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Above: Parineeta, as a new bride. Below: after the burning.

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In India, The Dangerous Meeting Of Women And Fire

JESSE PESTA & PREETIKA RANA, The Wall Street Journal

 

 

 





Jawan, Uttar Pradesh, India

Parineeta screamed as fire engulfed her kerosene-soaked leggings and long, green blouse.

“I saw her spinning in the courtyard,” says Zahid Khan, a neighbor. “The flames rose higher and higher.” The blaze burned Parineeta, a petite, 26-year-old mother of two, over some 40% of her body, including her legs, torso and the left side of her face.

Even as India rushes toward modernity, the country still sees unusually large numbers of women killed or injured by fire as a result of family conflict, a problem with deep cultural roots.

Sometimes, relatives set the fire as punishment for perceived affronts to family honor or in quarrels over dowry gifts in marriage deals. According to government figures, one woman dies roughly once an hour in a dowry dispute. In other cases, women burn themselves in desperation to escape abuse.

Fires like these offer a grim measure of the strains on Indian society as patriarchal traditions collide with changing ideas about a woman’s place in the world.

The phenomenon spans generations. In fact, Parineeta isn’t the first woman to burn in the pastel home where she lived. Twenty years earlier, a young woman burned to death within the same walls -- a sister-in-law Parineeta never knew.

Parineeta, who uses a single name, says that in January 2014, her sister-in-law doused her with kerosene, then lit a match, culminating years of struggle with her husband’s family, who wanted her to live a traditional, cloistered life, something she resisted.

They barred her from working in her friend’s beauty salon, a job she calls “my lifeline.” And they didn’t like that she had given birth to two girls.

“When women bear daughters, and not sons, this is what’s done to us,” she says.

Parineeta’s sister-in-law and father-in-law have been charged with attempted murder. They say they are innocent.

Parineeta’s husband, Sudhir Kumar, agrees. “She set herself on fire,” he says.

The Wall Street Journal spent months examining Parineeta’s case and interviewing dozens of people, including all six witnesses to her fire. Their accounts clash in fundamental ways, yet a powerful reality unites them: In rural India, rigid social rules can turn familiar and seemingly solvable family questions -- where to live, whether a mother should stay home and care for the children --into matters of life and death.

Parineeta grew up in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh near the town of Bulandshehr, a cluster of drowsy bazaars, dangling electrical wires and occasional horse-drawn taxi-carts. Her father, who died when she was little, nicknamed her “Baby,” and it stuck.

Parineeta married at 21. Her family chose her husband, whom she met for the first time at their wedding. Keeping with custom, the newlyweds moved in with his family.

In traditional Hindu households, where several generations live under one roof, a wife is expected to be devoted not only to her husband, but to her in-laws too. She is expected to abide by the rules of their house. And she is expected to bear a son to carry the family name.

This, Parineeta says, is where conflict grew. “I have two daughters. That’s why they used to trouble me,” she says, referring to her father-in-law, Sukhram, and her sister-in-law, Sangeeta. Sangeeta has a son, Parineeta says, so she was favored in the house.

Parineeta says her father-in-law would hit her older daughter, Shubhangana, now 5 years old. “He didn’t see her as a child.”

She says her father-in-law also demanded payments and gifts as compensation for bringing two girls into the family. Parineeta’s daughters represent a future financial strain: Someday the girls might require dowries of their own.

“They used to say, ‘You have two daughters. Who will bear their expenses?’ ” Parineeta says of her in-laws.

Sukhram, who died late last year at age 80 while being treated for heart trouble, denied in an interview demanding dowry or striking the children.

Parineeta’s personal escape, she says, was the beauty parlor where she worked, a tiny, open-air storefront next to the family’s house. Run by a woman named Durga, it held a few chairs, a mirror and a shelf stocked with beauty creams and “boxes and boxes of nail polish,” Parineeta says. “Red, pink, blue, yellow, just name it.”

Durga, a 30-year-old mother of two, says she saw tension in the home. “Lots of fights,” she says. “The father-in-law would never accept her daughters.”

Parineeta wanted independence, says Durga, who also goes by one name. “She used to say, ‘Teach me how to run the parlor. I’ll be grateful to you for life.’ ”

Parineeta’s personality changed in the salon, Durga says. She became outspoken and funny.

She recalls one day when a customer was disappointed in Parineeta’s eyebrow-trimming skills and insulted her work. To make amends to the customer -- or, at least, so it seemed -- Parineeta offered her a face massage.

