"It's not that straightforward, memsaab!" Parvati gently thumped the table with her bruised fists as she fought back her tears.
"Parvati, I understand." I got up from my chair, crossed the table and stroked her back to soothe her. "I understand it's not straightforward. Or even simple. But you have to do something or this will continue forever."
She then burst into tears. I sighed, picked up a box of tissues from my table and handed it to her. She used the tissues to wipe the tears from her face and blow her nose. This is the worst part of my job. Dealing with someone in denial about their situation.
I am a psychology graduate employed as a social worker with an NGO that specializes in helping out lower income women in Delhi. My expertise is counseling women under the poverty line, typically from the slums, who have been victims of domestic violence. When these women get beaten up or otherwise mistreated by their husbands, the police often get involved. The husbands are dragged away by police constables, beaten up, and spend a couple of days in jail. The women are brought to NGOs like ours where we help them recover from the trauma and try to counsel them on the best ways forward.
The police and the courts in India are nowhere close to perfect when it comes to dealing with women, but they generally at least try. The biggest problem that cops face in such cases is simple. The women are angry in the immediate aftermath of their trauma and are forthcoming about the abuses they have suffered. But after a couple of days, some traditional or familial instinct kicks in and they are not willing to press charges or testify. So the cops have to release the husbands. The police department is under-staffed and over-worked so they have to prioritize more serious crimes like murder and rape. So they put the case file away and then send the women to us.
My job is to counsel such women against changing their minds. To convince them, gently but firmly, that it is in their best interests to leave these men and have them put behind bars. And that is what I am trying to convince Parvati about.
"He is good with the girls. He really is!" Parvati took a break from her sobs and said.
"I believe you."
"He loves them. Always looks after them. It's just me he has issues with."
"Parvati, listen to me." I said. "Yes, he is good with the girls. Which means he doesn't hit them or abuse them. But he hits you. In front of them. Right?"
"Yes." she softly replied. "But it's only when he is drunk. When he is sober..."
"Don't use alcohol as an excuse..." I interrupted her "to justify his behavior. Alcohol doesn't change what a person is deep down inside."
Parvati opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again and wiped her tears.
"Now if you continue to stay with this man, what example are you setting for your daughters? Do you want them to grow up internalizing the belief that it is okay for a man to just bash up his wife? Using alcohol as an excuse?"
"No!"
"When your daughters grow up, do you want them to be beaten up by their men? And accept it as normal?"
"NO!" Parvati raised her voice. "I don't want my daughters to have a life like mine. I want them to be..."
She paused and looked at me.
"To be like you, memsaab!" she nodded and continued. "Educated, mature, strong, and independent."
There it came again. The effusive praise for me from the female victims, a classic example of transference. In my rookie days, I tried to brush it off. But now I knew better. I still didn't fully indulge in it. Just tried to channel it in the right direction.
"Well Parvati, if you really want your daughters to be like me, you have to set a good example. Which means you have to do something about...what's his name again?" I flipped through the file.
"Lallan..." Parvati whispered with a shudder.
From the file, Lallan seemed to be quite the textbook problem case. No steady job, mostly lived off the money his wife made selling vegetables, habitual drunkard, got in fights all over, and beat up his wife regularly. The last time it happened, the beating had spilled over onto the street just as a police patrol car was driving by. They scooped up Lallan, put him in the station lock-up and one of the lady constables helped Parvati file a complaint. But in a couple of days, she had shown up to withdraw the complaint. And they had to let the guy go with a stern warning.
"So you see my point?" I asked.
"Yes, memsaab." Parvati nodded earnestly.
"The only way forward is for you to file a police complaint, make him take his punishment as the law decides, and then we can help you leave him and divorce him."
"Divorce????" she sounded shocked.
"If you care about your daughters, that's the only way. So...are you ready to press charges? I know all the cops in that police station. They will help you. And we can also help you a lot."
"I don't know, memsaab...divorce seems so extreme!"
But I pressed on. I used all the persuasive skills at my disposal, all the things I had learnt in my training, everything I knew from my five years of experience in this job, to talk Parvati into acting on her own survival instincts. Finally, I seemed to have broken through.
An hour later, I was on the phone with Inspector Dubey who had referred her case to me. Parvati, I noted with a sense of accomplishment, was pressing charges against her abusive husband. As long as she testified, he would be sent away for a couple of years, and she could get a divorce as well as sole custody of her kids. Then another division of our NGO would help her resettle in another city so if her husband decided to get vengeful after getting out of jail, he couldn't torment her more. I closed the file from my side.
