by Cam Simpson
Women came to the ashram still wearing the white saris of their widowhood, if not literally upon their bodies, then internalized from the stigma each of them faced. Kamala had not understood the full extent to which she had rebelled against millennia of subjugation when she listened to her father’s plea to remove her white sari so soon after donning it. Yet she continued to feel intimidated by the power of what the white sari represented in her life. Historically, at least in some ethnic groups in Nepal, a widow was expected to burn herself alive upon the funeral pyre of her dead husband, and could be forced onto the flames if she refused to go willingly, a practice known as sati, or suttee. In some parts of Nepal, sati survived into the twentieth century and exemplified, in a very literal way, the idea that a wife existed primarily as a piece of her husband, in his life and in his death. Even within ethnic groups and regions where sati wasn’t practiced, the white sari was ubiquitous for widows, a kind of shroud marking their sexual and social deaths.1 Because they were blue, the ashram’s saris represented a subtle but deliberate act of defiance, made as they were from fabric woven by the women’s own hands.
One of the most difficult days for any widow is a nationwide public holiday in late summer called the Teej, in which married women are expected to worship their husbands and pray for their long lives. The women dress in all red, including in the red saris they wore on their wedding day, and cover their arms with red bangles and their necks with red beaded necklaces. Thousands upon thousands of wives parade en masse along the pathways of public parks and around the streets of Kathmandu’s neighborhoods, which look from above as if they were cut by crimson rivers. Kamala’s first Teej as a widow would come just a few days after the anniversary of Jeet’s execution. She faced its coming with deep trepidation, but on the day before the holiday, the ashram’s staff loaded Kamala and the other women onto microbuses, handed them each some cash, and sent them shopping in the noisy markets not far from a bridge that crosses the city’s sacred Bagmati River. After husbands die, some in-laws ceremoniously smash red bangles off the arms of the widows, literally, with rocks or other bludgeons. Now the ashram’s staff directed Kamala and the other women to buy as many red bangles in the market as they could afford. The women poured back onto the buses, smiling and laughing, extending their arms and showing off their bangles to one another. They spent the holiday itself at a carefully organized party, with songs and dances that carried on during the bus ride home.
The ashram’s struggle against millennia of discrimination dovetailed with a growing movement across the country. The nation’s civil war had left scores of widows in communities that had never known such widespread loss, especially in conservative areas where the culture of the white sari seemed deeply entrenched. War meant that young widows suddenly had strength in numbers, and in some communities, they began organizing themselves into a kind of loose resistance against the injustices born of their individual but collective tragedies. In 2005, the same year Kamala joined the ashram, a handful of well-intentioned international charity groups started recognizing this movement, and earnestly tried to push it forward.2 But although awareness of the discrimination, and the resistance against it, was growing, the stigma ran deep. Even Kamala’s ashram, perhaps the most enlightened place for widows anywhere in the shadows of the Himalayas, was not without practices that could be seen as judgmental toward the very women it worked so thoughtfully to empower. Upon admission, each widow was given a physical examination by a doctor, which included a test for sexually transmitted diseases. Any woman who tested positive was expelled.
The crying Kamala had heard in her room during her earliest nights at the ashram, which made her feel alone and afraid, began to fade over time, but even when another woman’s weeping kept her awake, Kamala’s unease dissipated, too, turning toward something else. Feeling another woman’s sadness made her less afraid and lonely than it had during her first couple of months. Every woman around her was visible to every other woman in a way none of them could have been on her own, in the same way Kamala and Heera had found strength by doing little more than gathering leaves together on the horseshoe ridge. The women of the ashram also explicitly shared tales of their own struggles, especially at impromptu gatherings in the evenings. The “senior” women, those in their second and final year of the ashram’s two-year program, were the most open. They often took the lead when the women would gather in one of the dormitories after dinner, crowding onto straw mats spread across the plaster floor, to speak of how it was that they had arrived at this moment.
A woman named Ganga, who came from a district called Kailali, in the far-western corner of Nepal, had lost her husband to a mining accident in India, where he was a migrant worker. His employer promised to pay workers’ compensation to the family, but they had to travel to India to claim it. Ganga told the women how she had crossed the border into India and then boarded a train with her father-in-law bound for the company’s headquarters in Himachal, near Kashmir. From nowhere, a group of men in the train car swarmed Ganga, grabbing and molesting her in concert. She screamed out to her father-in-law, but he stood still and silent as the train chugged forward. Ganga burst into a fury, clawing at every man she could reach, slapping their faces, punching, doing whatever she could, until the men, too pained or too frightened to continue their attack, backed off almost as suddenly as they had swarmed. In the immediate aftermath, everyone in the car stared at Ganga in shock, including her father-in-law. All were aghast at her behavior, as if she somehow were to blame for her own molestation and should have endured it in silence. Kamala and the other women were spellbound. So many of them also had felt hands, or worse, upon their bodies, while standing on crowded buses or in street markets, but most had never dared do what Ganga had done, fearing the consequences.
