Soon after the wedding, Neth became pregnant. If a pregnant woman takes a drug called nevirapine before childbirth and does not breast-feed afterward, she can drastically reduce the risk of infecting her child with HIV. But to take that route, Neth would have to tell Sothea that she was HIV positive and had contracted the disease as a prostitute. It was wrenching to watch Neth and Sothea during the pregnancy, because Sothea was so much in love with a woman who was secretly endangering his life and their child’s life.
One afternoon we were sitting outside their house as Sothea told us how his parents had looked down on Neth, because she had worked for a time in a restaurant. They considered that low-class behavior for a young woman. “My parents are mad at me, but I promised Srey Neth that I would love her forever,” Sothea said. “My parents said they would never allow me to go home. They said: ‘If you choose Srey Neth, we don’t care about you anymore.’ My parents tried to separate us by sending me to Malaysia, but even though I was there with good food, living in a nice place, I missed Srey Neth so much that I had to go back to her. Even if I run into problems, I will never leave her—even if I starve, I want to be with her.”
Neth looked uncomfortable with this public pronouncement of love, but they caught each other’s eyes and dissolved into giggles. This should have been a high point in Neth’s life, but she was scrawny and looked sickly. She seemed already to have contracted full-blown AIDS.
“She’s become weaker and weaker,” Sothea fretted. “Normally pregnant women want to eat, but she’s not so hungry.”
When Sothea stepped away for a few minutes, Neth turned toward us, looking haggard.
“I know, I know,” she whispered, sounding anguished. “I want to tell him. I try to tell him. But he loves me so much, how will he take it?” She shook her head and her voice broke: “For the first time, somebody really loves me. It’s so hard to tell him what happened to me.”
We told her that if she loved Sothea, she had to tell him. When Sothea returned, we tried to direct the conversation to the subject of Neth’s health. “You should both check your HIV status before the birth,” Nick suggested, in what he hoped was a casual tone. “People get it in all kinds of ways, and it’s a good time to check.”
Sothea smiled indulgently and scoffed. “I’m sure my wife doesn’t have HIV,” he said dismissively. “I never go with other girls, or to brothels. So how could she get it?”
On several occasions, we visited Neth and gave her bags of food and powdered milk for her pregnancy, and each time we saw her was heartbreaking. Her brief time in the brothel seemed to have left her with a disease that would kill her, her husband, and their unborn child. Just when her life seemed to be coming together, it was being torn apart.
Then, as the time for delivery approached, Neth agreed to be tested again. And this time, incredibly, the result came back: HIV negative. This test was more modern and reliable than the previous one. Neth had definitely been sickly and gaunt, but perhaps that had been from tuberculosis, parasites, or exhaustion. In any case, she didn’t have AIDS.
Once she knew this, Neth began to feel better. She put on weight and soon looked healthier. The prospect of a grandchild led Sothea’s parents to forgive the couple, and the family was reunited.
In 2007, Neth gave birth to a son. The baby was strong, healthy, and pudgy. Neth radiated joy as she cuddled him in the courtyard of her home. When our family dropped in on Neth and her husband at the end of 2008, she showed the boy to our children and giggled as he tottered about. She had returned to school for her final classes in hair-dressing, and her mother-in-law was planning to buy a small shop where Neth could set up a little business as a beautician and hairdresser. “I know what I’m going to call the shop,” she said. “Nick and Bernie’s.” After so many twists and setbacks, she had put her life together again; the young girl who had quivered in fear in the brothel had been buried forever.
For us, there were three lessons in this story. The first is that rescuing girls from brothels is complicated and uncertain. Indeed, it’s sometimes impossible, and that’s why it is most productive to focus efforts on prevention and putting brothels out of business. The second lesson is to never give up. Helping people is difficult and unpredictable, and our interventions don’t always work, but successes are possible, and these victories are incredibly important.
