The End of Karma Read online

  Khushboo later tells the police that he was on the girls’ backs all the time. If she or her sister went out with friends, they faced his wrath at home. He yelled at them. He slapped them. Once, according to Khushboo’s written testimony to police, he threatened to kill her.

  The girls can’t take it anymore. One day at the end of May, at the peak of the hot season, in 2010, they run away.

  The lanes of Wazirpur immediately start buzzing with talk. How could these girls dare to run away? If they ran away, who else would run away? Ah, remember that girl who ran away before?

  The memory of Monica’s misdeeds is resurrected. And it circles back to Monica’s brother, Ankit (not to be confused with Ankit, the political activist you met earlier in these pages).2

  The boys of Wazirpur sneer. Perhaps they lean against their motorbikes, as boys do to while away the stifling summer evenings, and cluck their tongues. See, they might say, your sister Monica started this.

  “I was demeaned by my friends,” Ankit later says in his written testimony to police. “I was stressed.”

  Ankit is a Class 9 dropout. He has a motorcycle and no job. His father has plenty of money, earning rent from the grocer who operates out of the ground floor of their property. He is the eldest son, and perhaps when the sneering starts, he begins to see himself as the enforcer of the rules his sister broke.

  Shobha and Khushboo’s brother Mandeep also feels demeaned on the street. “Torture” is how his older brother recalls it.

  Who among the boys first suggests that they avenge their family’s honor? It’s not clear.

  Police suspect that Ankit and Mandeep are egged on by their peers. “Maybe because of these things they were conscious of prestige and what people were saying,” N. S. Bundela, the police official in charge of North West Delhi, tells me.

  I suggest the obvious: “These are boys born and bred in the city.”

  Yes, of course, he says. But they have “village” attitudes, he says.

  Police say it falls on the two boys whose sisters had erred to take action. They recruit friends, among them a Class 7 dropout named Nakul, who lives in the neighborhood and who sometimes sells milk. His family warns him when they hear him talk about the runaway girls. They’re not our daughters, they tell him. Stay out of it.

  Nakul doesn’t listen. On the night of June 20, 2010, according to police, the boys procure a pistol and borrow a car.

  First they lure Shobha into the car, according to the suspects’ written testimonies to the police. They make her sit in the passenger’s seat. Her brother, Mandeep, sits just behind and shoots her in the head. They park the car in front of a local electricity supply office. Police find Shobha’s corpse inside.

  Next, according to the suspects’ testimonies, Ankit calls his brother-in-law, Kuldeep, on the pretext of needing a ride. His cell phone records show Ankit’s is the last call he received.

  Police find the car parked around the corner from the couple’s apartment. Kuldeep’s body is slumped over the steering wheel. Ankit is accused of shooting him in the head at point-blank range.

  Then, police say, they go up to see Monica. She has just made mango juice for Kuldeep, as she often does during mango season, because that’s what he likes to drink when he comes home from work.

  Police find two glasses of mango juice standing, untouched, on the kitchen counter—and her corpse on the floor.

  Ankit is accused of shooting her in the head.

  Police arrest the suspects in a matter of days. They are charged with murder.

  The day of the arrests, television news stations dispatch reporters to Wazirpur to collect vox pop reactions. Several older men appear on camera and praise the killers. It had to be done, they say. The men on camera show no remorse.3

  When Kuldeep’s older brother, Amit, sees them on television, something inside him snaps. These are the men he has grown up with. These are the values he has grown up with too—and now his brother is dead. This is when he resolves to pursue justice for his Kuldeep and Monica’s death. He persuades his parents to cooperate with the authorities. Hold strong, he tells them, do not cave in to pressures from anyone in the neighborhood.

  Amit’s most immediate fear is graft. “We prayed to God for an honest judge,” he says.

  As I write this, five years after the triple murders, none of the accused has been convicted of a crime. They have been in custody since their arrests, pending trial. I have pieced together a chronology of what is alleged to have happened on the day of the murders on the basis of interviews with police, family members, and the suspects’ written testimonies to police. Those testimonies may or may not be allowed in court, depending on whether the defense can show that they were obtained under coercion.

