The End of Karma Read online

  My own worries were about how to make it as a journalist, how to write about the world on my own terms.

  For much of my twenties, I worried about whether I was responsible enough to raise a child, whether I had money enough to raise a child, whether the man I was with would be an asshole or a decent father. I worried whether a child would pinch my hard-won freedom. In my thirties, I worried that I would have to pay the mommy fine at work—that is to say, get paid less and promoted less often if I bore children. I started collecting information about how to adopt a child from India; I discovered the file folder many years later in a storage box.

  At the time, I worried a lot, about a lot of things. I wanted no one to think that I was less able, less serious, less ready to hit the road and chase any story that was asked of me. Also, I loved my freedom.

  It was never the right time to bear a child. I deferred. I never felt entitled.

  Instead, I wrote about children. I never really intended to. I was just drawn to their stories. In Manhattan, I wrote about mothers and fathers who marched into a courtroom and signed over their troubled teenagers to the state. In Iraq, I wrote about teenaged girls whose lives were turned upside down after the U.S. invasion. In Congo, I wrote about a boy whose parents were dead and whose legs had been chewed up by shrapnel. I still remember his name. Jean de Dieu. John of God. I stood with him in front of a makeshift hospital on the day members of the United Nations Security Council came to visit. I wrote in The New York Times, “He especially liked watching the French soldiers who led the way, standing stiff in their jeeps with stylish sunglasses and menacing machine guns. Watching them, he said, took away his worries for a little while.”9

  For a moment I thought about taking Jean de Dieu home. It was an absurd idea. At the time, I traveled on average three weeks out of every month, covering godless wars like his. When I met him, I was sleeping in an abandoned convent around the corner from his hospital. The convent was deserted, except for a dozen journalists and an assortment of children who washed our clothes, swept our floor, and fetched bananas and soap from the market. “One dollar,” they demanded for every chore I assigned.

  It was never the right time. I never felt entitled.

  By the time I chose a husband, I was already in my midthirties. I knew that my reproductive years were limited. But it still wasn’t the right time. I was the first Indian-American in the bureau chief’s job in New Delhi. I wanted no one to think I didn’t take it seriously. So again, I deferred. Again, I wrote about children. The boy who blew out his ear in a Maoist guerrilla camp; the malnourished babies who resembled monkeys; a boy orphaned by the tsunami in Sri Lanka. (I wrote about him in the Times: “Baby No. 81’s awful burden is not in being unwanted, but in being wanted too much.”)

  It’s possible that the urge to be a mother was made more acute by living in India. A woman without a child is an oddity, a confounding creature and also everyone’s business.

  A pedicurist might look up at you in casual conversation and say, “Madam, no children? Why?”

  The shopkeeper might probe casually. “Is it Sir who has the problem or you?”

  The gynecologist might shout across the packed waiting room with your chart in her hands: “Still ovulating, no?”

  By the time my India assignment was coming to an end, so were the excuses to defer. By this time I was forty. My husband was a year older. We signed up to adopt. In October 2009, we were given the most remarkable gift: a headstrong little girl whom we brought home from an orphanage; she was eighteen months old.

  As my friend from Bombay reminds me, sometimes you have to accept your destiny. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank my lucky stars.

  The only grace that Kuldeep’s father, Ajit, could see in the murder of his son and daughter-in-law—he referred to them once as “my children”—was that they were both gone. “If only one of them had been killed, the other would go mad,” Ajit said.

  The killings changed Kuldeep’s family in ways that they could barely imagine at the time. They braced themselves for the consequences of a trial. A police officer was assigned to keep watch over them, in case the families of the accused tried to intimidate them—or do something worse—for cooperating with the prosecution.

  The first time I went to visit the family, a few days after the murders, what caught my eye was a framed photo of Monica and Kuldeep hanging on the wall. It was taken at a studio shortly after they married. And in it, they posed shoulder to shoulder. His blue shirt matched her dupatta. Their eyes were on me this time.

