Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  When I was in the tenth class in school, a man used to visit our house. I asked him to get me a job as a village welfare worker. (I have never told this to anyone before but am telling you now.) He said he would do it. This man used to deal in girls from an office in front of the Irwin Hospital. I was clever and alert from the very beginning. He took me to the office and around seven in the evening brought me to a deserted spot in Shahadra where there is now a cremation ground. God saved me. The man said, ‘Take off your clothes.’ I took off my new sandals which I had got from Lucknow. Then I said to him, ‘I will take my clothes off’. I had to trick him. I said, ‘Step back a little, so I can strip without shame.’ He thought he had trapped me. I untied the string of my trousers, dropped them and ran. Wearing just a shirt I came back home naked, but he had not succeeded in touching me. I cried and cried. My parent’s honour was almost plundered that day and it was only God who gave me the strength to save it. The man brought my sandals and my trousers back because he knew my father was poor. My parents collapsed on the floor. In those days I kept all the vratas—and went to the temple every day.

  For the training as a village welfare worker, I went to Durgapur near Simla. I did not even have a uniform. A contractor I had come to know said he would buy me one. But his eye was evil. Look, if a person is poor then everyone looks at her with bad intentions. He brought me two saris, a pair of shoes, and blouses. I had to travel alone that night. The contractor asked me to marry him because his wife was not a good woman. I told him ‘I have called you “brother” so I cannot look at you in that way.’ Then I got on the train but felt sad during the whole journey.

  I wanted to help my father financially. I felt homesick in Durgapur. I contracted smallpox and my skin erupted with boils. After a year I came back home. Mother had taken to bed. The other sisters did not look after her, so after returning I got her treated. I was very fond of my brother and sisters. I would have liked them to be educated but they wanted to take the evil path. The parents were respectable people, but the children betrayed their trust.

  Now I am 50 years old. I was 17 when I was married to Premnath in Gandhinagar. He is a distant relative and in those days he was in the army in Allahabad. Once when he visited our home my father asked him to look me up in the village near Nainital since I was living alone in foreign parts. When he finally found me I welcomed him with great respect. His looks changed then. He thought he’d be happy if he could marry me. Such a thought never entered my head. Then he went back to Allahabad and wrote me a letter, asking me to marry him. But I said this was not possible since we were related.

  Should I tell you the truth? I went to Allahabad to meet him. When he came to the station to see me off he cried and cried. He was very handsome in those days and I like handsome men. His complexion was fair and he spoke so sweetly and softly that if a third person was sitting nearby he couldn’t make out what the man was saying. He had so much politeness. I forgot everything after meeting him. I said to myself that I must have him for my very own. His mother had died when he was a child. He wept often, saying he had no one. I forgot everything after seeing his loneliness. I did not see any of his inner qualities. I thought about him day and night. We both used to write verses and songs to each other in our letters. We said we couldn’t live without each other.

  When I came home for a vacation I told my mother about him. He took leave from his job and came to our house one day and just sat there. He said if he couldn’t get married to me he would knife everyone. My father took off his turban and placed it on my feet and said ‘Child, keep my honour and refuse him. He is a very bad man. He will ruin your life.’ I said ‘No, if he is a bad person then it is in my hands to make him good.’ I said to my father, ‘So what if he kills me! You’ll carry my corpse to the cremation ground on your shoulders.’ My father married me off but when I was about to leave home he hid himself. He said, ‘She has done this against my will, she has not listened to me. I will not see her when she leaves. She was the one who was my son, but she has now betrayed me.’ So my dolia went to my sister’s house since my husband had no money for us to go anywhere else.

