes to say, the
police have not found occasion to come here. A boundary had been demarcated:
This is a place beyond the reach of the state.
With the arrival of the factories, that boundary had begun to
disappear. Roshan’s village was being swallowed by an expanding city. He
forbade the women in his own family to work at the factories, but watched with
distaste as his neighbors left in the morning. He looked back with nostalgia at
the time when the Nats supported themselves by begging.
“Life was much better 20 years back,” he said. “It was a nice
society. Now women are going out and meeting strange men.”
In the spring of last year,
after Geeta built her new house, Roshan’s son Dharmender began observing her
with special interest. He noted her new outfits, the way she came home “with
the crease in her clothes still visible.” He scanned her friends’ faces for
traces of makeup. He shared his suspicion that they worked at an
air-conditioned site.
Their work, he said, had a whiff of immorality.
“They have everything: Clothes to wear. Enough to eat,” he said.
“Why would they need to work? They still have husbands. It’s not just insulting
to them, it’s insulting to the whole village.”
Money and Respect
It was difficult to say where the rumor started. It concerned
Geeta’s neighbor Pinki, who had fair skin and a little girl’s high, fluting
voice. She was married with one child and worked at one of the new construction
sites, breaking rocks with a hammer. Some reported that Pinki had been seen
riding on a strange man’s motorcycle, others that a man from the construction
site had shown up at her family home.
In May, Roshan vanished into the temple to present the matter to
his most trusted authority: the goddess Kali. After a long conversation over
the magic necklace, he emerged saying that the goddess had shared a piece of
disturbing news. Women in the village, he said, were engaged in prostitution.
“If Kali tells us this person is wrong,” he said, “this person
is wrong.”
Roshan wrapped his head in the stained turban that marked him as
the chief, and for more than an hour, as the smell of heat and dung filled the
square, the men of the village debated what to do. The problem, Roshan said,
went beyond Pinki, to the general question of what went on when their women
disappeared into the factories.
His younger brother was in full agreement: Female employment, he
said, “has spread like wildfire” and was hurting the reputation of the village.
A third elder, their cousin, observed that his own wife worked at a factory,
adding 5,000 rupees a month to the 1,800 he earned in a wedding band, but that
there was an important difference between these income flows. “My money,” he
said, “is the money that is earned with respect.”
It was decided: The village’s women would stop working.
Geeta gathered a war council
on the floor of her house. They were a party of seven, including Premwati,
Pinki and another neighbor, Rekha. Geeta’s proposal was to ignore Roshan’s ban.
If their female neighbors were willing to quit their jobs, it was only out of
fear. The fear would fade, maybe in a month, maybe in two. In the meantime, she
told her friends, they had the full support of the Indian government.
The government she had in mind was a Muslim politician named
Jahiruddin Mewati, who had served as chief of the village of Peepli Khera
Mr. Mewati’s furred belly peeks out of the bottom of his dress
shirt, and he has Tourette’s syndrome, so he emits a stream of grunts and tics.
In the middle of a conversation, he slammed his hand with great force on the
table, exclaiming, “I am on the side of the truth! I am not worried about
votes! I am the true servant of the people, because injustice has been done!”
Mr. Mewati’s study of politics, especially the tactics of the
British Raj, had persuaded him that there was much to be gained — specifically,
votes — by inserting himself into local controversies. With all adult men and
women counted, there are about 150 votes in the Nat community, nothing to
sneeze at in a district where elections are won by a margin of 20 or 30. When
Geeta appeared in his reception area, a collection of plastic chairs arranged
under a tree, he smelled opportunity.
“Nobody can stop them from going to work,” he said staunchly.
“We don’t have a Taliban here. It’s a democracy.”
Heartened, the women decided they would simply leave for work in
the morning. Except, when they did, their neighbors were standing there,
telling them to stop.
‘These People Can Beat Me’
“On 18.05.2015 at 9:00
A.M. I
was going for work,” reads the report filed at the police station in
Kharkhauda, signed with Pinki’s thumbprint and written in the hand of their
sponsor, Mr. Mewati.