  Kuldeep’s killing had the biggest impact on his brother, Amit—not least because he had just become a father for the first time.

  It wasn’t only for his brother’s sake that Amit said he needed justice. It was also for his daughter. She was born just a month before the murders. Kuldeep had chosen her name—Harika—after scouring the Internet.

  Fatherhood changed Amit. He began to question many of the rules he grew up with, including the ones on love and marriage. He became convinced that these rules would have to disappear in the world his daughter would inherit—and he seemed to know exactly when.

  Arranged marriage, he predicted, would be history in five years. Caste, he said, would vanish in ten, maximum fifteen years. His daughter would live in a different kind of country. “Tradition has changed. The new generation wants to live the way they are,” he said.

  It was hard not to be moved by Amit’s convictions. Becoming Harika’s father, he said, had changed his perspective. He was seeing the traditions he had grown up with through her eyes. And he didn’t like all of what he saw.

  I asked him if he imagined an arranged marriage for his daughter. Amit offered a bashful smile. Ideally, he said, he would like to find a good husband for her—but it would be fine with him if she chose for herself.

  By the time Harika was two and a half, Amit’s principal obsession was to find a good school for her. “I dream she becomes a big personality of the nation,” he said. “An icon. In any field. It’s her life.”

  By then, Harika was already ruling the household. This afternoon, she ran circles around her father, as we sat in the one air-conditioned room in the house. He on the bed, me on a plastic chair rolled out for guests. Harika wanted her father’s full attention. She demanded that he play with her. She stuffed cookies into her mouth. Amit’s wife, Reshu, was busy in the kitchen. She was pregnant with their second child.

  I asked Amit whether he wanted a boy or a girl next. He insisted that he did not care one bit. He said that he would not subject his wife to an ultrasound to check the sex of the fetus. And anyway, after this child, there would be no more. Two were enough. “In the present day, I don’t feel there’s a difference between a son and a daughter,” he said gamely.

  His wife had a different perspective. Reshu said that her father-in-law had made it clear he wanted a male heir. And so this is what she prayed for too.

  You know how some lovers are. They think there’s no one else on earth. They whisper to each other on the phone, as if no one’s listening. They glow from head to toe and pretend like no one notices. They look at each other and forget there is such a thing as death.

  Kuldeep and Monica were lovers like that. Reshu was struck by their intensity. They couldn’t bear to be without each other. If Monica went to her mother’s house for a puja, she would soon call and ask him to come and join her. Once, when Monica broke a nail, Kuldeep rushed home from work to comfort her. Who ever heard of such a thing? Reshu giggled at the memory.

  Together, they could look like movie stars. Stylish. Going places. Happier than they were supposed to be.

  In Reshu’s eyes, Monica was a modern girl. She wore lipstick even when she was just at home. She had a way of hiking her sunglasses above her head like a celebrity. She wore jeans and capris—but also, like a good wife, a mangalsutra around her neck, to let the world know she belonged to someone. Monica had once wanted to teach in a preschool, but Kuldeep didn’t like that idea. So sh
e didn’t push it. She stayed at home.

  Reshu and Monica spoke to each other on the phone every day. What are you cooking? Reshu would ask. Why don’t you trim your hair? Monica would suggest. Don’t wear so many bangles. Be a little modern, which Reshu admits she is not. Reshu doesn’t even walk to the market by herself. If she needs something, she asks a neighbor to walk to the store with her, usually an older woman. Or her husband takes her where she wants to go.

  I asked Reshu about love marriage. She thought about it for a second. She said she considered her own marriage to be sort of a love marriage. The families arranged the union. But she was allowed to speak to Amit on the phone after the elders had decided on the match. Then, she said, she fell in love.

  In January 2013, Reshu gave birth to their second child. Amit sent me an email. “God has blessed me with a baby boy,” he wrote.