  One of the most widely shared Hindu parables about love and loyalty comes from the epic tale the Ramayana. Ram, the protagonist, is a popular royal, who, as part of an internecine power struggle in the court of Ayodhya, is banished by his father, the king, to the forest. His wife, Sita, and his brother, Lakshman, join him in exile in the wilderness.

  One day, Sita is left in their forest home alone, with strict instructions not to stray. A line is drawn in the dirt, encircling their hut. Do not cross this line, Lakshman tells her, and you will be safe.

  Sita, the good wife, agrees to stay within her bounds. Except that soon she forgets. Perhaps she disobeys—we don’t know for sure. Sita strays. A hungry, wandering Brahmin approaches the hut. She steps across the line to give him food. And just then, the monk changes shape and turns into the demon that he really is. He whisks her away across an ocean to his own kingdom, and proceeds to seduce her. Sita, we learn, is a loyal wife; she rebuffs the demon. She prays that her husband will find her.

  Sita’s abduction paves the way for a long, bloody battle, and eventually her rescue. But her story does not end happily there.

  Ram forces her to prove her purity in a trial by fire, which she does. For a while, their marriage is fine, but Ram is again plagued by suspicions about his wife. He banishes her back to the forest. The Ramayana tells us she eventually melts back into the earth.

  There are many readings of this great epic, and some readers will inevitably dispute mine.

  But no matter how you assess Ram and Sita’s conduct in the Ramayana, theirs is a powerful fable about love and trust, devotion and disobedience. It is also very much about a woman’s place. It is all the more powerful for how popular it remains, how ubiquitous. As a child, I learned about Sita from the comic book version of the Ramayana. My sister, who studied Kathak, the sixteenth-century classical Indian dance form, learned of Sita during her classes: Sita Haran is one of the most popular fables to be dramatized in dance. It is only a matter of time until my daughter learns the story of Sita and her boundaries.

  I never met Kuldeep and Monica. I reconstructed the story of how they fell in love, when they married, and how they were killed from interviews with relatives, neighbors, schoolteachers, and police as well as from the documents the authorities shared with me.

  I was drawn to their story for two reasons. First, like others in their generation, Kuldeep and Monica did not set out to upset the status quo. Survey after survey show that in social terms, young Indians tend to be pretty traditional. Especially when it comes to marriage, they are more likely to defer to their families than defy them. In a 2012 survey, for instance, married women in their twenties said their parents were to some degree involved in their choice of husband; only 5 percent said they had married across caste lines.4

  It is one of the paradoxes of this generation. Noonday’s children push for a more genuine freedom, certainly. But on the whole, they can be very conventional.

  The second thing I found remarkable was that their suspected killers were not illiterate old men living in a medieval village, fuming at the thought of a modern girl acting on her own desire. The suspects included Monica’s own brother, two years her junior, born and raised in the same prospering, fast-modernizing neighborhood of D
elhi. This was not a straightforward clash of old and new, or even old versus young. It was a case of young men in New India defending traditional rules of power—and in so doing, punishing a young woman, also in New India, for stepping across the line.

  Perhaps it was born of confusion. Clearly it came from fury.

  “Accident ho gaya,” said Mandeep’s older brother. “An accident has happened” is how he put it, using the passive voice. He did not want to be named. He did not really want to talk.

  The June 2010 murders of Kuldeep and Monica, in a fast-churning corner of sprawling Delhi, came amid a rash of widely publicized so-called honor killings across north India. The victims were all young heterosexual couples who had chosen each other in contravention of caste diktats. Police said their killers had sought to restore family honor. They were often sanctioned by elders in their communities, in the form of verdicts rendered by extrajudicial all-male tribunals, known as khap panchayats. They brought into sharp relief the impotence of law enforcement officials in the face of these informal authorities, which operated with impunity.