“These people started saying
that we were told not to go to the factory, because bad things are happening at
the factory. These people became angry and started abusing me and they
threatened to kill me. I request you to lodge my report and take legal action.”
She added, for good measure, “these
people can beat me at any time.”
The station officer, Manoj
Kumar Singh, took her complaint with a grain of salt. He had seen versions of
this drama playing out in other hamlets where young women were leaving for
work. The old, patriarchal order was dying in rural India
“That may be the cause of this
whole trouble, that they are losing control,” he shrugged. “These old practices
are going away.”
When word got out that the
women had gone to the police, Roshan’s son Dharmender was the one sent to tell
them how they would be punished. He stood in the lane and yelled it over the
wall, using the old phrase “Hookah-pani bandh,” a sanction that dates back to
medieval times, when sharing a water-pipe packed with tobacco was the
prerogative of adult men in rural India. From this point forward all seven
women would be outcasts — symbolically denied the hookah, as well as pani,
water, from a shared pump.
Geeta, Premwati and their
friends tried to wrap their heads around it. As children they had heard of the
rite of ostracism — it was used to frighten them into obedience — but they had
never seen it imposed. At first they found ways to adjust, avoiding a
confrontation with their neighbors by sticking to the lanes and handpumps that
had been constructed with government money.
A few days passed before the
finger of the punishment touched them. Geeta’s teenage niece greeted the girl
next door and watched her glide by wordlessly, like a ghost. Rekha dialed the
numbers of relatives, one after the other, and when she told them what had
happened to her and spoke the phrase “hookah-pani,” they hung up.
Then a wedding was held at the
home of a neighbor of Geeta’s. There was a bus full of well-wishers, rice and
dal for families who converged from a constellation of villages. The outcasts
could hear the music from their homes.
A delegation had come from
Geeta’s home village, and it included her mother, Anguri. Geeta remembered her
tenderly massaging her legs before sending her away to be married. She thought
she was around 10. She had seen her on rare occasions since then.
Geeta offered her mother a
glass of water. She refused. Geeta offered her tea. She refused. Geeta invited
her in. She refused.
“I feared that if I drank it
they would declare me an outcast,” her mother said later. “We have no outcasts
here. In our community, the elders are supreme.”
Geeta’s mother began to weep,
right there in the road. Then she turned her back and returned to the neighbor’s
house.
Geeta liked to think of herself
as hardened, but this took her by surprise. “She always loved me before this
dispute,” she said.
Unwilling to cry in front of
the neighbors, Geeta turned, walked into her own house, closed the door, and
wept.
Living as Outcasts
Dharmender was astounded that
the seven women persisted in going to work. The rest of the village’s women
spent their days collecting firewood, and by mid-July, the piles had grown into
towering, tangled masses that threatened to topple over. In the mornings, when
Geeta and her friends left for the factories, men lined the roadway and jeered.
“Are you going to star in a pornographic movie?” one of them called out.
The whole thing was strange,
Dharmender said. The women had been offered a deal, allowing them back in the
community if they confessed to “immoral acts” and paid a fine, but they had
refused it. Ostracism was such a severe punishment that dissenters usually
relented within 24 hours, paying whatever fine the elders demanded. Geeta and
her friends had already lived as outcasts for three months. “Who,” he wondered
aloud, “would be willing to suffer so much?”
The women, too, were in
uncharted territory. Every two weeks, they made a trip to the magistrate’s
court in Meerut
Their lawyer, Mohammed Yusuf
Siddiqui, had rarely sat across his desk from such nervous clients. In his
practice, it was not unusual to see state justice conflict with caste justice.
One of his clients, who had appealed to court in order to obtain a divorce, had
been assigned a punishment by his village council, to spit on the ground and
then lick the spit.
Still, there was something
unusual about these women, who signed each document with a thumbprint. Mr.
