The End of Karma Read online

  What a boon it turns out to be for Varsha. The school is run by a charity. And the reason it holds classes in the afternoons is that it borrows space from one of the posh private schools serving Gurgaon’s privileged—or what Varsha will one day call “the elite sections of society,” including, a few years later, Supriya’s sheltered daughter. In the morning come the children of bankers and ad executives. In the afternoon stream in the children of dhobis and drivers. The school is blessed with all the things that the neighborhood government-run school lacks: tables and chairs, educational posters on the walls, teachers who show up. Classes are conducted in English.

  Varsha loves it.

  She absorbs everything the school offers: math, songs, history. And then she runs back to the press stand to help Mummy.

  Shubha, one of the first homeowners on the block, remembers seeing Varsha march up and down these streets, one hand balancing a bundle of clothes on her head, the other gripping her little sister’s wrist. She must have been seven at the time.

  Shubha observes her closely. The girl is unusual. No wallflower, this one. Quite the opposite. She is inquisitive and impatient, even pushy at times. When Varsha brings her stacks of pressed clothes, Shubha lets her linger in her house and read books from her own library. Soon, Varsha is barging through her gates and demanding help with homework. Eventually, she is allowed to settle herself in front of the family computer. By the time Varsha is in Class 9, she has enlisted Shubha’s entire family into service. The daughter helps with English, the son tutors her in physics. I am just getting to know Varsha around this time, and Shubha warns me: Varsha can be in your face, she says, not impolite exactly, just unrestrained. Shubha is struck by her intensity.

  “My own children,” Shubha says, “don’t have the aspiration that she has.”

  Fire in the belly is what I call it. Like Anupam. Except that Anupam had his mother’s prayers to float on. And Varsha—she has her mother’s demons to contend with.

  What exactly her mother, Santosh, suffers from is not quite clear. Its first signs emerge after the birth of Varsha’s sister, Neetu, two years younger. Mummy screams. Mummy doesn’t get out of bed. She does not breast-feed. There are other times of trouble that Varsha recalls. Mummy wakes up screaming at night, or she stays in bed for days at a time. Whatever ails her, it is Varsha who learns that Papa needs her help to hold the family together. Childhood vanishes as quickly as it begins.

  Varsha is in Class 6 when Mummy has another episode, which costs her four weeks of school. In Class 9, Papa lands in hospital with dengue fever; Varsha misses her year-end exams. Where she lives, there are dirty puddles in the streets, and they are lush, hot vats of mosquitoes and disease. Later that same year, Varsha herself comes down with chikungunya. Another three weeks of school gone. Many girls would drop out; me too if I were in her shoes. Varsha does not. School is her refuge. It is where she can prove her mettle. It is where she finds beauty, in song and dance and poetry. School is to be her exit ticket from the press stand.

  Papa agrees to let her finish high school, but mainly to improve her marriage prospects. He knows only louts will marry a girl without a high school degree nowadays.

  By the time she is fourteen, which is when I first meet her, in the winter of 2010, she and her mother do most of the pressing. Her younger sisters, Neetu and Megha, pick up and deliver. Badal, the first son in the family, born after three daughters, mostly plays. The baby suckles at his mummy’s breast.

  Varsha juggles the pressing among her many other obligations. It falls on her to roll chapatis every evening, dozens of them, one after the other—and so many do they all eat, her family of seven, that by the time she is done, she has little energy left for homework. She worries about exams. She worries about the useless government school where Badal and Megha are enrolled. She worries about a useless boy she likes, who has no ambition to speak of, but whom she talks to quietly on her cell phone every night. She worries that if she keeps on with it, there will be terrible consequences. “Papa will kill me,” she says.

  Varsha’s father takes his responsibilities seriously. He tries to protect her from harm. At the same time, he is the chief enforcer of the very traditions that circumscribe her dreams. He keeps putting up fences around her. He keeps stopping her from becoming who she can be.

  “I have been pressing clothes all my life,” he says once. “The main thing I want for my children is that they do something better.”

  It is a bland answer to a bland question about his hopes for Varsha, but it fills Varsha’s eyes with tears to hear her father speak this way. She turns around and buries her head on his shoulder, which catches him by surprise. He awkwardly pats her on the back.

  He is pleased with her progress at school, but not always. He worries she is becoming too independent. “She is growing wings,” he once complains to her school principal. “She’s talking back.”

  Varsha pushes the limits, finds herself pushed back, pushes some more. She is a child in an impossible situation. She has gulped the Kool-Aid of aspirational India. Deep inside, she believes she can make something of herself. She is convinced school is her best exit strategy. And so she has risen to all its demands: studied, scored well on the critical exams, become captain of the girls volleyball team. She has risen to the demands of family too: hung towels to dry, helped with dinner, made sure her siblings do their homework, made sure Mummy takes her medicines, and smoothed out crease after crease after crease. Not a child and still a child.

  I get Varsha. She is like so many girls I have known. Obedient and dutiful, we keep our heads down and do as we’re told. We mostly follow the rules, but we dream of escape. Despair catches us when we least expect it, and we wonder why.