  I went to Monica’s family house twice. The first time, right after the killings, in the summer of 2010; no one answered the door, though I could hear voices inside. The second time, two and a half years later, I was greeted by Monica’s youngest brother, nicknamed Shanky, who was lolling around at home at three in the afternoon. He was a student at a spiffy private school nearby. His teacher described him as restless, a boy who was uninterested in class, disruptive, often a bully who sought to be the center of attention.

  Shanky let me into their home. He wasn’t interested in talking. I can’t say I blamed him. It was he who discovered her body on the night of her murder, lying in a pool of blood. His older brother was in jail for her murder. The family was ruined.

  As for the other two suspects. I picked up few details about their lives. Both of them had attended school, though neither had distinguished himself academically. Neither had a full-time job. Their families owned property. They could afford to eat well, drink well. They could buy jeans, cell phones, and motorcycles of their own. They didn’t have to eke out a living on the fields as their grandfathers had once. They didn’t have to break their backs on a factory floor like their tenants did. Or drive auto-rickshaws. Or mop floors. They didn’t even have to roll chapatis: that was their mothers’ work, their sisters’ work.

  They lived comfortably by Wazirpur standards. They lived by Wazirpur rules too. They saw themselves as the guardians of Wazirpur’s rules, when it came to their sisters at least, when their aspirations became too much.

  Five years after the killings, they were still in jail, pending trial. Amit wanted them to hang.

  Amit considered moving out of Wazirpur once the verdict was finally delivered. He feared there could be trouble if the boys were convicted.

  But moving would not be easy. Delhi had become a very expensive city. Anyway, Wazirpur was home. For generations the family had been on this land. Would it be good to be here when Harika would come of age? Amit wasn’t sure.

  “The mind-set of this village is very old,” he said.

  CURSE

  A Father’s Fears,

  a Daughter’s Dreams

  Saturday night, suburban Gurgaon. The sky turns from blue to black, the burnt-toast smell of fireworks blows across the ravine, and tall, broad-shouldered Varsha hauls a hot-coal iron over the shimmering finery of others.

  Quietly, quickly, she presses the wrinkles out of a brushed pink chiffon salwar-kameez, another the color of nimboo-pani, followed by three button-down white dress shirts. Her cell phone trills. “Yes, didi. It’s almost ready. Send your driver in ten minutes.”

  Didi is a customer with a wedding to attend, perhaps several, since it is wedding season, and many didis around town have many weddings to attend. Firecrackers begin to boom-snap in the distance. They will go on past midnight. It is Varsha’s job to make sure didis don’t show up to their parties all rumpled.

  And so she presses their clothes, places them on hangers, one after the other, futt-a-futt, racing against the clock. Left hand on cloth, right hand on iron, she removes every crease, every wrinkle. If only she could press away her worries this way, I think.

  Varsha is seventeen, every bit the dreamer, like the IIT-striving Anupam. She too is born to a family of modest means. She too wants to rise. The difference is that Varsha is a girl, and she doesn’t have a mother like his Sudha, willing to move mountains for her.

  And so Varsha tries to move mountains herself. She aspires to go to college and to one day be financially independent. She dreams of being a cop, gold stars on her shoulders, capable of protecting herself from the louts out there who harass and abuse girls. This conviction becomes all the more urgent after her country is roiled by the gang-rape of a young woman in late 2012.

  Varsha finds beauty in Kathak. For a while, she fantasizes about learning to play guitar. In her head, day and night, she hears a hot, impatient voice: I am not bound by my past. I make me.

  She is one among many.

  Varsha’s ambitions alternately bemuse her father and make him sick with worry. There is no question of her becoming a cop, as far as he is concerned. By the time she is twenty, he intends to find her a husband—from a good family, of course from the same caste, with a capacity to earn and protect his child. If the in-laws allow, she can work. Kathak lessons are out of the question. Likewise, guitar. It will not improve her marriage prospects.