The third lesson is that even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it’s still worth mitigating. We may not succeed in educating all the girls in poor countries, or in preventing all women from dying in childbirth, or in saving all the girls who are imprisoned in brothels. But we think of Neth and remember a Hawaiian parable taught to us by Naka Nathaniel, the former Times videographer, himself a Hawaiian:
A man goes out on the beach and sees that it is covered with starfish that have washed up in the tide. A little boy is walking along, picking them up and throwing them back into the water.
“What are you doing, son?” the man asks. “You see how many starfish there are? You’ll never make a difference.”
The boy paused thoughtfully, and picked up another starfish and threw it into the ocean.
“It sure made a difference to that one,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
Learning to Speak Up
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
One of the reasons that so many women and girls are kidnapped, trafficked, raped, and otherwise abused is that they grin and bear it. Stoic docility—in particular, acceptance of any decree by a man—is drilled into girls in much of the world from the time they are babies, and so they often do as they are instructed, even when the instruction is to smile while being raped twenty times a day.
This is not to blame the victims. There are good practical as well as cultural reasons for women to accept abuse rather than fight back and risk being killed. But the reality is that as long as women and girls allow themselves to be prostituted and beaten, the abuse will continue. When more girls scream and protest, when they run away from the brothels, then the business model of trafficking will be undermined. The traffickers know that, and they tend to prey on uneducated peasant girls precisely because they are the ones most likely to obey orders and resign themselves to their fate. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it during the American civil rights struggle: “We must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”
Of course, this is a delicate matter, and it’s dangerous for foreign cheerleaders to urge local girls to assume undue risks. But it’s also essential to help young women find their voices. Education and empowerment training can show girls that femininity does not entail docility, and can nurture assertiveness so that girls and women stand up for themselves. This is exactly what has happened in the slum of Kasturba Nagar, outside the central Indian city of Nagpur.
Usha Narayane in her slum neighborhood in India (Naka Nathaniel)
The fetid ditches of Kasturba Nagar ooze sewage, stink, and hopelessness. The inhabitants are Dalits—Untouchables. Most of them have dark complexions and signal in their clothing and bearing that they are poor. They live in shacks on winding dirt lanes, which turn to a stew of sewage and mud whenever it rains. The men of Kasturba Nagar drive rickshaws or work in menial or dirty jobs, and the women work as housemaids, or they stay home and raise the children.
In this improbable setting, a young woman named Usha Narayane shook off despair and thrived despite the odds. Usha is a self-assured woman of twenty-eight: short, with long black hair, a round face, and thick eyebrows. In a land like India that has long suffered from malnutrition, pounds can be prestigious, and Usha has just enough weight to hint at her own success. She talks nonstop.
Her father, Madhukar Narayane, is a Dalit, too, but he is also a high school graduate with a good job at the telephone
company. Usha’s mother, Alka, is also unusually well-educated: Although she married at age fifteen, she has a ninth-grade education and is literate. Both parents were determined that their children get a solid education as an escape route from Kasturba Nagar. So they lived frugally and saved every rupee to educate their children—and they accomplished something heroic. In a slum where no other person had ever gone to college, all five Narayane children, including Usha, graduated from university.
Usha’s mother is delighted and a bit horrified at what this education has wrought in her daughter. “She’s fearless,” Alka said. “She doesn’t get frightened by anyone.” Usha graduated with a degree in hotel management and seemed destined to manage a fine hotel somewhere in India. She had already escaped Kasturba Nagar and was preparing to take a hotel job when she came back for a visit—and collided with the ambitions and self-assurance of Akku Yadav.
Akku Yadav was, in a sense, the other “success” of Kasturba Nagar. He was a higher-caste man who had turned an apprenticeship as a small-time thug into a role as a mobster and king of the slum. He ruled a gang of hoodlums who controlled Kasturba Nagar and who robbed, murdered, and tortured with impunity. The Indian authorities would have prevented a gangster from preying so ruthlessly on a middle-class neighborhood. But in slums with Dalits or low-caste residents, the authorities rarely intervene except to accept cash bribes, and so gangsters sometimes emerge in such places as absolute rulers.
