The End of Karma Read online

  In Delhi alone, there were 1493 rapes reported to police in the first eleven months of 2013, more than double the number reported in the same period of 2012. Complaints of sexual harassment went up sharply too.

  Nationally, there was already a steady uptick in reported crimes against women. Between 2006 and 2010, the total number of reported crimes against women, including rape, increased by 29.6 percent, according to national crime records.8 That did not necessarily mean that incidents of rape had gone up. It likely signaled that women reported them more often. It’s worth noting that conviction rates for rape remain lower than for other violent crimes.

  All of which is to say, a once hidden problem—particularly in the countryside, where rape has long been a way for upper-caste men to subjugate lower-caste women—was becoming less hidden.

  The December 2012 gang-rape seemed to have emboldened survivors. In June 2013, a thirty-seven-year-old Calcutta woman appeared on television and described how she had been gang-raped over a year ago, and how she had only now felt brave enough to speak about it.

  In August, a photojournalist in Mumbai went to police to report that she was gang-raped by five men at an abandoned industrial building. A receptionist came forward and said she had been assaulted by the same men earlier, but hadn’t filed a report out of shame. (The men in court said they were innocent.) Three months later, a lawyer accused a retired Supreme Court judge of having sexually harassed her when she worked for him as an intern. A journalist accused her boss of assaulting her in a hotel elevator. Equally important, the woman told her friends that very night there was no question she would keep quiet about it. The man she accused was jailed, pending trial.

  My friend the writer and editor Priya Ramani wrote pointedly in the financial paper Mint: “This will be known as the year rapists, sexual molesters, perverts, predators and assorted other Indian creeps realized they can no longer count on that one big assumption that makes them so brazen; Indian women don’t like sharing horror stories.”9

  The Constitution of India, which went into effect in 1950, enshrined equal franchise for men and women. This was an extraordinary edict for a society where women like my grandmother ate only after the men of the family—and then the children—had had their fill. Many women still do.

  Equally extraordinary, since then, India’s lawmakers have passed specific measures designed to redress the marginalization of women in life and politics. The most radical of these was a 1993 constitutional amendment that set aside seats for women in village governance councils. The law required that in every village, one in three council members would have to be a woman. It further stipulated quotas for Dalit women, those considered “untouchable” on the caste ladder and traditionally the most powerless.

  Critics said the quota system was misguided: women sat on these councils in name only, while their husbands and sons remained the real decision makers. This may have been true in certain cases. But women’s participation also brought tangible changes to their communities. Councils that were led by women, showed one study, were more likely to invest public funds in things that women considered more valuable—like building and repairing drinking-water wells.10

  One wonders how federal government funds would be spent if India’s parliament was also required by law to have one-third representation by women. One can keep wondering. A bill to extend the women’s quota to the national legislature has languished for years. Parliament remains a predominantly male province: about 12 percent of the 543 elected members of the lower house are women. (Women’s representation is far higher in many other parliamentary democracies worldwide.)

  The women’s quota in village councils coincided with a series of other events that irreversibly changed women’s lives. The economic reforms that began in 1991 created new private-sector job opportunities, for men and women both, and with it, new social norms. Education was the most obvious example. Illiterate mothers began to send their girls to school, knowing that only an education could improve the girls’ chances of getting a job and also getting a husband with a job.

  Between 2000 and 2010, more women than men became literate, though female literacy overall remains lower than male. By 2013, female enrollment in primary school peaked at close to 100 percent. Women started marrying slightly later in life, though by global standards, they remained among the youngest to marry: on average, around age twenty-one. One government survey, carried out in 2013–2014, found that among women aged twenty to twenty-four, nearly one in three was married before turning eighteen.11

  The opening of the economy created new kinds of jobs. As private airlines sprouted, women could work as pilots as well as flight attendants. They could legally work as bartenders, after the Supreme Court in 2007 overturned a colonial-era law that had prohibited women in the capital, New Delhi, from mixing drinks. Armies of women went to work at call centers. But social norms around women working outside the home were oddly slow to change. While girls’ education soared and the economy grew rapidly, women’s participation in the labor force actually went down. Less than 30 percent of women worked for a living in 2011, placing India near the bottom among 131 countries with available data.12

  When I posted, on Facebook, an essay about how this would hold back India’s economic advance, Varsha quietly clicked “Like.”

  For every story that testified to improvements, there was another that spoke of degradation.

  In 2006, shortly after I had moved to India, dozens of little bones were found at the bottom of a well behind a private clinic near Patiala, a prosperous city in Punjab state. Police said the doctor there had conducted ultrasound tests to determine the sex of the unborn children and had then aborted unwanted females for a fee. The following year female fetuses were discovered in Gurgaon. Stories like this came at a regular clip. A government-appointed committee, in a 2012 report to the prime minister, warned of “a silent demographic disaster in the making.”