  Varsha regards her papa as her ally, but he is also her obstacle. He loves her but he also sabotages her. He too wants her to break free of her past—but not too much. She keeps pushing the bounds, and he has to figure out how far to let her go.

  Varsha is born to a community of dhobis, whose ritual occupation is to clean other people’s dirty clothes. The advent of washing machines has tweaked the caste norms. Dhobis have become press-wallahs. They take rumpled piles of machine-washed clothes, press them, fold them, and return them to their owners.

  Varsha’s father, Madan Mohan, is a pioneer in Gurgaon. He moves to the new city in 1998. Varsha is a baby then, and Gurgaon is too. The very first suburban villas come up. A smattering of gated communities are under construction.

  In the pressing business, location is everything. And being first in this emerging suburb gives Madan Mohan a chance to corner the market early. He establishes a press stand, which is no more than a flat piece of tin held up by four sturdy bamboo trunks. Under the tin roof stands a cement platform with a smooth piece of marble on top, courtesy of Varsha’s uncle, who has moved up the ladder from the dhobi line and into construction. The family erects their press stand at the intersection of two dead-end streets, on the edge of a ravine of neem and acacia. In those early days, you can see straight across the valley all the way to sunset. Antelopes slink out of the bush to explore. Varsha is just learning to walk.

  Soon, all around the press stand, villas and high-rises spring up—and with them come customers with piles of cottons and silks to be pressed. Varsha’s parents work the press stand in the early days. As soon as she can find her way around the neighborhood, Varsha starts going house to house to pick up and deliver. When her sisters learn to walk, she takes them along on her rounds. The girls become a fixture on these blocks. They march up and down the streets with bundles on their heads—tidy, warm stacks, neatly contained in old bedsheets: button-down shirts, linen trousers, salwars, saris. Sometimes, men even send old chaddis to be pressed. Varsha giggles at the thought that a man would want hot, pressed underwear.

  Varsha grows up in the press stand. She learns how to load coal into the heavy iron. She learns how to haul it across cloth. Once Papa accidentally brushes a hot iron against her hand. It leaves a permanent black scar.

  In time, her father gets a gig washing towels for a neighborhood beauty parlor. He buys a secondhand washing machine. He props it up on a pair of bricks behind the press stand, and plugs it into a jerry-rigged power cord that looks like it bursts out of the bush, until city authorities get wind of it and crack down. They accuse him of encroaching on public land, eventually letting him continue to press clothes, but snipping the water and electricity connections. The washing machine ha
s to be moved into the family’s tiny two-room apartment. Varsha has to wash the salon towels at home. Her sisters have to spread them out on an empty field to dry—and guard against pooping crows.

  By the time Varsha is three, Papa saves up enough money to diversify the family business. He buys an auto-rickshaw, packing as many passengers into the puttering three-wheeler as he can. A few years later, he buys a second, which he rents out to a driver who hasn’t yet saved up enough to buy his own. Gurgaon’s population is burgeoning by this time, there are hardly any public buses, and auto-rickshaws are in high demand. The auto business provides the family a solid, steady income, but not enough to discard the pressing business altogether, which Varsha’s mother runs. Each daughter pitches in. I never see Varsha’s brother, Badal, being put to work.

  Madan Mohan is sure of one thing about the dhobi business. He wants none of his children to inherit it. Nor does he want his daughters to marry into it. A dhobi’s wife must work all day, standing over a hot iron, which means that by the time she gets home, she is too tired to do much housework. A woman is better off staying in the house, in his view, looking after the children. And anyway, a dhobi’s work is neither easy nor valued. You work outside all day—in the heat, in the rain, in the cold. And at the end of it, he says, a greedy developer can come and toss you out.

  When Varsha is six, he finds a school for her. It is ideal for his purposes. It is nearby. It costs nothing. And classes are held in afternoons, which means Varsha can help her mother in the mornings and then go to school.