Siddiqui watched them curiously.
“They know nothing about court
procedure,” he said. “They never ask me questions. They just say one thing: ‘We
are not wrong. We are not wrong. We are not wrong.’”
Premwati, it turned out, had
not fully reckoned how much she had to lose. Earlier in the year, she had
managed to arrange a marriage for the second of her sons, a muscular teenager
named Bhima. She had found a way to secure a bride without going deeper into
debt, enrolling him in a mass wedding sponsored by the government to ease the
financial burden on poor families.
Under the circumstances, Bhima
was braced for disappointment, but the girl Premwati had found was, improbably,
a beauty: her eyes large and luminous, brows arched like a film star. Bhima was
boggled with love.
By late July, two months after
Premwati was ostracized, that small victory had curdled. The girl, Puja, now an
outcast by virtue of her marriage, was not allowed to attend her brother’s
wedding, and she was wild with anger, crouching on the ground and murmuring to
herself. She glowered at Bhima if he so much as put his arm around her. In the evenings,
he began to beat her, energetically enough that the neighbors heard.
One hot night, Puja’s father
swaggered into the family’s courtyard, a flask of Besto whiskey and a toy
revolver tucked into his waistband, and announced that he was going to take his
daughter back to her home village. He lifted one foot and kicked a chunk out of
the mud wall that marked the edge of Premwati’s homestead.
“All these problems are caused
by one woman. I don’t want to say her name right now,” he said, and turned his
bleary gaze to Premwati.
Just like that, the young bride
was gone. Puja dressed up on the morning of her departure, putting on the
rhinestone-studded kitten-heeled sandals she had worn at her wedding. They
kicked up a cloud of dust as she disappeared down the road.
Premwati seemed deflated. The
monsoon rains had brought down the wall of her hut in a lumpy mass, and when
night fell, clouds of mosquitoes moved in. Now her son, withdrawn into a
lovesick funk, blamed her for the breakup of his marriage. She looked
exhausted. “I have worked so hard,” she said. “But still there is always
trouble in the house.”
Roshan had followed the
sequence of events with satisfaction. These women, he said, were trying to show
that they could exist without the community. When he heard that the girl was
gone, he smiled.
“Slowly, slowly, they will
understand our power,” he said.
A Return to Begging
Around the hearths of the Nat
women, the ones who had agreed to resign their jobs, pressure was building.
They wanted to be loyal to the community elders but by September, stripped of
the 200 rupees a day that had been supporting their families, they were running
out of money.
Geeta’s neighbor, an imposing
woman known as Big Suman, surveyed the homesteads one by one with the
experienced eye of a general. She had disapproved of Geeta’s rebellion, but she
grumbled about having to give up her income. One morning, a moneylender stormed
down the lane, bellowing, “Give me my money or I will take your bicycle!”
On one of her rounds, Big Suman
spotted something peculiar: A widow with grown children was trudging back from
the nearest town with a sack of flour balanced on her head. Big Suman did a
double-take. She knew what begging looked like. This was an activity —
“spreading your hands before strangers” — that the Nats were trying to leave
behind.
The widow’s story was what she
expected. She had run out of flour two days earlier. The thought of going
deeper into debt terrified her, so she did not want to approach Roshan, who
would lend money but charge interest. She wept, and then she went to beg.
That morning, Big Suman decided
the time had come to end it. She visited all the women who had resigned from
the factories, stopping by at times when they would not be overheard by Roshan.
They agreed that they would break into small groups, leaving when the men
slept, and take their case to the one person who could clear the way for them
to work again.
When Mr. Mewati, the Muslim
politician from down the road, saw the crowd of women enter his courtyard, he perked
up. Local elections were two months away and he was feeling lively, like a bear
coming out of hibernation. Several days later, at 7:30 one September morning, he
bumped down the road in his decrepit Maruti Gypsy jeep, its suspension
squeaking as it hit ruts in the road.
