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Witness the Night "CAREFULLY, Sharda took out a paper envelope from which she took out a tiny skeletal hand. She made me hold it. ‘I want you to know what they do in this house, Durga,’ she said. ‘This hand was buried deep in the vegetable plot. There was also a tiny skull and other limbs but they have all been crushed by the tractor’."
The story is about a much-respected Jat Sikh family based in Jalandhar, which, as a routine and in a matter-of-fact manner, repeatedly get any pregnant women in the family undergo sex-determination tests and ruthlessly abort the female foetus. Before such helpful technology was at hand, they resorted to finishing off the newly born girl infants by poisoning, suffocating, burying or drowning them. Durga, the main character in the plot, is one stubborn girl who refuses to die. The whodunit story begins with a brutal mass-murder of 13 members of a well-to-do respectable family. The scene is blood-spattered and spooky, and there are nuances of ghosts and black magic in the air. It is in-your-face, underlined horror throughout. Kishwar, the brilliant pigtailed girl I knew in school, had panache for driving facts home in a hard-hitting lucid style—and it is still there. In order to drive home the facts, her commentary on gender bias and female foeticide tend to be a tad too exaggerated; no girl in the Atwal family may live, except those by sheer chance. All must die. "Punjab is known for murdering its daughters." Women justify their existence only by producing male heirs and generally live only to submit to male dominance, take abuse and be married off. Whereas, I would not get too defensive about the reality of some amount of gender bias in the state, it can hardly be admitted to the nauseating degree scripted in the book. The author has also fleetingly touched some other social ills like trafficking in women, drug abuse and corruption in the government. It is a little surprising that Kishwar, having actually spent a couple of high school years in Jalandhar could not, even in the 1970s, when we were together in school, be called "an ambitious village"—it has been an old, fairly large and prosperous, heritage town of Punjab. She has also mistakenly referred to announcements on the railway station being made in Swahili! Similarly, there is a discordant note in most of the names chosen for members of a typical Jat Sikh family, i.e., Durga, Sharda, Rahul, Brinda, Mandakini, etc., which are rather improbable. In spite of these minor flaws, the story holds your attention through its graphic narration of sexual aberrations, violence unabated, macabre scenes and black magic. I would recommend this
book as a perfect companion on your next ten hours trans-continental
flight to divert your mind from leg-cramps in the "cattle
class" crouches!
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In
her debut novel, Kishwar Desai picks up the shameful but frequent
episodes of female foeticide in Punjab to spin a chilling tale of
blood and gore, corruption and crime in the elitist landed gentry,
aided and abetted by the very officers who are the custodians of law
and order.