The woman in the family and the man of the family never have the same stand; they are always perched on pedestals of different elevations- the highest for a woman often being lower than the lowest of a man. I was eight when I first learned this fact.
This time it was the news about Neelu Mehta. The country was baffled by what happened to her, but she was just another grain in a pot of rice. Often, most stories go unheard, unsaid, and thus unencumbered by the world. ‘Home is the most dangerous place for women around the world,’ a U.N. study once said. Time and time again, that statement is gathering nothing but more and more truth.
Neelu’s husband apparently did such a horrendous crime to end “his pain.” The pain that had arisen from ‘his suspicion’ of her having an affair. The cost of a man having suspicion on a woman, or a woman having suspicion on a man, is always paid by the woman by being abused, violated, or worse, as in this case, killed. Years later, as everyone wept, including my grandfather, in the room where my grandmothers’ corpse lie, I questioned the concept of love and marriage. Everyone pitied the old man, everyone except those who had seen him kill her everyday when she was very well alive. A few months later, when the public visit was done, and the show was over, he went back to his life, forgotten that he ever had a wife.
What we saw happening with Neelu Mehta was the culmination of the violence she must have faced behind closed doors everyday, the very reason she must have left his house to live with her parents, rooted where was the man’s fear of her having an affair. Why do we always portray working women in questionable character? Is it just because she has had the guts to stand on her own feet, independently earning and thus, boundless to the shackles of money you tried to chain her in? It makes me terribly sad that even after decades of fighting, this is how a lot of women lead their life, under an ever-imperious patriarchy. As Khaled Hosseini wrote in A thousand splendid suns, “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”