He moved with purpose. His
shirt was clean and crisply ironed. He parked the Gypsy in front of Roshan’s
homestead, and a series of Mr. Mewati’s male cousins unfolded themselves from
the back seat, assuming positions in Roshan’s yard. The two headmen sat down on
a rope cot, exchanging compliments.
“I am with you with all my
heart,” Mr. Mewati said.
“I know you are,” Roshan said.
“Even if I die, I will support
you,” Mr. Mewati said.
“I can die, but I cannot fight
against you,” Roshan said.
Mr. Mewati assembled the
villagers and informed them that the Indian Constitution guaranteed equality
under the law. Women could not be prevented from working, and Geeta and her
friends should be forgiven. Then he withdrew 3,000 rupees in folded bills from
his pocket, enough to cover the fine for Geeta’s disobedience, and handed it to
Roshan.
“Take care of this mess,” he
said.
The machinery of compromise
cranked into motion. Roshan’s brother sprinkled sugar on the ground outside the
temple, reversing the rite of ostracism. Geeta and her friends lined up and
their neighbors embraced them gingerly, barely grazing one another with their
arms. Geeta gathered the women to celebrate, and a shoe dangled on a pole above
her house, in an ancient symbol of contempt for her accusers.
The matter was unfinished. Some
tension flickered in the night. Dharmender, livid at his father’s lenience,
grabbed Roshan by the shoulders and tried to shove him out of the town square.
“Your mind is not working,” he
said.
‘A Black Mark Has Been Drawn’
It was late at night, two
nights later, that the police stationed at Kharkhauda received a report of
violence from the village of Peepli Khera
The officer on duty was
Subinspector Ankit Chauhan, a babyfaced 28-year-old. Striding down the center
lane into the settlement, heavy loops of khaki braid hanging from each
shoulder, the subinspector noted that there were few men present, only a gaggle
of women who had, he deduced, spent the last hours exchanging terms of abuse.
He recalls examining “scratches and bruises,” nothing serious.
Finally, because he saw the
necessity for some kind of action, he detained a short, excitable man, one of
several who had been named in a complaint from Geeta, a female resident of the
village.
He then gathered the villagers
and reminded them that it was necessary to embrace modern life. Subinspector
Chauhan recorded this encounter as a constructive, civil one. Then, satisfied
that he had performed his duty, he got back into his service vehicle and left
the village.
Those who remained could hear
the familiar sound as the police car bumped away down the rutted dirt road.
Chup chup chup chup chup.
At night, the settlement is
engulfed in darkness, oceans of darkness.
The electricity flickers on for
a few hours a night, creating pools of light from single bulbs suspended inside
each house. Beyond that, for miles around, there are only crickets, stars and
sugar cane fields.
Jackals, gray and ghostly, dart
in and out of the croplands.
When the sound of the police
car had become faint enough, Dharmender and his brothers and his cousins and
uncles came back out of the sugar cane field.
Premwati watched them advancing
across the village square, some two dozen men closing in. When bricks began to
fly, she and her friends ducked inside a house and braced their bodies against
the door. Seated on the floor by the light of a candle, Premwati could see the
faces of her neighbors, some pressed up against the grill on a window: Those
she loved, those in her family, those she had known since childhood.
“They have put a black mark on
us,” she said. “It will stay as long as we live together.”
Pinki, whose 4-year-old
daughter was trapped outside with the crowd, had begun to sob.
“They said, ‘By morning you
will come out,’” Pinki recalled. “They said, ‘We will sit here all night for
you.’”
Karim Khan, a Muslim neighbor,
rushed over from his sundries shop when he heard about the melee, certainly
more excitement than he had gotten from the Nat village in a long time.
“Those women peed their pants
from fear and it was running out onto the floor,” he chortled. “They peed their
pants! All these men were standing outside and banging on their doors, abusing
them. They knew if they fought again, they would be killed.”
Inside the tiny house, Geeta’s
friends watched as she dialed the cellphone again and again that night. But the
government was not available. Mr. Mewati remained in his compound, about a mile
away. He claimed later that his phone’s battery had died and he had been unable
to receive calls.
