by Ira Trivedi
At Shiny’s spacious home, I meet his mother. She is elderly, kind, and soft-spoken yet talkative. Shiny leaves me with her while he gets back to work. Auntyji and I settle in to talk while drinking cups of thick, syrupy chai. The television crackles in the background. Over the next few days I observe that it runs all day, mostly playing Hindi soap operas, Hindi news, and movies, and sometimes even National Geographic. Auntyji moved to Punjab from Uttar Pradesh as a young bride and quickly learnt to cook and speak Punjabi so she could cater to the needs of her husband. Even today, she wakes up at 6:45 a.m. to make hot tea for Shiny’s father before he goes for his morning walk. After dinner when Shiny’s father goes to bed, she always stays awake to clean and tidy up. She talks a lot about ‘duty’. To her, and to many other Indian women of her generation, duty is marriage and marriage is duty. She talks about her husband as ‘Uncleji’ or ‘Shiny’s father’, never referring to him by his name—a respectful form of address used by older Indian women for their husbands. When the timing seems right, I carefully broach the subject of Shiny’s ongoing divorce. The old lady’s face falls, and her wrinkles are suddenly marked. Shiny’s second marriage, unlike his first one, was arranged. A woman of the same caste as Shiny’s Brahmin family and from a comparable economic class was found through the matrimonial portal shaadi.com. Astrologers agreed that their birth charts were compatible, so all marked and matched, they quickly got married.
As a marriage broker later told me, ‘A man in Punjab is like a bull; as long as he is virile, he can find a bride, no matter how many times he has been married before.’ There was that, and Shilpa, Shiny’s bride-to-be, was thirty-two, which, by Indian standards, was over the hill. According to Shiny, Shilpa was under pressure from her parents to get married, especially since her sisters and cousins were already settled. For Shilpa, Shiny fit the bill; he was handsome, his family was well-to-do, they were from the same caste and community, and their horoscopes matched. Shilpa and Shiny got married in a suitably ostentatious Punjabi way and quickly conceived a child. Six months after their daughter Pinky was born, all hell broke loose and Shiny fled from home to the ashram. Auntyji bemoans that Shilpa drove him up the wall and out of the house. As we talk about the divorce a sombre mood permeates the colourful living room we’re sitting in. Auntyji repeats more than once how they were so loving towards her, how they opened their home and hearts to the ‘girl’ (as she calls Shilpa), but things still went awry.
‘She did not adjust,’ Auntyji says firmly, so Shiny was forced to do what he had to do. Auntyji believes that a woman should ‘adjust’ to her husband as she herself has done. But Shilpa, the product of a new generation and a new India, had different expectations from a man and marriage.
As the conversation steers on towards Shiny’s life, Auntyji is uplifted, and her face lights up. Shiny has been a perfect son to her. She blushes as she tells me that Shiny was chosen to participate in a prestigious male beauty pageant, Mr India, in Mumbai. She says she was so proud to see her handsome son on television, and tells me how Shiny, a ‘Punjab da puttar’, had become the pride of Jalandhar and gone on to win the title. Shiny, being the deferential son that he was, turned down the modelling contract for the family business and less glamorous pastures of Punjab.
I ask if I can see photographs of Shiny’s most recent wedding. Auntyji frowns and looks at me with a considered gaze, but she loves showing photographs so she eventually fishes out the photos, which are stacked away at the back of a cupboard. They have gathered a significant amount of dust, it is clear that they haven’t been viewed for a while. Despite the festivities, there is an element of sobriety in all the photos, with Shiny and Shilpa flashing fake, bright smiles that get grimmer as the evening carries on. Auntyji points out all the relevant family members, though I can tell she is far less enthusiastic than she has been with the other photos. I take a chance and ask if we can see those photos of the first wedding too, but Auntyji apologizes and says grimly that Shiny has burnt all the photos from that wedding.
