May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller Page A

innocence.
    Sita’s ordeal has left an indelible mark on the relationship of Indian women to fire, which remains a major feature of their spiritual lives, a cause of their death and a symbol, in the end, of one of the most shocking forms of oppression. What follows is the story of two Indian women, Surinder Kaur and Roop Kanwar, both of them victims of fire and Hindu tradition. One of them is lucky to be alive, the other is dead.
    Surinder Kaur is a Sikh, illiterate, the mother of two, from a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Delhi. In 1983 she almost burned to death in her own home and accused her husband and sister-in-law of setting her on fire deliberately. She lived to tell her story, but like most personal tragedies in India, hers remained largelyunknown; no famous lawyers or outraged women’s groups came to her side. At her request I have changed her name.
    Roop Kanwar was a member of the traditional warrior caste of Rajputs, with a high school education, from a small village in Rajasthan. In 1987 she died in the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. Her death shocked the nation, was deplored by the prime minister, and was partially responsible for the ousting of the chief minister of a state government.
    In both cases, I spent weeks trying to learn what really happened to cause the violence but finally had to accept that the truth could probably never be known. Surinder Kaur may have been burned by her husband and sister-in-law, or she may have immolated herself. Roop Kanwar may have been forced to her husband’s pyre, or she may have chosen to die. Whatever the case, both were victims of a society in which women are not only burned to death but are raised to see self-immolation as their only escape from miserable marriages—or, worse, as an act of courage and religious inspiration.

    ON AUGUST 12, 1983, ON A GRAY, SWELTERING DAY AT THE END OF DELHI’S monsoon, Surinder Kaur, the thirty-year-old wife of a scooter-cab driver, was doused with kerosene and set on fire. The burning occurred at her home, in a small, dark entranceway leading from her front door to an inner courtyard. She ran screaming out into the street, her clothes on fire, and threw herself into a pool of water that had collected there from the heavy rains. Her husband lifted her out of the gutter and drove her in his scooter-cab to a nearby hospital, where she was admitted with burns over 60 percent of her body. In India, with wounds like these, most people die. Remarkably, Surinder lived, although she would have deep, permanent scars on her legs, arms, neck, upper chest, stomach and back. Only her breasts and face were untouched. These facts, at least, were not disputed. Beyond that, the stories wildly diverged.
    Surinder claimed that her husband and his sister had tried to burn her to death. They were angry, she said, that she had not brought more dowry to the marriage. “My husband was holding my hair, and my sister-in-law poured the kerosene on me,” she told me angrily. Then her husband guarded the door while her sister-in-law lit the match. Based on this account, the police charged Surinder’s husband with assault and her sister-in-law with attempted murder. The case has languished in New Delhi’s Sessions Court for years.
    But the husband and the sister-in-law maintained that Surinder’s burns were self-inflicted and that she had framed them as revenge for her unhappiness in the house. The sister-in-law said she was having tea upstairs when she heard screams from below. “She was shouting, ‘I’m burning, I’m dying,’ ” the sister-in-law told me. The family had never asked her for any dowry, Surinder’s husband and sister-in-law said, and in any case, she had brought them nothing.
    My search for Surinder began during my first year in India. That summer I had come to my benign conclusions about arranged marriage, yet I sometimes wondered if I had too tolerantly interpreted an essentially repressive tradition. My