  When he left me to go to Allahabad he promised to send money. My parents began to hate him. They said he has got married and left his wife which is a matter of great dishonour. So they also harassed me. I wrote him a worried letter and without letting him know came to Allahabad. We took a room from one of his friends and spent a very good year. We were together all the time: I never slept alone for even one night. Then I became pregnant. My health worsened. The vomiting would not stop. So in the eighth month he brought me back to my mother. My baby was about five weeks old when he ran away from the army but said that he had come on leave. One day passed, two days passed. Whenever the girl cried he would say, ‘Come, let’s throw her into the Jamuna river. Throw the sister-fucker into the river!’ Neither the child nor I had anything to eat. At home the parents would say, ‘What was the great pleasure in getting married when there is no money. He is nothing but a naked, starving beggar!’ I could not tolerate this and so we shifted to my sister’s shanty in Link Road. We got a hut of our own but did not have enough money even for milk for the child. By this time he had started beating me with a whip.

  The baby became very weak and died when it was four months old. We brought her to Irwin Hospital and they put four bottles of glucose into her but she could not be saved and died by the morning. He began to be upset with our lack of money. I would tell him, ‘I will always be with you. I have left my parents, I have left my brothers and sisters, left all my relatives, I am with you.’ Then my sister got him a job in Eros Cinema for a hundred rupees a month.

  One night what happens is that he has gone to the cinema. Taking my younger sister—she died sometime ago—we looked for him the whole night. When he came home at four in the morning he was drunk. I said to him, ‘Listen, I searched for you the whole night.’ He did not say anything. He took off his boots and hit me hard with one of them. Four, five times, on the head. Who was I to question him if he had been with a woman! When a man’s character goes bad he will always hit the woman. He locked me in the hut and went off. The same day the police came to demolish our huts. They loaded us and our belongings in trucks and threw us out here in Madangir which was then just an empty, dusty plain. I was alone. When my brothers came to know, they came looking for me. They asked what had happened. I told them that their brother-in-law had left me. They spent the whole day clearing up a space, digging foundations, making a hut for me.

  Eventually, he came back. Everyday he would harass me, beat me. By this time I had another child, almost 15 months old. He would take a knife out in front of the child and say that he’d kill me. My mother often said, ‘Leave him, his character is bad. You will weep your whole life.’ But I said, ‘No, I have taken hold of his hand. He is my consort. You may all leave me but I shall never leave him.’ He made scenes. Abuses, beatings, staying away from home. When I was sick he’d never ask whether I needed a cup of tea or milk. He’d often say, ‘I will throw you down the roof.’ But he is my husband. And then my son died when he was a year and a half old.

  You know, when I was a child my father told me many stories. Two of these stories have stayed in my mind. In a village the daughter of a brahmin and the son of another brahmin loved each other. The brahmin boy asked the girl to run away with him and one night they took off. On the way they stopped to rest in the veranda of a house. Two thieves who had just robbed a house came to the place where the couple was sleeping. They were followed by the villagers who cornered them in the veranda. The villagers asked the girl which one was her husband. The brahmin boy was a weakling while one of the thieves was a strong and handsome young man. Besides, he also had money and jewellery. The girl did not take a moment to change her mind. Ignoring the brahmin boy, she identified the thief as her husband and went away with him. On the way they came to a river and wondered how to cross it. The thief said, ‘Let me first go and leave the bag on the o
ther side and then I will come back and carry you across.’ When he reached the other shore the girl called him to come back and take her with him. He said ‘When after choosing a man you left him so easily, how can I trust you to stay with me?’ So my father told that a woman belongs to one man only. If she is going to get happiness then it is only from him, never from someone else. A husband is God.

  Another story I liked a great deal is about a king who had five daughters, he made them sit in a row and asked, ‘Who gives you the food you eat?’ All the daughters except one said, ‘Father, you give us the food.’ The fifth daughter said, ‘Father, I eat what is given by God, what is given by my karma.’ The king was furious. He called a leper, bleeding from his sores, married this daughter to him and turned her out of the palace in rags. While leaving the girl said, ‘O Father! This is the husband of my karma—this husband is my god!’