WITH PAPAJI AT DINNER
‘Shiny has not given me thirty-five seconds of trouble in thirty-five years of life. He is a God-fearing and a good man,’ proclaims Uncleji, Shiny’s father, chomping methodically on his chicken.
‘Yes, yes,’ agrees his mother, nodding her head vigorously, and smiling at Shiny.
Then, as quickly as she smiled, her face falls. ‘It is so sad that this happened to my son of all the people in the world,’ she says and stares down into her plate. I have observed that she often falls into these moods in the midst of conversations.
Uncleji declares, ‘Ira, when your father comes to Punjab, he is invited to stay here.’
‘Thanks, Uncle, but what about my mom?’ I ask.
‘Father means the couple only. Both father and mother,’ says Uncleji.
‘Yes, beta. Your Uncleji, is right,’ agrees Auntyji.
Over the past few days I have come to realize that Shiny’s elderly father is a deeply conflicted individual. While he expresses deep reverence and respect for his wife, he has very clear-cut beliefs about a woman’s role in the family and what her primary duty is—simply put, it is to serve her husband and her children.
Shiny is his father’s son. Though he was deeply sensitive, caring and emotional, he had peculiar, rigid views that didn’t seem to change despite his ‘worldly’ experiences. For example, sex. Shiny believes in what he calls the ‘Indian Vedic culture of life’. According to his interpretation, the scriptures say that a physical relationship is important only to have children. Good sex, Shiny feels, does not guarantee a good relationship. To me, his interpretation seems unidimensional and also radical, more so for someone as emotional. But Shiny is set in his ways and views and was not willing to change, especially since love didn’t work in his favour during his first marriage. Shiny had married from the heart the first time, but the second time around he changed his strategy, marrying strictly from the head. He had a checklist, and the woman who met his criteria would be the woman he would marry.
But in a modern day Indian marriage, it was not just the woman who needed to adapt in the marriage, but a man too. Shiny had told me that before his marriage, he had presented Shilpa with a list of duties and the things that his family expected of her; Shilpa had agreed to all of his conditions. After his first divorce he wanted to proceed ‘by the book’ (in this case the book was the ancient Saptapadi, the Hindu code for marriage) and that is why he wanted to make sure his second wife would be amenable, which she appeared to be.
The unfortunate truth was that a successful marriage couldn’t be initiated by checking off a list, but Shiny refused to believe that.
♦
One evening Shiny takes me to Haveli, a large mock Punjabi village, complete with colourful dhabas, mud houses and turbaned waiters with impressive moustaches in colourful Punjabi garb. Shiny and I settle down cross-legged on a wooden coir-strung cot and order cups of rich almond milk and gobi paranthas. This place is, or at least was, special to Shiny because it is where his first wedding took place. He tells me that he hardly thinks about his first marriage anymore, and that this is one of the few times he has gone back over that period in his life. It was a love marriage, and the woman was five years older than him and he loved her deeply. Though she was not keen to get married because she didn’t see herself as the ‘marrying type’, he had convinced her to marry him in 2005. The marriage lasted for two years before they mutually agreed to get divorced.
I ask Shiny why his marriage broke up. Shiny shrugs, giving me a resigned look.
‘She was a nice, straightforward, truthful girl. She never wanted to get married, she always wanted to be single. I convinced her to get married.’
‘Why did you try to convince her if you knew she never wanted to be married?’ I ask.
‘If you talk to any Indian girl, I’d say 70 per cent of them never want to get married. But ‘no’ means ‘yes’. It’s not a no no. If I had taken her at face value, we would’v
e never gotten to be boyfriend-girlfriend. Some people say that love is blind. I was really blind and never saw the truth,’ he says.
Shiny was blindly in love. His ex-wife, though, did not want to be married and did it out of a sense of duty. After all, every Indian girl is brought up thinking that marriage is the be-all and end-all of life.
Shiny looks away from me, his voice is cracking just a little bit.
‘She asked for the divorce, and I agreed. I realized there was no point going back to broken relationships. They can never be made okay. It’s like trying to put back broken pieces of glass. It’s just going to cut your hands and it will never come back together in the same shape.’
