It's Kishwar Desai's first novel. But it's already the first in a series, owing to the tremendous response it received, and a widely-admired protagonist. The book “Witness the Night”earlier long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, is also being translated into Italian, French and Finnish. A British producer has bought the rights to the book. All this while she, short listed for the Costa Book Awards, waits for the results.
So it's been a good beginning then? “I remember feeling very surprised when my agents in London loved the book,” she laughs, “white males who have no connection with India or the gender politics in its villages! Then all over the U.K., even in Finland, I met people who were able to engage with this distant world. The issue, perhaps, is more universal than I'd initially supposed.”
Fourteen-year-old Durga is found tied to the bed-post in her sprawling farmhouse, beaten and abused. In the house lie the bodies of thirteen members of her family, poisoned and then set ablaze. The police are convinced she has committed the murders. As she waits in prison, social worker Simran Singh arrives, and becomes the only one who thinks Durga is innocent. But there's more to Durga's story, to girls murdered before they are born, to foeticide that lays to waste ideas of family and kinship.
Reduced to statistics
After three decades in journalism, why turn to fiction to tell her story? “Because these issues are everywhere in the news already. And no one seems to take them seriously. I wanted to get into the minds of the characters — there's an emotional side to these people that's usually left out, reduced to a statistic.”
And the statistics aren't kind either. In the last 20 years, anywhere between ten and 35 million women are estimated ‘missing' from the population. “And it's not really about the money, is it? Affluent South Delhi has the most skewed sex ratios in the country, if not the world.”
The story is set in Jalandhar, where Kishwar herself lived for a while. “My father was in the police, we were always transferred every few months because he wouldn't accept bribes, annoying the politicians. So I went to almost ten different schools,” she smiles.
“I was lucky my parents wanted a girl. Other relatives, displeased, took my mother to meet the matriarch of a neighbouring household. She told her proudly that she had buried six daughters.”
But the story really began while she was running a television channel in Punjab, and met a woman who had survived being given opium as a child. “That stayed with me for a long, long time. That you would look at your mother, and see your murderer,” she says. “So many women are growing up with these memories.”
While her book was in print, a teenager in Haryana was accused of poisoning her entire family — an eerie resemblance to her story. “There is so much rage, right beneath the surface. So in a way, none of the characters in the book have been made up. There's a hospital in Punjab that has not registered the birth of any baby girls at all.”
Simran Singh has become one of the greatest successes of the book. If most female detectives in contemporary television and books are young and svelte, “Simran's in her mid-forties, she's not beautiful, she's unmarried and likes her liquor hard. Quite content and infinitely at ease with herself. Having her own lovers. A free spirit who simply refuses to accept rules laid down by others.”
Abroad, she'd have people constantly going up to her and demand in disbelief — ‘Are there really women like her in India?' “‘Yes, yes, a hundred times yes!' I'd tell them, laughing. They have a very different idea of Indian women.”
But in literature now, that's a different story. “There are almost no strong women like her in our books. It's foeticide of a different kind! Where are all our level-headed women, interested in anything more than romance?”
Which is why Simran will be back. All the books in the series will have Simran at the helm, addressing issues that we routinely try to brush under the carpet.
“A whole generation of women are dying out — if not physically, then intellectually. We don't have the luxury of time,” she says. “That's also why I wrote this book. I don't have many of the strengths that Simran has, but I wanted to give hope, that we can act now and make a difference.”
