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

thirty years earlier. It was old, but much larger than the house where she had lived before. And it was close to the large markets of Karol Bagh, where women from all over Delhi came to shop. Manjit’s father had worked in those markets as a vegetable salesman; he was an immigrant who had settled in Delhi after the 1947 partition of the British Empire into India and Pakistan drove him from the border state of Punjab. It was a move that would instill in his offspring, as in millions of others, a feeling that they were refugees in their own land.
    Manjit’s new wife was soon complaining all the time, even though she was not treated as a slave, Manjit said, like most new brides. After Manjit’s mother died, Surinder had to cook only for her husband and two children. His two brothers and their wives kept to themselves upstairs; his sister, Amrita, came by only for visits. And yet his wife became very jealous of his relationship with his sister, even though he was just trying to help Amrita out. She had left her husband, and she desperately needed money. But Surinder hated her husband’s giving cash to his sister. “She wanted to control my brother,” Amrita said. As it was, Manjit was working night and day, trying to make one hundred dollars a month for his own wife and children. He was never unfaithful. “I treated her as nicely as possible,” he said. But still she would get angry. One night when he came home at eleven for dinner, she gave him cold vegetables and bread. When he told her to heat it up, she became furious. What kind of a wife was this? Sometimes after their fights she would go to her uncle’s home. Manjit began to wonder about the two of them. Was it her uncle she wanted? Had there been a relationship before the marriage? He began to think about it all the time.
    In August of 1983 there was another terrible fight. Surinder had been behaving strangely—beating their small daughter and once even threatening to burn the child. But this time, Surinder poured kerosene on herself and said she wanted to commit suicide. “Then she called her uncle,” Manjit said, “and told him that I had poured kerosene on her and was trying to kill her.” Some days later, on August 12, Surinder was at home feeling weak and feverish after donating blood for arelative. Manjit had gone to the hospital to pick her up and had found her there in the relative’s room, whispering in a corner with her uncle. When the two saw Manjit they stopped. “Why did they stop whispering when I got there?” he asked us. This was the proof he needed. He was now almost certain there was something between them. At home that day, his wife was even angrier than usual. Manjit felt he could no longer control her and grew more and more worried that she would try to kill herself. Finally, in desperation, he left the house and went a few doors down to an old family friend. He wanted to ask her what could be done for his wife. It was there that he heard the screams.
    When he reached the hospital with his wife, the doctors wanted to know what had happened. “Whatever I tell you,” he said, “you won’t believe it.”
    I had gone to see Manjit only out of a sense of responsibility, because I wanted to write a fair story for
The Washington Post
. There had been no doubt in my mind that he was guilty, but now I was confused. I assumed Manjit was lying about certain parts of his story, but I knew Surinder had not told the entire truth either. For one thing, she was not now as impoverished as she said; Renuka and I discovered she had recently had a job inspecting clothes at a garment house. I had also never been comfortable with her claim that this was a dowry case, simply because she had been burned nearly four years after her wedding. Bride burnings over dowry usually take place in the first year of marriage, before there are children. It was clear that there were more serious problems in Surinder’s marriage than a lack of wedding gifts. Kanwaljit