While Shiny’s first divorce was by mutual consent, his second divorce was contested. This is where the trouble lay. In India, except in cases of divorce by mutual consent, people are not entitled to a divorce because they have been separated. Everything has to be proven in court. A smart divorce strategy must be devised and a petition must be filed in court. The court then prescribes mandatory counselling sessions for the couple, which can go on for years, alongside court hearings. If couples get past this painful stage, then the battle for alimony begins because Indian law has no clear rules laid out and each case is dealt with individually. It can be years before the marriage is finally nullified. According to estimates, there are 55,000 divorce cases pending in courts across the country.242
When Shiny filed for divorce, his wife resisted. Reacting to Shiny’s divorce petition, Shilpa’s father filed a police complaint accusing Shiny of domestic violence against his daughter and another charging Shiny and his entire family with dowry demands. This may seem like the hasty, hot-headed reaction of a madcap father, but the reality is that Shilpa’s father’s reaction is common. As Shiny explained to me, it is the ‘typical way’ for an urban, middle-class Indian family to react. Dowry laws were put into place to protect women and their families against dowry atrocities, but they were often misused. According to Shiny, poor women who really needed the law are not aware of it, and those who use the law are usually educated, urban women ‘exploiting their ex-husbands’. Since a dowry complaint was filed, Shiny and his parents had to prove that they never asked for dowry, as opposed to the other way around. Knowing Shiny and his family, it was impossible that any of Shilpa’s allegations were true.
The more I explored divorce cases, the more I realized how easy it was for women to be at the receiving end, and why they might be compelled to exploit the system. It is still common for Indian men, like Shiny, to live with their parents whose homes, property, and assets remain in their fathers’ name. As maintenance or alimony is judged on the husband’s income tax returns it makes it hard for a woman to demand a fair sum of money for maintenance. Many Indian men use this as a tactic to evade paying maintenance to their wives.
More often than not, says lawyer Shroff-Garg (author of Breaking Up: Your Step-by-step Guide to Getting Divorced), divorce cases end in a wrangle over money. ‘There are never black-and-white cases. It’s all grey. In the end, it’s about buying your freedom. Either you pay money or take money. It’s that simple.’243 Maintenance remains a contentious subject in Indian divorces. In several Western countries, alimony is an obligation ordered by the court to the financially stronger spouse; in India it is not yet an absolute right of the seeker. The awarding of alimony, its amount, and its duration are determined based on the financial position and circumstances of the spouse. Women will let the legal proceedings drag on until they receive a satisfactory amount of money. Not giving a divorce is perhaps the only leverage they have.
Shiny’s situation is not uncommon either. A study conducted by the NGOs Save Indian Family Foundation and My Nation, which looked at four aspects of domestic violence—economic, emotional, physical and sexual—in a sample survey of 1,650 urban men, found that 98 per cent of the respondents had suffered violence in these forms more than once.244 Economic abuse was the most common, but so were nagging, grumbling, taunting, name-calling, refusing food, denying sexual intercourse, and throwing objects. The most serious of all was framing of false charges under the Indian Penal Code, just like Shilpa had done.
In a written testimony as a part of his divorce proceedings, Shiny shared his anguish and anxiety with the judge by presenting evidence of cruelty, the grounds on which he has filed for divorce. Shiny’s frustration is evident in this twenty-page document, in which he shares incidents from his failed marriages. When he gets especially frustrated he writes in capital letters that are bold, and when he gets thoughtful, he puts in multiple ellipses.