For fifteen years, Akku Yadav had terrorized Kasturba Nagar while shrewdly building a small business empire. One of his specialties was the threat of rape to terrorize anyone who might stand up to him. Murder left inconvenient piles of bodies, requiring bribes to keep the police at bay, while rape is so stigmatizing that the victims could usually be counted on to stay silent. Sexual humiliation was thus an effective and low-risk strategy to intimidate challengers and to control the community.
According to neighbors in the slum, Akku Yadav once raped a woman right after her wedding. Another time he stripped a man naked and burned him with cigarettes, then forced him to dance in front of his sixteen-year-old daughter. They say he took one woman, Asho Bhagat, and tortured her in front of her daughter and several neighbors by cutting off her breasts. Then he sliced her into pieces on the street. One of the neighbors, Avinash Tiwari, was horrified by Asho’s killing and planned to go to the police, so Akku Yadav butchered him as well.
Akku Yadav continued his assaults. He and his men gang-raped a woman named Kalma just ten days after she gave birth, and she was so mortified that she doused herself with kerosene and burned herself to death. The gang pulled another woman out of her house when she was seven months pregnant, stripped her naked, and raped her on the road in public view. The more barbaric the behavior, the more the population was cowed into acquiescence.
Twenty-five families moved away from Kasturba Nagar, but most Dalits had no choice. They adjusted by pulling their daughters out of school and keeping them locked up inside their homes where no one could see them. Vegetable vendors steered clear of Kasturba Nagar, so housewives had to trek to distant markets to buy food. And as long as Akku Yadav targeted only the Dalits, the police didn’t interfere.
“The police were very class conscious,” Usha noted. “So if you were lighter-skinned, then they thought you were higher class and they might help. But they would swoop down on anyone darker-skinned or unshaven. Often, people went to the police to complain, and then the police arrested them,” Usha said. One woman went to the police to report that she had been gang-raped by Akku Yadav and his thugs; the police responded by gang-raping her themselves.
Usha’s family was the only one that Akku Yadav didn’t torment. He gave the Narayanes a wide berth, wary that their education might give them power to complain effectively. In developing countries, tormenting the illiterate is usually risk-free; preying on the educated is more perilous. But finally, when Usha was back for her visit, the two families met head-on.
Akku Yadav had just raped a thirteen-year-old girl. He was feeling cocky. He and his men went to the next-door neighbor of the Narayanes, Ratna Dungiri, to demand money. The thugs smashed her furniture and threatened to kill her family. When Usha arrived afterward, she told Ratna to go to the police. Ratna wouldn’t, so Usha herself went to the police and filed a complaint. The police informed Akku Yadav of Usha’s action, and he was enraged. So he and forty of his thugs showed up at the Narayane house and surrounded it. Akku Yadav carried a bottle of acid and shouted through the door for Usha to back down. You withdraw the complaint and I won’t harm you, he said.
Usha barricaded the door and shouted back that she would never give in. Then she frantically telephoned the police. They said that they would come, but they never did. Meanwhile, Akku Yadav was pounding on the door.
I’ll throw acid on your face, and you won’t be in a position to file any more complaints, he roared. If we ever meet you, you don’t know what we’ll do to you. Gang rape is nothing. You can’t imagine what we’ll do to you.
Usha shouted back insults, and Akku Yadav replied with vivid descriptions of how he would rape her, burn her with acid, slaughter her. He and his men tried to batter the door down. So Usha turned on the cylinder of gas the family used for cooking and grabbed a match.
If you break into the house, I’ll light the match and blow us all up, she shouted wildly. The thugs could smell the gas, and they hesitated. Back off, or you’ll get blown up, Usha shouted again. The attackers stepped back.
Meanwhile, word of the confrontation had rushed around the neighborhood. The Dalits were deeply proud of Usha’s schooling and success, and the thought that Akku Yadav would destroy her was agonizing. The neighbors gathered at a distance, not knowing quite what to do. But when they saw Usha fighting back and hurling abuse at Akku Yadav, finally forcing his gang to retreat, they found courage. Soon there were a hundred angry Dalits on the street, and they began picking up sticks and stones.