“But there was no massage that day!” Durga says, laughing at the memory. Instead, Parineeta started vigorously slapping the woman’s cheeks. “This is how you get that rosy glow,” Parineeta assured the startled client, Durga says.

A little more than two years ago, Durga left the village and gave Parineeta the salon as a gift. But Parineeta didn’t keep it open.

Her husband and his family were opposed. “I told her, ‘You’ll not be able to take care of the kids if you run the parlor,’ ” Kumar says.

“She was upset,” he says. “She said she would multitask. ‘I’ll manage everything -- the home, the kids, and work. Just let me run it,’ ” she said, he recalls.

Kumar says he told her no. “Men hung around the parlor,” he says. “I didn’t like that.”

Durga says her theory is that Kumar’s family feared Parineeta would “become independent and earn her own living.”

From her hospital bed in New Delhi last year, Parineeta said she missed the beauty parlor. “But some things are best forgotten,” she said.

On January 25, 2014, the day before Parineeta was burned, she says, she fought with her father-in-law. She says he wouldn’t let her or her daughters eat. “He had thrown the cooked vegetables to the cows,” she says, to prevent their having a meal.

Two neighbors describe hearing another fight that day, too. It was a foggy winter’s morning, they say, and a clash broke out over heating water to bathe Parineeta’s daughter. It was “a big fight with a lot of screaming,” says Khan, the neighbor who saw Parineeta on fire.

“Don’t you know how expensive a gas cylinder is?” said Sangeeta, the sister-in-law, according to Khan. He says she told Parineeta that she needed to get her own gas, and not use the family’s gas.

Sangeeta “picked up the pot of water and plonked it outside,” Khan says. “We were startled.”

The next morning, Parineeta says, she woke up early, swept the house and washed clothes. She had just hung them to dry in the courtyard when Sangeeta, she says, splashed her with kerosene.

“I thought it was water,” says Parineeta. Her sister-in-law struck a match, she says, and told her to die. She says her husband, Kumar, extinguished the flames, saving her life.

‘She set herself on fire,’ says Sudhir Kumar, Parineeta’s husband. He stayed with their two daughters in a slum area on New Delhi’s outskirts during her recovery in the hospital.

Kumar, Sangeeta and Sukhram narrate a different version of events.

In Kumar’s telling, he and his wife were chatting on a staircase near the courtyard when their conversation was interrupted. “Papa started screaming from downstairs,” Kumar says, demanding that someone serve tea to a visiting aunt.

A few minutes passed, Kumar says, and everyone gathered in the courtyard. As he describes it, Parineeta walked over to her father-in-law, who was sitting on a rope cot.

“I’m packing my bags,” Parineeta said to her father-in-law, Sukhram. She said she wanted to move to another house the family owned, in the town of Aligarh. Sukhram said she couldn’t move there.

“Everybody fights with me here,” Parineeta said.

“Of course everybody fights with you,” Sukhram replied, with sarcasm. “You don’t fight with anyone.”

Sukhram, in an interview, said Parineeta also made this comment: “If you don’t give me the house that way, let’s see if you give it to me this way.”

Next, both men say, Parineeta turned and walked into a storage closet directly off the courtyard, and locked herself in.

“Baby, open the door!” Kumar says he shouted.

A few moments later she opened the door and stepped out, Kumar says, with her clothing ablaze.

“I started ripping her clothes off. I thought the fire would go out if I tore the clothes,” he says. “It didn’t work.”

Sangeeta smothered the blaze, he says, by draping Parineeta with a blanket.

Kumar says he thinks Parineeta wanted to frighten the family to get her way in the dispute over where to live. “She only did it to scare my father,” he says, without imagining that the fire itself could “spiral into something big.”

Parineeta says she didn’t set herself on fire. She says she thinks her husband is trying to protect his relatives.

Along with attempted murder, Parineeta’s father-in-law and sister-in-law were charged with demanding dowry and inflicting cruelty over dowry payments and jailed. Both denied the charges. They also denied, in detail, the claims of troubled family life described by Parineeta and others.

In an interview at the prison last year where she was being held, Sangeeta, who is in her early 30s, denied burning Parineeta. When the commotion started in the courtyard that morning, she said, she was in a bedroom.

“I ran outside,” Sangeeta said. “That’s when I saw Baby on fire,” she said, using  Parineeta’s nickname.

Describing her relationship with Parineeta, she said, “I won’t say we were friends, but we weren’t enemies either. There was no friendship, but there wasn’t animosity.”

Sangeeta is currently out on bail.

The father-in-law was released on bail last August. Shortly thereafter, he checked into a hospital suffering from heart trouble.