  She began begging to feed her husband, patiently broke pieces of bread and put them in his mouth. He would ask her not to waste her youth on him and to marry someone else. ‘God has made me to serve you,’ she always replied. One day, leaving him in the jungle, she went off to the town to beg. A bird came and sat on the tree under which the leper was resting. The bird said to the leper, ‘My prince, there is a pond nearby. If you bathe in its waters your leprosy will disappear.’ The man dragged himself to the pond and put one leg in the water. It was cured instantly. He put in another leg which also became clear of all disfigurement, he dipped his whole body and came out clean, like a golden king. When the girl came back, she did not believe this handsome man was her husband. He convinced her by putting his little finger, which had not touched the water earlier, in the pond and showing her that it had become clean. The bird came again and said ‘If you boil two cans of oil and put the oil in the pond, the water will part and you will find at the bottom treasures buried by ten kings.’ The couple followed the bird’s instructions and built a big palace for themselves from the gold and the gems.

  One day the husband said to the wife, ‘We must call your father for dinner’. When the king came the daughter served him, wearing a new dress and jewellery with every dish. When the king finished eating she came out with the rags in which her father had turned her out. She then presented her husband to him and said, ‘These are the clothes you gave me and you have seen the clothes given by my karma. You gave me a leper for my husband and this is the man karma has given me.’

  Look, no one can erase even one line of what karma has written down in your book. My man could not be mine. I do not understand why. But my lack of understanding does not mean that I should leave good dharmic (according to the law) thoughts and embrace bad ones. You can get peace only from your own man, not from others.

  We had been hiding in shanties for five years while the warrants for his arrest for desertion from the army were out. One day, finally, the police came and took him away to Banga in Punjab. I followed him to the police station, crying all the way. They took him to jail in the military cantonment in Jullundhar. I stayed there for 21 days and went to see him each day. He would abuse me every time I came and I would cry.

  I love him. I love him so much that mother-father, sisters-brothers, the whole world was of less worth to me than my man. I could not leave him. I said if he is sent far away from me I will die. They gave him a three-month sentence and took him to Lucknow jail. I came back to Delhi. The house was lying unattended and there was a child in my womb. My husband was jailed for three months. When he came back I was delivered of a boy. He had been given 350 rupees by the army which we spent on the baby, but he died.

  Afterward, the same story started all over again. Drinking, beating, filthy abuses, suspicions. He would say ‘Why does this man come, why does that one come?’ I’d answer. ‘I have given up everyone for you. I have given you my all, don’t accuse me falsely.’ He’d pick up sticks, take out knives, and I would keep silent out of fear.

  Then I gave birth to four daughters, one after another. After the fourth daughter he did not even let me rest. The third day after I gave birth he sent me to work in the kitchen. He had not let anyone from my family come and help me at the time of delivery. When the fifth child was about to come I said, ‘God, give me a son otherwise this man won’t let me live.’ But those whose habits are bad do not change even if they have ten sons!

  Gradually, we built a small house in Mehrauli and shifted there with our five daughters. I thought perhaps being among good people he might change. We also kept our hut in Madangir. But his habits worsened. He would beat me and tell me to get out of the house. But I thought of the future of my daughters, of their marriages. If I left the house, people would say I was a bad woman who has run off with a lover. There was a woman who lived next to us in Mehrauli. She did some black magic which made my eldest daughter very sick. I went to all the hospitals. Then someone sent me to the baba (holy man) of the Mehrauli tomb. Baba asked me not to worry and gave me some water in a bottle. The water cured my daughter. Baba also intimated that the neighbouring woman had been responsible for the illness. So I talked my husband not to visit her. She turned him completely against me. She would make him drink and tell him that in this absence other men visited me.