After they returned to Nepal, Ganga’s father-in-law and the rest of his family immediately rejected her, casting her out. Before long, she lost her children to an orphanage because she could not house, care for, or feed them on her own, as she was without any means of support. She eventually found her way to the ashram, but only after enduring severe suffering on a cross-country journey. Kamala was inspired by Ganga’s bravery and emotional courage, not just in fighting off her attackers, but also for facing the costs, and then finding a way to overcome despair by moving into the ashram. Ganga told the women that she was there to gain the independence that would allow her to regain custody of her children after she graduated. Kamala determined that she must live up to Ganga’s courage.
Some nights, the women did more than share their experiences in the dormitories. They would sneak out of their rooms, walk through the gate from the courtyard to the back of the ashram’s main buildings, and share a cigarette on the rickety balcony beneath a blanket of stars. Senior women paid particular attention to Kamala, seeming to take special care of her. Maybe that was because of the public spectacle of her husband’s death, and the way it had enraged the country against its growing economy of exploitation; or because it had been the first national mourning of its kind beyond the royal family; or perhaps because Kamala’s pain was more evident than that of the other women in her class. Kamala also likely gravitated toward these older women because she had been raised and cared for by elder sisters. Whatever the reasons, their support helped her develop a growing sense of ease, about her plight and about Kritika, too. The day care and kindergarten inside the ashram were so well respected that the campus also took in the children of tuition-paying parents from the community beyond its walls. The high quality of Kritika’s care and education allowed Kamala to focus on gaining the skills that could give her independence.
The daily rhythms of life at the ashram were not so different from those on the farm. Kamala rose at five each morning, walked out of her room, slipped on her flip-flops, and made her way down to the far side of the ashram’s long, low dining hall, where four taps spilled water into a stone basin. She cleaned herself and then quietly lined up with the other women at a small statue
of the ashram’s late founder, in the center of the courtyard, where each pressed her palms together beneath her chin and offered a brief prayer and a slight bow. The women then filed into the main campus building, which held workshops and classrooms, to do yoga for about ninety minutes, before breaking for morning tea and biscuits. They then split themselves into small groups for the morning’s chores, each group carefully configured to keep women from the different castes and strata of the society bound together. The ashram held what was in essence a small working farm on a spread of land at the back of the campus, where the women grew vegetables for their own meals and tended to chickens and a couple of cows. Other women swept and cleaned, or worked with the campus’s chef, a wiry old man who sometimes flirted playfully with them, to do the prep work for the day’s meals. By nine, they were uniformly dressed in their blue saris and filing into the workshops at the back of the main campus building, a two-story brick edifice with large windows across the front. An open-air gate built through the center of the building served as a passageway from the courtyard to the back, where rickety wooden staircases and balconies hung from the building’s exterior. The entrance to each workshop or classroom was at the back, too.
Half the women learned spinning, knitting, and weaving, turning out thread, yarn, tapestries, and fabric. The other half learned to tailor, taking seats at rows of desks, two by two, each desk topped with a vintage-looking treadle sewing machine made in India and etched with silver swirls or vines and flowers. The sewing rooms smelled of dust and linen and oil, and were illuminated by sunlight pouring in from the large windows extending nearly floor to ceiling across the side wall, which faced the courtyard. Each woman powered her machine with her own two feet, rocking the cast-iron treadle like a seesaw and filling the room with a symphony of gentle mechanical rhythms, broken only by the women’s banter and laughter. Patterns and fabric were spread across low-slung worktables at the front of the room, weighted down by scissors nearly as long and heavy as garden shears. Over the course of a year, the women learned to make simple things, such as saris, as well as more complex garments, including dresses and men’s jackets. The focus that tailoring required, the attention to minute measurements and details, the art and pride of creation—all these drew Kamala to this new craft, but it was something about the rhythm of the treadle that really captured her. The machine she worked on, an Indian-made Luxmi, had been a gift to the ashram from India’s foreign ministry, in honor of the connection between Gandhi and Meher, as were all the ashram’s machines. It was also Kamala’s own machine to keep. Photos of bygone graduation ceremonies were pinned to a bulletin board in the front of the administration building. They showed women lined up in the courtyard, displaying their diplomas for the camera, each woman standing proudly behind her sewing machine. Kamala, like every woman at the ashram, knew that when and if she graduated, she would get to take her machine with her. The ashram also sold and carefully tracked everything each woman made, and put profits from each garment into a fund for her, which she also received upon graduation.
The connection between sewing and healing was something the ashram’s chief seamstress, a woman named Shakuntala Basnet, pondered over her years teaching class after class of grieving women. Basnet knew from the start that Kamala would struggle, simply because the widows with children faced a more difficult path, but also because everyone in every corner of the country knew about the twelve men killed in Iraq. The public nature of Kamala’s pain would make it harder for her to escape her metaphorical white sari in the eyes of the world. When Basnet saw how hard Kamala worked to learn sewing and tailoring, and how eager the young widow was to advance, she was heartened. Yes, Basnet believed there was something about the rhythm of the sewing machines, the way the sound of the treadles and the rapid pounding of the needles filled the building, but she also knew how comfort comes with the intense focus required to learn something difficult and new, giving rest to a worried mind through escape. She knew that Kamala’s hard work would yield rewards that had nothing to do with the garments she made.