  Violence against girls seems to preoccupy Varsha’s papa. He hears terrifying stories about what happens to girls who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. He tells me about a barber’s daughter, no more than five years old, who had gone to temple for a free meal, only to be abducted by a man, raped, and dumped at a traffic circle nearby. Every time he drives by that traffic circle, and usually it is several times a day, it makes him shudder to think of a girl raped and dumped like that.

  He is exceptionally protective. He doesn’t let Varsha walk home from the press stand after dark. Even in the middle of the afternoon, when Varsha gets out of school, he doesn’t let her go anywhere—neither to a friend’s house, nor to a neighborhood study hall. Nowhere but straight to the press stand. He demands that she call him as soon as she gets there, and that better be by 2:20 P.M., which is exactly how long it takes her to walk from school. The streets are not safe, he says. They are especially not safe for Varsha, who is by now tall and curvy, as full of adventure and desire as only a teenaged girl can be.

  Varsha grows into a young woman at a time when the safety of women and girls takes center stage in the public life of her country. It fills her father with foreboding, and he tries to rein her in even more. And it makes her all the more determined to become a cop.

  It suits her personality, she tells me. “I’m like a boy at school,” she says, by which she means that unlike other girls, she never asks boys to help her, say, lift a heavy chair in the classroom. She is usually the one helping others. “I’m independent. I can do my work. My nickname at school is ‘Proactive.’ ”

  It’s true. She’s bossy—in a really good way. A girl born to more privilege might be described as a leader. Fearless and tough.

  Varsha was sixteen when a young woman, just a few years older, was gang-raped not far from Varsha’s home, on the southern edge of Delhi. The woman was not so different from Varsha: ambitious, smart, hardworking, studying to be a physiotherapist, and poised to leap from a life of working-with-hands to working-with-head.

  It happened on December 16, 2012, when the city shivered from a cold spell and the smell of coal fires hung low in the night air. The woman was home from college for the holidays that Sunday. She had met a friend, a young man who worked as an IT spec
ialist. They had gone to the mall, to see a movie that everyone was talking about, Life of Pi. On the way home, she was assaulted by five men, plus a juvenile, who had been joyriding all night on a private bus. They jammed a steel rod inside her, which perforated her intestines. They beat her male friend. They threw them both on the road, naked.

  I was in Delhi the morning that the news of the gang-rape broke. I learned of it when a friend with whom I was staying burst into the guest room with the day’s papers. “Gang-rape nation,” she spat. She was furious. She insisted that I not raise my daughter in India.

  The news uncorked grief and rage across the country. Every day came a new revelation that infuriated people even more. It was revealed that the woman’s assailants had earlier that evening robbed and assaulted a day laborer, dumped him on the side of a road too, and assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that he wouldn’t have bothered to file a police complaint. In news reports, it emerged that the couple had languished on the side of a busy road for close to an hour that night before police came, and even after they came, police debated for a while about which police district was responsible for handling the investigation. The woman bled.

  Two nights after the gang-rape, as I was getting ready to fly home to the United States, four of my friends gathered for a meal. We couldn’t talk about anything else. It seemed no one could. My friends, all Indian, ranged in age from their thirties to their fifties. They were all women who had been raised to think of themselves as no less than men. They were all smart, kind, funny, and accomplished in their fields—precisely the women I wanted my daughter to grow up around.

  Each of them had a story of degradation.

  The oldest among them, a lawyer in her early fifties, recalled that some years ago, someone kept scrawling lewd messages on her car window while it was parked in the basement garage of her office building in the commercial center of Delhi. It rattled her. It took her weeks to get to the bottom of it, only to discover that it had been the handiwork of the parking attendant.

  “Just the idea of a woman driving to work was too much for him,” my friend surmised. It left her so freaked out that for a while she was afraid of going down to the parking lot by herself late at night. She was compelled to ask a male colleague to walk with her. This humiliated her doubly.

  The youngest among them, a lawyer, recalled sitting in a Delhi courtroom, listening to the case of a woman who had eloped with her boyfriend. The girl’s parents, who were present, had accused the boyfriend of having kidnapped their daughter; and now they were willing to drop the charges and accept the marriage. The judge was no naïf. “If your daughter comes to any harm,” the judge warned them, “you will be punished.” It was a reference to what had happened to countless girls who had married against the wishes of their families: they were killed, by their own families.

  This woman’s brother, barely a man himself, leaned over to their mother and said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Having a girl is your punishment.”

  I thought of Monica, across town in Wazirpur, and her brother, charged with her murder.

  The woman on the bus lived long enough to tell her entire story to the police. Two weeks later, she suffered massive organ failure and died. By then, protests had broken out in city after city. Day after day, women and men, most of them young, braved the cold to come out into the streets of Delhi and sometimes also brave the water cannons of riot police. “Azaadi,” they chanted, which is the word for “freedom” in Hindi. “Freedom at day. Freedom at night.” The rape and its aftermath were covered widely in the Indian and international media. I have pieced together her story from those news reports.