Reclining on a rusty steel bed in a dim hospital ward that same month, he said of the charges against him: “How much did I sin in my past life to deserve this? Maybe this is what kismet had in store for me.”

A few days later, he died.

Parineeta’s husband, Kumar, says his father was deeply concerned before his death that nobody would believe his innocence. And “why would they?” Kumar says. After all, “This happened 20 years ago, too.”

He was referring to April 1, 1994, the day Gayatri Devi, another daughter-in-law of Sukhram’s, burned to death in a bedroom in the same home. The fire also injured Devi’s baby boy, who survived.

Sukhram and two other men were tried on charges of dowry death in the case. All were acquitted. Sukhram, in his hospital-bed interview, said Devi burned herself because she had cancer.

Devi’s brother, Harprasad, a fruit seller in a village an hour’s drive away, says he believes his sister was murdered. He says she didn’t have cancer. He says the in-laws were dissatisfied with her dowry and demanded more from the family, including a motorcycle.

“ ‘We are poor people,’ we told the father-in-law,” Harprasad says. “Where will we get the money?”

Since the fire, Harprasad says, the two families have had no contact -- not even with his sister’s son, the child who was burned in the fire that killed Devi. “We haven’t seen the boy since that day,” he says.

Today that son, Anshul Kumar, is a slim, swaggering 22-year-old. Last summer he was the only person living in the pink-and-green pastel home where he, his mother and Parineeta were burned.

Standing in the home’s open-air courtyard, he pointed to a soot stain on the wall. “This is where the fire happened,” he said. Nearby was the door to his bedroom. It is the room where his mother died.

Anshul says he believes his mother killed herself, and that his grandfather wasn’t involved. Asked how two women, Parineeta and his mother, both came to be burned in his grandfather’s home, he says, “It’s just a coincidence.”

Parineeta’s neighbor, furniture maker Shafiq Ahmed, saw her on fire. He believes many women in India voluntarily set themselves on fire.

There are three more people who saw Parineeta on fire: the visiting aunt, and the two neighbors who heard the screaming. The aunt says Parineeta burned herself.

The two neighbors -- Khan, who owns a hardware store, and Shafiq Ahmed, the furniture maker -- have lived next to Parineeta’s in-laws for years. They remember Parineeta’s arrival partly because she knows how to make good tea.

“We used to joke around, ‘Good that they’ve gotten a new daughter-in-law, at least the quality of tea has improved!’ ” Khan says.

Both men suspect Parineeta set herself on fire, although they are quick to say they can’t be sure. Neither saw the fire start. Both agree they heard her husband shout, “Baby, what did you do to yourself?”

Messrs. Khan and Ahmed say they think Parineeta was forced into a desperate act. “Everyone in the village thinks she had no other option,” Khan says. “Baby was being mentally tortured in that home.” He says, “What could anyone have done?”

There is a complex history of fire and women in India. In Hindu mythology, the goddess Sati set herself alight in a family dispute centering on preserving her husband’s honor. That story is tied to a centuries-old historical Hindu practice, also known as sati, in which widows would immolate themselves -- or be forcefully immolated -- on their husbands’ funeral pyres. India outlawed sati in 1987.

Ahmed draws a distinction between history and Parineeta’s circumstances. “Sati was forceful,” he says. “Women were forced to immolate themselves. Today, women immolate themselves voluntarily.”

Khan sees a more direct link to the past. “Tradition plays a very important role,” he says. “Women were burned in India back in the day. Maybe this idea of burning came from there.”

Then, he makes a practical point. “Kerosene is available in every household,” he says. “Burning becomes convenient.”

The two men believe Devi also set herself on fire, an event they remember from childhood. “She, too, saw no other choice,” Ahmed says.

With Parineeta, they say, history simply repeated itself.

At Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, where Parineeta was treated for months, the burn unit sees one or two cases a day where a young woman says she was burned in a family dispute, according to Dr. Shamandra Sahu, a senior resident there.

“At least one patient, always,” he says, “who has a quarrel with the in-laws.”

These injuries often go by the euphemism “kitchen fire,” doctors and police say, because it is common in India for women to be injured while cooking. Open flames and traditional, flowing Indian garments can be a dangerous mix.

“A lot of women say they were burned in kitchen fires, but the real story is something different,” says Karoon Agarwal, the doctor who heads the burn unit.

One of the senior physicians on Dr. Agarwal’s staff, Upendra Kumar, says it can be difficult to know precisely how a woman was burned without a police investigation. But there are hints. In cases of intentional burning, he says, some patients arrive at the hospital “reeking of kerosene.”