  A study published in The Lancet, an international public-health journal, estimated that between 1990 and 2005, up to 12 million female fetuses were aborted. That was the period when ultrasound machines became increasingly accessible, enabling many more parents to learn the sex of the fetus. Sex determination tests are illegal, but this law, like so many others, seems to have been flouted routinely.13

  India has one of the most skewed sex ratios of any country in the world. Among children under the age of fifteen, there are 1.13 boys for every girl. Only China is worse. Thanks to its one-child policy, by 2011, there were 1.17 boys for every girl in the same age cohort. They came to be known in Chinese as “bare branches,” who would eventually have to care for their elderly parents and who would inevitably, one day, find it hard to marry. (For sake of comparison, the male-to-female ratio in the United States is 1.05 boys for every girl.) The numbers tend to be worse in cities, because that is where maternity clinics are more likely to have ultrasound machines.14

  Relatedly, girls are far more likely to be abandoned and put up for adoption. In 2013, there were nearly 3000 girls in the formal adoption system, compared with 1800 boys.15

  A girl’s chances of surviving her fifth birthday are slimmer than a boy’s. That could be because she is not fed as well, or not as likely to be taken to the doctor when she falls sick. By their teenage years, half of all Indian girls are anemic, a condition that makes them feel tired, weak, and sometimes unable to produce enough breast milk for their own babies. Fewer than half of all pregnant women get prenatal care. One in 70 women risks dying in childbirth; by comparison, in Vietnam, which is not nearly as wealthy a country as India, that figure is one in 280.

  One study found recently that the money that a family invests in a pregnant woman falls off noticeably after she bears a son. Apparently she is more valuable if there’s a chance that she is carrying a boy in her womb.16

  I find it hard to be hopeful about whether this attitude will turn around by the time my girl grows up. Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, two academics who study gend
er issues worldwide, conclude that the status of women and girls in India reflects “the profound devaluation of female life.”17

  Scholars are increasingly beginning to wonder whether gender balance also has something to do with gender violence. That is to say, could an unnatural surplus of young men in a given society be a symptom of violence against women—and simultaneously, a cause?

  In China, one study found that as the sex ratio of a province grew more imbalanced, so too was there a measurable increase in violent crime between 1988 and 2004. The authors looked at data from province to province, homing in on the period when the one-child policy was enforced, resulting in a corresponding rise of men in the population. They concluded that where there was a 0.01 increase in the sex ratio, violent crimes and property crimes went up by 3 percent. The suspects were largely men between age sixteen and twenty-five. The authors surmised that “the increasing maleness of the young adult population” offered at least a partial explanation for the rise in overall crime.18

  I am not persuaded that a skewed sex ratio causes more violence against women. A correlation between those two things is not enough to prove that one causes the other.

  Guy Standing, a University of London economist, has coined the term “precariat.” A play on the notion of proletariat, he uses the term to refer to men who are by-products of globalization, “living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities, social protection or protective regulations.”

  There are many of them loping about in my daughter’s India. They find themselves at knife’s edge, without enough land to live on in the countryside and without enough skills to get a good job in the city. What they do have—or they think they have—is just enough power to kick the women and girls around them.

  I find Varsha walking home from school with her friends one afternoon, past an empty field strewn with garbage, then through a gated community, whose guards let the schoolkids through, because it’s a shortcut, then across the rushing river of traffic of the Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road. The sky turns orange-gray, a harbinger of the hot dust that will blow in from the Rajasthan desert, farther west. Then the sky turns purple. Skyscraper lights come on, and construction debris and sand and waste rise and swirl through the air. On days like this, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to shield your face with a dupatta.

  Varsha is now fifteen. She is straight-backed and loud-mouthed and prone to boxing a schoolboy on the ears if she needs to. She is a popular kid, a joker and the one among her friends least afraid to step out and cross the street, braving cars that may or may not stop for a gaggle of schoolgirls with plaited hair and gray salwar-kameez uniforms and overstuffed knapsacks.

  A gaggle of skinny young men, not in school uniforms, are leaning against a fence and making catcalls as Varsha and her friends pass by. The girls don’t even look up. It is so routine. This is why Papa doesn’t want her walking around by herself.

  Varsha signs up for everything that school offers: volleyball, debate team, something called the English Olympiad, Kathak dance class. It means she has less time to help with chores, less time for pressing. It becomes a source of domestic strife. On one occasion, Papa wants her to attend a family wedding; Varsha refuses, because it means missing a full week of school. Another time, Varsha wants to attend a school-run dance competition that would take her out of state; Papa refuses. He races over to the school, parks his auto-rickshaw at the gates, and marches up the stairs to the office to stare down the principal, Raji Nambissan, from across her wide wooden desk. Not in a million years will Varsha go to a dance competition out of state, he says.

  He also tells the principal what happened to his own niece who got too much schooling, went off to college, and fell in love with a boy from another caste. The girl ran away and eloped with him. It caused a scandal in the family.

  This is also when he tells Nambissan that he doesn’t like Varsha growing wings.

  Nambissan, an unflappable woman with nearly three decades of experience in dealing with parents of many varieties, tells me there is little she can do to change the minds of men like Varsha’s father. Education is a double-edged sword for men like him, she says. They want their girls to be educated, but they don’t want their girls to think for themselves. Nambissan takes pains to point out that this applies not just to Varsha’s class of poor people. It is also true of her own more privileged social class.