I felt cautiously optimistic about this case. Part of this job was regular disappointment. An odd kind of reverse recidivism where women we convinced still changed their minds and went back to their battered lives despite having the option to escape. Whenever that happened, I felt sad and defeated.
Years of this had taken a toll on me, and my husband Anup had seen it from close quarters. He saw me go from a perky and idealistic aspiring social worker at 22 when we started dating, to a slightly hardened postgrad during my internships at 25 when I got married, to an often morose and cynical veteran now at 30. Anup often tried to convince me to quit the job and do something less stressful and depressing. I resisted, knowing that what I was doing made a difference. But as the years passed, it was getting harder and harder to resist his suggestions.
So when Anup's company decided to send him to the US on an onsite assignment with the possibility of a green card, I decided to change my career tracks too. I took the GRE and starting sending applications to doctoral programs in social psychology. With a good score and a hefty experience in social work on the frontlines, I was optimistic that I would soon enter the world of academia and leave this soul-sapping job behind.
I was counting the months.
I saw Parvati again a month later. She walked into my office looking considerably more cheerful and entirely free of bruises. She was accompanied by a short wiry man. Maybe her brother, I presumed.
"Namaste, Shikha memsaab." Parvati said, and was echoed by the man in a flat voice.
"Namaste." I smiled at her and looked at the man questioningly.
"Memsaab, this is Lallan, my husband."
What the hell? I thought this case was closed and the guy would be in jail by now. The inspector as well as the prosecutor had assured me that it was an open and shut case as long as Parvati didn't recant.
"Oh umm... namaste!" I said, not sure of what to say now that this woman had brought her tormentor along. I couldn't very well ask her in front of him about what happened with the police complaint. And why the man was here in my office with her. "Please sit down."
"Memsaab, we have come to thank you. Because of your advice, our marriage is now on the mend. Lallan has given up drinking, gotten a job, and things are really great like they used to be." she said, beaming and putting her hand on her husband's.
He had been staring at the table until then. At her touch, he first looked at her and then at me. For a second I felt like there was a flash of anger in his eyes. But it passed. And he started talking.
"Yes, thank you very much, memsaab. I know I have not been a great husband. And I have made a lot of mistakes. But in the future, it will be different. I love my wife and my daughters, and will do anything to not lose them. I will change."
Although his words sounded very genuine and sincere, there was a hint of rehearsed pretense to the way he said them. I did not believe he could change. More than that, I did not believe he wanted to change. I had handled many such cases, and the patterns are predictable.
I wasn't sure what to say. I just looked at him and nodded. That's when my cellphone rang. It was a cousin calling.
"Excuse me, I have to take this." I said to the couple in front of me and answered the call. "Hi, Priya, what's up? I am at work. Can I call you back in a little while?"
"Shikha didi, this will only take a second. I'm sending out the wedding invitations today and I just realized I don't have your new address."
My husband's project had entered a critical stage and he had to go to the US nine months earlier than the original plan. Our lease was almost up anyway, so we had given up our old rental apartment, and after he left, I had temporarily moved into a house belonging to his cousin who was also away in the US with his family.
"Oh ok...I will text it to you."
"Could you just tell me right now? I am typing out the labels and I have to get this done soon." she said.
"Alright it's House number 134, Sector G4..." I gave her the address right down to the pin code.
"Thank you, Didi. Bye."
I hung up the phone and got back to Parvati and Lallan.
"Well, I am happy you recognized the error of your ways." I said.
"I really have." he nodded. "I haven't touched alcohol in a week, and I have been hired as a cleaner by a transport company. I will be accompanying trucks on long haul trips to Bangalore. In fact I am leaving for my first one tomorrow."
"That's good. A steady job is the backbone of a healthy lifestyle." I said, while thinking to myself, it's good that he will be away for many days, and have less time to beat up his wife.
There was a little more polite small talk, and then they left, looking very happy together.
But I was troubled. I did not think Parvati was thinking straight. If she had been alone, I could have at least tried to talk some sense into her. But bringing the husband along meant that my options were limited.
I called up Inspector Dubey next. He and I had gotten to know each other well over the years. He was that rare honest cop who also had empathy. While most cops in Delhi believed NGOs were a waste of time, Anil Dubey was different.
"Shikha...I have been expecting your call." he said. "I guess you heard about Sunita."
"No...what about Sunita?"