  The Indian Express counted thirty-four reported honor killings in one North Indian state alone, Punjab, in the previous two and a half years leading up to the murder of Kuldeep and Monica, or roughly one each month.

  In one of the most gruesome cases, in a village in the state of Haryana, next to Delhi, a couple was dragged off of a bus even after a local judge had ordered police to keep a watch over them. The young man was tied to the back of a car and dragged along a road until his body was reduced to pulp. The young woman’s corpse was found in a ditch. The people of that village could rattle off several recent examples of honor killings nearby. In one hamlet, I was told, a man used a tractor to run over a daughter who had eloped, then strung her body from a tree so that it would serve as a lesson to others. Khap panchayat leaders sometimes blamed cell phones for encouraging unsanctioned romance. Also Facebook.

  During that season of killings, which were covered widely by the Indian and foreign press, politicians by and large ducked for cover. The local elders who reigned over the khap panchayats could deliver votes at election time. Few lawmakers seemed to want to rein them in.

  Let this be clear: I am not telling you this story of honor killing because I am keen to draw attention to the dreadful things that happen in India. That gives me no pleasure.

  In my own Indian family, most people have chosen whom they married. My parents chose each other, and so did half of their siblings—some of them across caste lines. Some of my cousins, living in India, have had arranged marriages; some have not. The vast majority of my friends in India, gay and straight, have chosen their partners, though my gay friends cannot marry by law, even if they wanted to.

  Across India today, honor killings are relatively rare.

  More often than not, families accept intercaste marriages, rare as they are. For instance, Ankit and Prerna, the political activists who fell in love amid the anticorruption protests in Delhi, also married across caste lines, and also at an Arya Samaj temple, where so many of these defiant unions are consecrated. Neither of their families was thrilled about their decision, and both sides wanted the couple to wait a while before tying the knot. But in the end both families came around. They were not willing to lose their children forever.

  I am telling you the story of Kuldeep and Monica’s murders because they embody both desire and fury. They represent a power struggle, between those who pry open the old rules of blood and sex, and those who violently defend them.

  I tell you their story because I am haunted by it. Kuldeep and Monica loved each other so openly. Their love changed those who loved them, in unexpected ways.

  Honor killings, it seems to me, are part of a continuum of contempt against girls who try to control a piece of their destiny—and the men who collaborate with them. They happen not just in the Indian back of beyond. They happen in places of transition, among young people struggling to figure out who they are and who they can become.

  It complicates our notion of what happens when a traditional society modernizes. Even those who become more prosperous, growing up in a modern, dynamic city, cling to some of the old norms. In so doing, they preserve the old pecking order.

  It is an extreme example of how the most basic freedom is thwarted in my daughter’s India: the freedom to love who you want.

  If they are gay, the law is certainly not on their side.

  One of the sharpest collisions on love came over a British-era law banning homosexuality. A clause in the Indian Penal Code, known as Section 377, made it a criminal offense to engage in “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” It was largely used to harass and humiliate gay men. For this reason, an HIV/AIDS advocacy group, the Delhi-based Naz Foundation, sought to overturn the law. Criminalizing homosexuality impeded AIDS prevention, the group argued in its lawsuit. It also violated a central tenet of the Constitution, it argued—the right to personal liberty.5

  The lawsuit led to an extraordinary judicial ruling in 2009. A Delhi High Court panel of judges rendered a portion of Section 377 unconstitutional, concluding that outlawing consensual sex among adults in private was indeed a violation of the fundamental right to liberty and equality.

  The ruling riled religious conservatives. In an exceptional show of unity, a Christian evangelical group, an Islamic clerical lobby, a Hindu astrologer, and a self-described yogi filed a challenge in the Supreme Court. In the Supreme Court, these petitioners argued that any change in law regarding homosexuality must be made by the legislature, that it was too serious a matter to be handled by a court of law.