  “Choop raho ghar-pay. That’s the attitude,” she says. It literally means “Be quiet at home.” Which also means: Do not defy.

  “I call it a civilized way of slavery,” the principal continues. “They’re ready to give exposure to education. But there’s a limit. They don’t want them to argue.”

  Varsha is fifteen when she overhears relatives talk about finding a groom for her. This only stiffens her resolve. She vows to herself that she will score so high on her school exams that Papa will be forced to stave off marriage talk.

  The ones who come to Nambissan’s school are the children of Gurgaon’s worker bees. They are all one generation away from the village. They grow up with their noses pressed against Gurgaon’s high-rise air-conditioned condos, like the one Supriya and her family occupy. They grow up in the one- or two-room flats squeezed in between those high-rises, amid the drunken brawls of their neighbors and the dengue that strikes postmonsoon, and the neon promise of noonday.

  The school eventually raises enough money to move out of the posh kids’ schoolhouse that Supriya’s children go to and into a building of its own, at the end of a narrow road, next to a ramshackle spread of tarp and tin, as though to remind every child, all through the day, of the perils of getting stuck here.

  Nambissan’s students are survivors. One is an orphan who lives with an abusive uncle. Another suffered second-degree burns when a kerosene tank exploded and sent ripples of flames through her narrow lane. Just before the Commonwealth Games began in 2010, police swept through the slums and chased away those without valid identification, which meant that many of Nambissan’s students vanished for a few months.

  For most of her wards, school is a refuge. There is order here, as well as flush toilets and grown-ups who are better fed and better dressed than anyone in their mohallas, and who, for the most part, care about what happens to them.

  Nambissan is not starry eyed. This is what I most like about her.

  She says the school tries its best to arm its students with basic skills to survive in the modern economy—chiefly, the ability to communicate in English. Most of these kids want to graduate from college, but Nambissan knows they will need much more. A college degree is no guarantee of a steady paycheck for most Indians of Varsha’s generation. Nambissan is convinced they will need to learn a marketable trade, which is not part of the formal school curriculum. A few of them, perhaps a handful of the truly gifted kids, will triumph academically, she says. Not many.

  So what about Varsha? I ask.

  Nambissan is blunt. Varsha is a hard worker, she tells me, but she is not intellectually exceptional. She is a leader, but also a hothead, quick to blow a fuse. In the end, Nambissan says, her fate depends on what her father has in store—and how hard she pushes back.

  Nambissan’s school does not nurture idle dreams. So when Varsha first tells her teachers she wants to be a psychologist, as a way to help women like her mother, she is not encouraged. In fact, her teachers discourage her. Too much math, they warn, too much studying. You won’t be able to manage, they say.

  For a while, Varsha wants to be a dancer. “My heart’s dream is to be a dancer” is how she puts it. “I forget that dream. My father won’t allow it.”

  It becomes a pattern. A burst of ambition. A splash of cold water. A new burst of ambition. Kindly adjust. Tamp down your dreams.

  “First Papa said no to college,” she says quietly. “Then my feelings also changed.”

  The policewoman idea is sealed into her brain after she and Papa listen to a speech by on
e of Gurgaon’s assistant police commissioners, a woman who describes growing up in a mud house in a village, studying hard for the police service exam, rising up the ranks. Varsha is charged up by this. She thinks: If she can do it, why can’t I? She looks over at Papa. She sees that he is applauding enthusiastically when the policewoman finishes speaking. He is beaming.

  But when she broaches the idea of taking the Indian Police Service examination, Papa is the opposite of beaming. No way, he tells her. How would he find a husband for her? Imagine. A daughter-in-law packing a pistol! No respectable family would allow that of a bahu.

  * * *

  Varsha and I share a birthday. A Virgo, she is stubborn like me. She has trouble keeping her thoughts to herself. She mouths off when she shouldn’t. She falls in love easily. She despairs sometimes.

  I go to see Varsha on a Tuesday afternoon in winter, a few months before the critical Class 10 exams that will determine whether she can continue her studies and at what kind of school. Her mother is on her haunches, filling the iron with hot coals. She looks up when I ask after Varsha. Her mouth is packed with the blood of a betel nut. “She said she’d be gone only ten minutes for some tuition. But look what time it is. She’s still not back,” she says. She points her chin in the direction of three bundles of clothes that still need pressing.

  If Varsha can imagine another life, I reckon her mother cannot. Santosh is a dhobi’s daughter and a dhobi’s wife. She seems incapable of seeing beyond the piles of clothes that need pressing. Or the child that needs her breast. I have a hard time seeing the world through her eyes. At first, it seems to me that she treats her daughter like a beast of burden. Only later does it occur to me that maybe she isn’t just being mean to Varsha. Maybe she sees it as her duty to teach this girl to make herself useful—to be able to work like a mule. For what good is a girl who can’t work like a mule?