May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller Page A

sister, Amrita. The sister had recently come back to live in the house because her own marriage was ending and she needed financial and emotional support. Soon Surinder was certain her husband was sleeping with his own sister as well. Although she may well have been irrational at this point, her suspicions are not necessarily unfounded. In India, psychologists say, affairs with relatives are not unusual. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, who has a middle- and upper-middle-class practice, once told me that of his patients who were having affairs, most were involved with extended family members.
    By August 1983, the tension in the house had become unbearable. During one fight, the husband and his sister had thrown kerosene on Surinder, and she was sure they were going to kill her. At the time, talk of dowry deaths was everywhere. A few months before, a New Delhi judge had caused a sensation in India when he handed down an unprecedented death sentence for a husband, mother-in-law andbrother-in-law charged with the murder of Sudha Goel, a young woman who was nine months pregnant. Neighbors had testified that Sudha Gole’s parents had been unable to meet demands for a refrigerator, motor scooter or cash after the wedding, and that the three defendants had dragged the screaming wife into the garden and set her on fire. In a statement made before she died, Sudha Goel said her mother-in-law had ripped off her jewelry just before lighting the match. (The husband, mother-in-law and brother-in-law were acquitted on appeal.)
    On August 12, 1983, Surinder was at home with her two-year-old daughter and one-year-old son feeling weak and feverish. Her husband and his sister were there too. Around two-thirty in the afternoon another fight erupted as the husband and his sister began beating Surinder. Suddenly her husband grabbed Surinder to hold her still. His sister threw the kerosene, and Surinder fell to the floor. Then her husband went to guard the door as his sister threw the match. Surinder told me later she didn’t remember where it hit or how it ignited. All she recalled was that she ran, flaming, past her husband at the door. “He just let me go on,” she said. “When you’re burning, nobody wants to touch you.” She threw herself into the gutter. On the way to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital she was still conscious. “My husband told me that if I blamed him, he would kill all my uncles,” she said.
    A short time later, Renuka and I went to see Surinder’s husband. He still lived in the house where the burning occurred, a large, rundown, two-story home on a dusty alley closer to the central part of town. The husband, Manjit, turned out to be a slight, sad-eyed Sikh with a turban and a medium-length black beard. Sometimes he was so passive that he seemed uninterested; at other times tears came to his eyes and he asked why his life was destined to turn out as it had. “My faith has been totally broken,” he said. “I just want to die.” His sister, Amrita, was a tiny woman with a little-girl voice and a forceful manner; she often took charge of the conversation. We talked in a dark bedroom that opened onto the central courtyard, where two women in the family squatted on the floor over a lunch of rice and lentils. Surinder’s two children lived there but had been sent away to boarding school, which Manjit claimed he could hardly afford. He was also upset that he had no one to cook for him. He and his sister had been in jail for more than a month before they were released on bail, and when they finally came home, his neighbors told him his children had been eating from the gutters in the streets.
    This was his version of the story:
    The problems, Manjit said, began right after the wedding. “She used to get angry about every little thing,” he said. His new wife had brought no dowry, and yet he had not complained. “We knew she was poor,” he said. He thought she would be happy in the house, the same one he had been born in