Here is an excerpt from his affidavit:
Before my marriage, I told Shilpa that I was a teetotaller. Shilpa told me that she is also almost one but occasionally she takes one or two drinks. I did not have a problem with that. After we got married, I realized that her ‘occasion’ is once every two or three months. Whenever we would go to a good eating-place she would need a drink. One day when we were at home she told me to get a drink (whisky) for her. I said to her, ‘Go and get it yourself, it is in the cupboard.’ My dad has a drink every evening, and all the arrangements are there. She refused to go, because she said she felt embarrassed to make a drink for herself. I felt so disgusted since I don’t drink at all. I thought to myself, what will my father think, and what will the domestic help think about me. With a lot of courage and a straight face, I got a drink for her and thought the ordeal was over, but she sent me again to the whisky station saying, ‘Ise theek karke laao, yeah mazedaar nahi hai’ (Go fix this, there is no fun in this drink). I went all the way, did the horrible job, and prayed to God that no one was watching and darted back to my room. Sir, for a person who doesn’t drink, and whose spouse has an impression in the house that she doesn’t drink too, it’s humiliating to do this service.
Shiny tells me that his lawyer deleted the above incident when the document was shown to the judge. Another incident was used instead.
She used to kick boxes of food articles from our room like an angry footballer, in her fits of insane temperamental rages. Once, she kicked a box of mathis weighing appx 2.0 kgs from our room on the first floor. It landed in the ground floor—a heavy box like that could have hit anyone’s head and could have easily injured that person, or maybe killed that person also.
♦
In the dirty, dusty alleys of New Delhi’s Connaught Place, I circumvent cars, people and animals. I pass a McDonald’s and a Costa Coffee, both of which reek of pesticide. At the law firm, sombre lawyers sit in crowded offices with stacks of papers everywhere, surrounded by enormous law books. Most lawyers’ offices in India have this same aura—dim fluorescent lights; thick, dusty piles of law books and lots of people crammed into one room. I have come to speak with Roopesh Sharma, Shiny’s divorce lawyer, to get the final chapters of Shiny’s story.
In order to give me the right perspective on divorce, Sharma first tells me the story of Manish Dalal’s divorce.
As he entered the venue riding on a small white horse, dressed in his wedding finery, being trailed by his raucous baraat, Manish Dalal knew his life would never be the same again. Unfortunately, instead of walking seven times around the wedding fire to solemnize his marriage he walked and got burned in an entirely different way that fateful night.
Manish was stopped, horse, baraat and all, and told by his to-be-father-in-law that Nisha was refusing to marry him because Manish’s family had demanded dowry and their family was unwilling to meet their demands. Overnight, the demure twenty-one-year-old Nisha Sharma became a national sensation, an anti-dowry heroine, praised for her brave rejection of her evil to-be husband. Famous politicians told the public that she was their daughter; handsome actors declared her their sister. Men queued up at her gate to ask for her hand in marriage. An interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show brought her international fame.
Manish, on the other hand, became the evil face of dowry. He was arrested on what was meant to be his wedding night and thrown into jail. Nisha a
nd her family slapped dowry charges on him and his family claiming that they had asked for 12 lakh in cash and various household items, like a sofa, an AC and a fridge. The case went on for years; Manish and his parents went in and out of jail and the courts. Manish lost his job and was humiliated nationally and internationally. When all seemed to be lost for poor Manish, the case suddenly took a Bollywood-esque turn. Navneet Rai, a former classmate of Nisha’s from engineering college, produced a marriage certificate and photos of what he claimed was their secret marriage ceremony. He claimed to be Nisha’s jilted husband and declared that she had spurned Manish because she wanted to be with him. He demanded the restitution of his conjugal rights. By this time, though, Nisha was famous and being seen as a champion of women’s rights. She was happily married to a third man and denounced the marriage certificate as fake.
Manish’s legal team, bristling with confidence at this unforeseen stroke of luck, questioned how Manish could be charged with demanding dowry if Nisha had been married all along to someone else. Finally, after eleven long years, Manish and his family were acquitted. However, by this time, Nisha was the mother of a few children, nobody was interested in the case and poor Manish continued to be a pariah in the eyes of the few people who remembered him.
The Nisha Sharma case is similar to Shiny’s, and Roopesh Sharma had represented Manish, so Shiny has hired Sharma to represent him.