“People realized that if he could do this to Usha, there was just no hope,” one neighbor explained. Stones began to fly toward Akku Yadav’s men, who saw the crowd’s ugly mood and fled. The mood in the slum became giddy. For the first time, the people had won a confrontation. The Dalits marched through the slum, celebrating. Then they went down the street to Akku Yadav’s house and burned it to the ground.
Akku Yadav went to the police, who arrested him for his own protection. Apparently the police officers planned to keep him in custody until the mood cooled and then to let him go. A bail hearing for Akku Yadav was scheduled, and rumors spread that the police were planning to release him as part of a corrupt bargain. The bail hearing was to take place miles away in the center of Nagpur. Hundreds of women marched there from Kasturba Nagar and filed into the high-ceilinged grand courtroom with its marble floor and faded British grandeur. The Dalit women were uneasy there in their sandals and faded saris, but they took seats near the front. Akku Yadav strutted in, confident and unrepentant, sensing that the women were disoriented in the grand setting of the courtroom. Spotting one woman he had raped, he mocked her as a prostitute and shouted that he would rape her again. She rushed forward and hit him on the head with a slipper.
“This time, either I will kill you, or you will kill me,” she shrieked. At that, the dam burst, apparently by prearrangement. All the women from Kasturba Nagar pressed forward and surrounded Akku Yadav, screaming and shouting. Some pulled chili powder from under their clothes and threw it in the faces of Akku Yadav and the two police officers guarding him. The police, blinded and overwhelmed, fled at once. Then the women pulled out knives from their clothing and began stabbing Akku Yadav.
“Forgive me,” he shouted, in terror now. “Forgive me! I won’t do it again.” The women passed their knives around and kept stabbing him. Each woman had agreed to stab him at least once. Then, in a macabre retaliation for his having cut off Asho Bhagat’s breasts, the women hacked off Akku Yadav’s penis. By the end, he was mincemeat. When we visited, the courtroom walls wer
e still stained with his blood.
The bloodied women marched triumphantly back to Kasturba Nagar to tell their husbands and fathers that they had destroyed the monster. The slum erupted in celebration. Families put on music and danced in the streets. They dug into their savings to buy lamb and sweets, and they handed out fruit to their friends. Throughout Kasturba Nagar, the festivities resembled a giant wedding.
It was clear that the attack on Akku Yadav had been carefully planned, and Usha was the obvious leader. So even though Usha could conveniently prove that she was not in the courtroom that day, the police arrested her. However, the killing had focused public attention on the plight of Kasturba Nagar, and there was an outcry. A retired high court judge, Bhau Vahane, publicly sided with the women, saying: “In the circumstances they underwent, they were left with no alternative but to finish Akku. The women repeatedly pleaded with the police for their security. But the police failed to protect them.”
Then the hundreds of women in the slum decided among themselves that if they all claimed responsibility, no one person would be culpable for the murder. They reasoned that if several hundred women each had stabbed Akku Yadav once, then no single stab wound would have been the fatal one. Across Kasturba Nagar, there was a single refrain among the women: We all killed him. Arrest us all!
“We all take responsibility for what happened,” said Rajashri Rang-dale, a shy young mother. Jija More, a prim housewife of forty-five, added: “I’m proud of what we did…. If anybody has to be punished, we’ll all be punished.” With considerable satisfaction, Jija asserted: “We women have become fearless. We were protecting the men.”
The police, grim and frustrated, released Usha after two weeks, but only on the condition that she stay in the area. Her career as a hotel manager is probably over, and she is sure that members of Akku Yadav’s gang will seek revenge by raping her or throwing acid on her face. “I don’t care about that,” she says dismissively, with a confident toss of her head. “I’m not worried about them.” She began a new life as a community organizer, using her management skills to bring the Dalits together to make pickles, clothing, and other products to sell in the markets. She wants the Dalits to start businesses to raise their incomes, so that they can afford more education.
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