  The Supreme Court judges deliberated over what could constitute “carnal” or “unnatural.” acts. They discussed the legal ramifications of a man inserting his penis into the nose of a bullock, as well as a gynecologist inserting a hand into the vagina of a pregnant woman to ascertain the condition of the fetus. One of the Supreme Court judges mused aloud that he had never met a gay person.6

  At the end of 2013, the Supreme Court overruled the lower court decision to overturn Section 377, effectively reinstating the ban on homosexuality. The judges averred that the matter would have to be taken up by the nation’s lawmakers.

  The leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the time cheered the Supreme Court decision, calling homosexuality “unnatural.” Narendra Modi, who was the party’s candidate for prime minister at the time, said nothing about the verdict. I read that as strategic silence; he couldn’t afford to alienate either his socially conservative foot soldiers in the Sangh or the young urban voters who might have been more libertarian.

  The Congress party boss, Sonia Gandhi, said she was disappointed and suggested legislative redress.

  The Aam Aadmi Party made the most explicit overture to the sentiments of a young, urban electorate. Indians who are “born with” or who “choose a different sexual orientation” should not be hounded by the law, the Aam Aadmi statement read. “This not only violates the human rights of such individuals,” it went on to say, “but goes against the liberal values of our Constitution, and the spirit of our times” (my italics).

  India is among seventy-six countries around the world that continue to criminalize consensual same-sex sexual conduct among adults, or have other laws on the books that allow their courts to prosecute gay and lesbian citizens.7 It shares that distinction with countries of the Arab world and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Russia overturned its Soviet-era ban on homosexuality in 1993, but in 2014 a new law banned what it vaguely called “propaganda about nontraditional relationships.”

  A league of seven countries, including Iran and its regional rival, Saudi Arabia, considers same-sex sexual conduct to be punishable by death.

  Gay rights seem to have little to do with a country’s prosperity or even the trappings of modernity. It has to do with the limits of freedom, arguably the ultimate freedom—to choose who you are and who you love.

  In May 2015, Ireland made history, when a majo
rity of Irish voters passed a referendum allowing gay people to marry, signaling defeat for the Catholic Church, which had lobbied vigorously against it.

  That same week, an Indian mom tried to place a matrimonial ad for her son. It read: “Seeking 25–40, Well Placed, Animal-Loving Vegetarian GROOM for my SON (36 5'11") who works with an NGO. Caste No Bar (Though IYER preferred).”8

  The Times of India described it as the first gay matrimonial ad, which its own advertising department had rejected “for legal reasons,” without citing specifics. Homosexuality was illegal, although no provision in the law barred marriage ads for a gay son. Another Bombay paper, called Mid-Day, ended up carrying the ad.

  The woman who placed the ad, Padma Iyer, said that she wanted her son, Harish, to “settle down.”

  On the last Friday of June, the U.S. Supreme Court gave a nod to same-sex marriage, calling it a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. “No longer may this liberty be denied,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote as part of the majority opinion.

  If my parents ever considered setting me up for an arranged marriage, with someone from my caste or my Bengali-speaking Hindu tribe, they never told me. I was not raised to be a good wife. Neither my mother nor father told me I had to learn to cook or iron shirts or stay at home to raise children.

  I was expected to do well in school, to go to a good college (but not too far from home, where they couldn’t keep an eye on me), and get a respectable job (becoming a foreign correspondent wasn’t what they had in mind, certainly not one who would end up in faraway war zones). They assumed I would get married, “be settled,” as Harish Iyer’s mother put it, and inevitably, bear children.

  My own worries were not really about settling down or finding a member of my tribe. I belong to a generation of extremely privileged women who can plan our destinies—or at least so I thought. I could choose my own career—it wasn’t prescribed by my caste, though clearly I enjoyed a legacy of caste privileges, not least the right to learn. I could choose my lovers. I could choose whether and when to have children. The women’s movement assured that women of my generation had access to contraception—and crucially to safe, legal abortions starting in 1973 (a full two years after India enshrined the right to abortion).