  One night, coming home drunk, he really wanted to kill me. With the children in tow I climbed up the rear wall and hid in a neighbour’s house while he was out in the street looking for us with a drawn knife. We ran barefoot through the jungle at night and came to my sister’s house. In the morning I went to the police station and got them to write down that I have left with my five daughters and nothing else so that he does not accuse me of theft. The next day I sent word to him through my sister’s daughter. He told her in front of everyone that I should send our daughters out on the street, earn money by making them whores. I went to Eros Cinema, where he worked, and asked him why he was making such a spectacle out of his family. He started beating me in front of a big crowd till my body was blue with bruises. But I did not fall down. When some taxi drivers intervened to save me, he ran away. We came back to Madangir and I started working. He would turn up every other day and abuse all of us ‘Sister-fuckers, whores, bastards, even prostitutes are better than you. Go and do your work in the streets.’ He called me such filthy names that I wished the earth would split open and take me in. After three months we all returned to Mehrauli.

  Someone stole a lot of money from the cinema theatre where he worked. He was also implicated in the theft, lost his job, and was arrested. I spent all my money running from one court to another, hiring a lawyer, finding the jail he was in and arranging bail. When they released him all he said was ‘Bitch, why did you spend all that money?’

  My brother, my sister, and her children came to visit us. I cried a lot that day for my own sister betrayed me. I cannot bear to tell you. When a man becomes bad, women take advantage of him. First they asked me to cook for them and then I served them liquor. I also drank some but then went to sleep. Only heaven knows what he did that night. Three bottles of liquor had been consumed. My daughter woke up in the night and she saw my husband and my sister doing the work that is done between man and woman. My whole body trembled. I said to myself. ‘Now my house is ruined.’

  I told my mother. She is a frank woman and cannot tolerate any harm done to me. She went to my sister’s house. ‘Why are you destroying that poor woman’s home?’ she said to her. When my sister discovered that I knew, she came to meet me. I did not say anything. I did not want to create a scene in front of the whole world. My sister only said, ‘Brother-in-law gave me some roti to eat and exacted its price.’

  Look, when a man is drunk, he does not distinguish between his wife, sister or even mother. He will fuck even his mother. When he came home in the evening I abused him roundly. I said ‘She may be my sister, she may be anyone. But if that woman crosses the threshold of my house, I will set her on fire and also burn myself.’

  One day he called me for ‘business’ and when I took off my clothes, he said, ‘You can now g
et out of the house.’ I felt so humiliated. If I had had a tin of kerosene in front of me that night. I would have set myself on fire.

  Look, there is one kind of love which makes the woman blind and lose her senses. There is another kind of love which is true and yet another which is false. A woman understands everything about the differences in the kinds cf love. The woman may not speak but she understands. True love has a lot of rasa (literally ‘juice,’ ‘flavor’). False love is dry. The third one makes the woman blind so that she does not ask which other woman her man visits. These are the three kinds of love. He used to call me to bed once in ten or 15 days only to make me blind.

  Look, I didn’t want him to feel any lack in love. If he called me 20 times, I went to him 20 times. If he called me ten times, I went ten times. A man goes out of the house only if he is not getting enough. So I never let him remain hungry. In the early days of the marriage he used to call me two to four times a day.

  I drink sometimes. Liquor intoxicates in many ways. I am talking about myself. When a woman drinks she needs a man. Every woman will say that. She wants new men. It is natural to feel that way. My husband had no idea of intercourse in the beginning. He didn’t even know about a woman’s monthly periods. I taught him everything. I had such strength that even if he called me to bed 20 times it was too little for me. Now he has ruined my body. When I walked people used to say, ‘There comes the police inspector!’ But the strength is gone now. Well, the strength is still there and will come out if he does not abuse me and shares his life with me. If he’d still love me I would forget everything. Earlier he used to call me ‘wrestler’ and then he called me ‘head woman.’ Now it has come down to ‘bitch,’ ‘whore,’ and ‘badmash’ (bad character). Once when he came home early and I was not there, for I had to attend a programme of religious singing in our alley, he took out two tins of kerosene and said, ‘Before burning yourself arrange to have the news brought to me in the cinema. I will come to throw your corpse away.’