  Certainly, there had been other widely publicized sexual assaults before.1

  Still, the December 2012 gang-rape resonated widely because the woman on the bus was so much like so many of her generation—the very portrait of aspiration. She was raised in a working-class warren in Delhi. Her father worked as a baggage handler at the airport. In newspaper accounts, neighbors described her as a studious child, the family’s hope, the one who was on her way to getting out of the ghetto and making something of herself. Her parents believed in her. They sold a patch of land back in their village to pay her college fees. One of her college professors described her as “punctual and hardworking.” I made a note of this. I thought about Varsha.

  It wasn’t just the woman on the bus who was emblematic of her generation. So too were her rapists. They lived in a tin-roof ghetto in the center of Delhi, encircled by five-star hotels. They were mostly in their twenties. They had all come from the countryside for a better life in the city. They were all uneducated and marginally employed. The man who drove the bus drove that same bus to ferry children to and from school. His brother, who was a co-conspirator, sometimes drove a taxi. With them was a fruit seller, a young man who worked part-time at a local gym, and a seventeen-year-old who somehow made ends meet by washing dishes at roadside lunch counters. “There was nothing very extraordinary about them,” The Guardian pointed out in a richly reported portrait of these men.2

  Police arrested the six almost immediately. There were angry calls for them to be hanged. One was found dead in a Delhi jail cell. Four were sentenced to death; they are appealing. The juvenile among them was sentenced to a maximum jail term of three years.

  The protests that sprang from the rape seem to catch politicians completely off guard. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the father of three accomplished daughters, didn’t speak out for the first several days, nor did the head of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi. The depth of outrage, especially among the young, seemed lost on them.

  Several other politicians, when they did speak out, showed themselves to be woefully out of touch with the sentiments of a generation. One member of parliament, who was also the son of the Indian president, said on national television that the women protesting did not appear to be young but rather “dented and painted,” which is a term used to describe old cars that are patched up with copious coats of paint.

  A politician in Rajasthan, where Varsha’s people are from, proposed that skirts be outlawed as part of school uniforms.

  A Hindu religious leader suggested that the victim was to blame too, because she didn’t sufficiently implore her attackers to stop. Penetration, he asserted, requires the actions of two individuals. “Can one hand clap? I don’t think so,” he was quoted as saying.

  With public anger boiling, the government appointed a committee of retired jurists to recommend how to address violence against women. The committee produced a remarkable report. It called out political and religious leaders for “gender bias”; it faulted police and courts for failing to protect women from harassment and assault; and it recommended overhauling laws dealing with rape and sexual harassment.

  It went on to remind India’s leaders of the promise made at independence and listed all the ways in which women had been cheated, concluding bluntly: “de facto equality guaranteed by the Constitution has not become a reality for them.”

  The report was released in January 2013, on the eve of Republic Day, as India marked the birth of its constitution. In the face of persistent protests, the parliament quickly passed a batch of new laws to stiffen penalties for assaults against women.

  The protests drew attention to campaigns by women’s groups to make Indian cities safer by doing simple things: installing better streetlights near bus stops and subway entrances, repairing sidewalks, making sure public toilets are clean. And the protesters called for women cops—many, many more women cops.3

  The streets of Delhi, the country’s capital, are notoriously unfriendly for women. A 2010 study by an advocacy group called Jagori found that two out of three women in New Delhi said they were subjected to sexual harassment between two and five times during the past year.4 Surveys of men’s attitudes were equally revealing. For instance, a poll conducted in late 2012 by the Hindustan Times found that half of all Indian men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five said a wom
an in a short skirt was inviting trouble.5

  Varsha’s father seemed to have a good read on those sentiments. By the time she was seventeen, he did not like her wearing a skirt as part of her school uniform.

  Ever since the 2012 gang-rape, I have been asked repeatedly: Are women more likely to be raped in India than in other countries around the world?

  No. There is no data to suggest that’s the case. It is pretty much impossible to get sound data on the incidence of rape and other forms of violence against women—in India and in many, many other countries. Stigma runs high. Reporting remains low. Police and prosecutors can be ignorant or insensitive or both.

  What we do know is that the reported rates of violence against women in India roughly mirror the rates of violence that women face worldwide. The World Health Organization, which looked at survey data from around the world, found that roughly one in three women—35 percent—said that in their lifetimes, they had experienced “intimate partner violence and/or non-partner sexual violence.” One in ten girls under the age of eighteen was forced to have sex, a separate study found.6

  The corollary to this question, which rightly rankles defenders of Indian women’s rights, is this: Is there something about Indian culture or the mind-set of its men that makes them so brutal? So much attention has the December 2012 gang-rape drawn to India that Kavita Krishnan, a prominent feminist activist, says she has started to school foreigners on how not to talk about rape in India.7

  What is true about rape in India is also true about rape elsewhere. First, rape survivors are not always keen to file a crime report. And second, their assaulters are usually men they know—friends, neighbors, or family members.

  What is notable about India is that rape in particular—and violence against women in general—has seized the public imagination like never before. Girls and women are refusing to keep quiet about it anymore. They are pouring into the streets to protest, sometimes braving water cannons. And many more of them are filing police reports.