“Most of them, they lie about the injury,” Dr. Kumar says.

Parineeta is expected to recover, her doctors say. She has undergone about five surgeries, including two skin grafts. Things haven’t gone smoothly, though. She lost an eye to infection. And her injuries are taking a toll across her family, and across generations.

Parineeta’s elder daughter hasn’t returned to school since the fire. That is because Parineeta’s husband had to quit his job to care for the girls, which meant he couldn’t pay rent, which meant he had to move several times. Something had to give, and it was his daughter’s education.

After spending months in and out of the hospital, Parineeta is back in Bulandshehr, convalescing at her mother’s house. Her sister, Ruby, helps care for her. This month, she received an artificial eye -- a “stone eye,” Parineeta calls it.

What comes next for Parineeta is uncertain. Her father-in-law, Sukhram, said before his death that he wanted to see Parineeta drop her case and state that she set herself on fire. Asked if his family could live together again under the same roof, he said, “I’ve left it to the one above. It’s all in his hands.”

Parineeta’s husband feels pressure to pick a side. “On one hand there is my family,” he says. “On the other is my wife and kids.”

“Who do I choose?” Kumar says. “Either way, I lose someone.”

Ultimately, though, he wants his wife to come home. “I want us to be family once again,” he says. “I want to have the good memories again.”

Parineeta calls her husband a “simple man. Too simple.” It angered her when he visited the hospital while she was there. As the months passed, he visited less often.

Still, Parineeta says, she knows what the future holds. “I’ll have to stay with him,” she says. “I have no choice. I have two daughters.”


[Courtesy: The Wall Street Journal. Edited for sikhchic.com]
July 24, 2015
 

Conversation about this article

1: Sunny Grewal  (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), July 24, 2015, 1:37 PM.

"One side is my family, one side is my wife and kids". Wow! How can the two ever be described as being separate?

2: Kaala Singh (Punjab), July 25, 2015, 12:26 AM.

Thank God, we parted ways 500 years ago!

3: Roop Dhillon (London, United Kingdom), July 25, 2015, 2:08 PM.

Day by day, I wonder if we need to reboot all of Indian culture and actually say it is a bad culture and they should start over again. More and more Indians are living up to the comments the conquerers made about them and their minds.

4: Sunny Grewal (Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada), July 26, 2015, 1:21 PM.

@4: In reference to India, early on during colonial rule the British stated that you could judge a culture by the way that they treat their women.

5: Kaala Singh (Punjab), July 27, 2015, 2:50 AM.

@4: These are the culture and values being propagated by Bollywood and the Indian media. We need to make sure that our culture does not get corrupted considering the fact that Sikhs even in the West are enamoured with the Bhaiyya culture being propagated by Bollywood. Many Sikhs are also not free from the social evils of caste and domestic violence and female infanticide. BTW, reading this article and looking at these pictures, I can't resist asking this question -- why does everything that is wrong in India have a Bhaiyya connection? Does a day pass when we don't hear about a Bhaiyya committing a rape, robbery, assault or a mob attack? It is a matter of concern that a Bhaiyya invasion is taking place in Punjab.

6: N Singh (Canada), July 29, 2015, 3:11 AM.

I am glad that this is happening to these women. These are the women who bred the men that terrorize minorities in India. What goes around comes around. Sorry to all the liberal bleeding hearts, but no sympathy here.

7: Arjan Singh (USA), July 29, 2015, 9:12 PM.

Thanks to to the Wall Street Journal, now the entire world can see the real Indian society (at least the one that exists in the majority Hindu population). Most of the world does not realize that in the 1970s and 1980s an entire genre of Indian films was made on the issue of harassment and eventual burning of brides in the name of dowry. These films were not made on imaginary scripts but based on real life events happening in the Indian society. Since these films were made before the advent of mass media and globalization of media, most of the world has not seen or heard about them. In spite of years of campaigning the status of Indian woman along with other minorities has not improved. Imagine if they can burn their own daughters and wives what they can do to other members of society? The same technique of burning the human body (ultimate crime against humanity) was applied to many Sikh men during the pogroms of 1984. Sikh men on the streets of many cities of India had their hair burnt, followed by burning of the entire body. My body shudders with horror even today as I recall these horrific crimes; how can a living person be set alight? I agree with comment #6; no mercy or sympathy for these women as well – they are reaping the fruit of the system of horrors that they themselves created and encouraged. This entire article reminds me of the movie, 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' (in which young children are tortured through slave labor).

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