Subinspector Chauhan, for his
part, was not in a hurry to return to this corner of his precinct twice in the
same night. He found the reports of serious injury to be dubious. Where the
Nats were concerned, he reasoned, injuries could be caused by any number of
things.
“These people are all
drunkards,” he said. “They are so drunk that even if you push one of those guys
into a drain, he will fall down. These women try to exaggerate, they say, ‘This
person attacked us, that person attacked us.’”
Mr. Siddiqui, their defense
lawyer, saw no need to report the incident to the magistrate who had issued the
restraining order. Sometimes, he said, it is better to allow a community to
settle its own differences rather than initiate a laborious investigation.
Anyway, he added, the police are very busy.
“This is a country with 1.4
billion people,” he said. “The police can’t stand behind every single person.”
The women were alone. When it
became clear that Geeta’s friends were securely barricaded, Dharmender gathered
a few men and made his way to the other end of the village.
Coursing through him, he
explained later, was a certain kind of anger that he associated with being part
of a mob. He had felt it before; it is gone after 15 minutes. But for that
period, anger can make ordinary men strong enough to flip over a truck. Geeta
had already called the police, and Dharmender saw no further reason to avoid
violence.
Geeta’s husband, Sanjay, was in
his undershirt at a neighbor’s house, watching a television serial, the
children asleep under mosquito nets. When he looked up he saw that the door was
blocked by bodies. He recalls the sight of his niece, slumped beside a drain,
crying, and a heavy blow to the back of his head, and then nothing.
Dharmender felt pity as he beat
Geeta’s husband: Sanjay was a poor boy, a decent boy. It was not his fault.
“If he was a bad person, we
would feel O.K. that he had gotten hurt. But he’s a good guy,” Dharmender said.
But the beating was necessary, he said, with a heavy sigh. “Until someone gets hurt,
people don’t learn.”
The crowd dispersed some time
later, leaving Sanjay unconscious in a pool of blood, with a deep cut on his
arm, a slit snaking across a cheekbone, and a red knot on his forehead. His
neighbors recalled seeing him lying unconscious on a woodpile. The police, when
they finally arrived, recommended that he be taken to the hospital.
Sanjay would spend five days in
a hospital bed. He had always been a small and quiet man, but when he returned
to the village, he was somehow smaller and quieter. He took to slipping in and
out in the half-light, trying to avoid crossing paths with the men who had
beaten him.
“Anyone who has beaten you in
the night can do it again,” he said.
Geeta, too, had lost her
swagger. When people asked about Sanjay, she told them that he had fallen off
the roof. She denied that she had been trapped in the house with the other
women. She was no longer eager to boast about her campaign against the village
council.
“They are powerful,” she said.
“They are stronger. They beat us up like dogs.”
On the day Sanjay was
discharged, Roshan was lounging with his male relatives on a rope cot outside
the temple. The heat was soporific, and beside them, two buffaloes nosed
through a pile of dung, quietly grunting.
All told, it had been an
expensive night, Roshan said. To avoid criminal charges, he had had to pay
3,000 rupees for Sanjay’s medical care and an additional 4,000 to ensure there
would be no investigation. But it was worth it, they all agreed.
Even Roshan’s concession — allowing
the women of the village to return to work in the factories — had turned out in
his favor. Though the Nat women had headed out almost immediately, nearly all
of the factories were now shuttered: China Brazil
So that was that. No one was
hiring.
Roshan could not help preening
a little. “See, in our community, a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” he said.
“This is what it is here. Women have lower status and men have higher status.”
If any more women propose to challenge that principle, he said, “we will
quietly, politely tell them this is not a good thing.”
And that night, as the sun
slipped down over the sugar cane, Roshan and the others laughed and laughed.
This story was
reported over a five-month period by Ellen Barry in Peepli Khera, Meerut Ganeshpur , India