Kamala’s family believed that the ashram would be good for her, but it was hard for them to envision her life there. Every few weeks, Maya would find a reason to be in the village of Taksar (about a two-hour walk from the horseshoe ridge) with a little money in her purse. It was the nearest village with a public telephone, the one kept by the Kunwar family inside the one-room convenience store they ran from their home beside a narrow road choked with buses. Whoever was on duty would pull the phone out for Maya and place it on a glass display case at the shop’s front and dial the ashram. A runner at the administrative office in Kathmandu would fetch Kamala, and the two sisters would reconnect across the long-distance line for twenty to thirty minutes. In the earliest days, as Kamala remained bowed by shock and sadness, Maya would do much of the talking. She caught her sister up on family news and gossip from the horseshoe ridge. She managed to get Kamala talking by asking after Kritika. Perhaps because they spoke only about once a month, it didn’t take many of these chats for Maya to start noticing a change that seemed both rapid and marked. Kamala began speaking not only more, but also with excitement, telling Maya about everything she was learning, about the other women she had grown close to, and about potential ideas for her future, which, till then, she had thought about only with dread. Now Maya heard something in Kamala’s voice that she had not heard for a couple of years, not just a sense of hope but also a hint that Kamala was getting back to herself, gaining strength and becoming grounded. She sounded confident, even happy at times.
Kamala also wanted to stay connected with Jeet’s family back on the horseshoe ridge, at least for the sake of Kritika, but they never called her at the ashram. Just a few weeks after the first anniversary of his murder, and following the waves of red crimson in Kathmandu marking the Teej holiday, Nepalis celebrated the most auspicious holiday on their calendar, the two-week-long Dashain festival. Kamala took Kritika back to the village on the ledge to see Jeet’s family, as they had requested of her, but she found that little in the farmhouse had changed. Despite their invitation to her and Kritika, Jeet’s family had not prepared any of the traditional gifts normally given to a daughter and granddaughter on Dashain. Kamala had expected little, if anything, for herself, but for Kritika, who was now nearly four, it would be like a grandchild not getting any gifts at Christmas. Kamala returned to the ashram saddened that her relationship with Jeet’s family remained so distant and cold, despite the gains she was making in her life.
Not long after, a call came into the ashram’s administrative office from a man who said he urgently needed to speak with Kamala. A runner summoned her to the phone, and when she answered, the man on the other line introduced himself as Ganesh Gurung, an academic who ran a small institute in Kathmandu. He told her he was working with a group of American lawyers who believed she was entitled to compensation from the U.S. government because of what had happened to Jeet. Kamala was shocked, if not skeptical, but Gurung seemed both kind and authoritative, so she agreed to come to his office and hear him out.
Part III
“More Vile Than Anything the Court Has Previously Confronted”
9
2005–2006
Washington, DC
Matthew Handley sat down behind the conference table to face two men who had more power over his life than any others. Handley’s annual review as a junior lawyer at the Washington law firm of Cohen Milstein Hausfeld and Toll could be make or break. A bad one—filled with euphemisms along the lines of “Needs improvement”—might precipitate a serious diversion from the road to partnership. Becoming a partner is what it’s all about at a big firm. It’s where the money is. It’s where lawyers can earn the freedom to pursue cases they care about. Other paths end at a wall. Handley’s review took place in the office of Steve Toll, the firm’s managing partner. His immediate supervisor, a senior lawyer named Daniel Sommers, was there, too. Sommers ran the firm’s securities group. His cases paid a l
ot of bills at Cohen Milstein. They also paid Handley’s salary.
The firm ran a vigorous class-action practice not unlike that of other large law firms across America. The securities practice group sued major corporations on behalf of allegedly aggrieved shareholders, getting a slice of settlements with the corporations, or from verdicts won at trial. High-profile accounting scandals that roiled financial markets starting in the 1990s, and involving the likes of Enron, Waste Management, and WorldCom, sent share prices plummeting. The farther they fell, the greater the potential reward from a lawsuit on behalf of defrauded shareholders. Such cases might not have turned the pages of legal thrillers by John Grisham, but they did mint millionaires in the wood-paneled offices of Cohen Milstein and partnerships like it across the country—as did the firm’s other staple: antitrust lawsuits.
The two partners conducting Handley’s review offered some praise. Warm and genial, the young lawyer was impossible to dislike and worked as hard as anyone in the firm. He also competently executed the kind of junior lawyer schlepping that filled most of his days, such as scouring through Securities and Exchange Commission filings of a company called LeapFrog Enterprises, an educational-toy maker whose share price fell 34 percent in a single day on news of questionably booked revenues. Corporate malfeasance could be intellectually engaging for Handley, but injustices to shareholders didn’t stir the passions that had sent him to law school. So he dedicated his free time and other stolen moments to working on the firm’s pro bono cases, especially those involving civil and human rights. Cohen Milstein had an international reputation for its work on cutting-edge human rights litigation. Its commitment was a big part of what had drawn Handley to the firm in the first place.