People | I Survived

In Kolkata, This Survivor of Domestic Violence Sought Justice—Through the Restoration of Her Property

Rozha fled an abusive marriage, and survived the death of her son. Now she claims what is hers.

Rozha waited for me at the entrance to Alipore Judge’s Court, where her lawyers had called her in for the hearing of a case. It was an unusually cool morning for April in Kolkata. Dewdrops lay on unshorn grass, and a duo of mynah birds called over the tangle of telephone wires overhead. In my many years visiting and conducting research in Kolkata, I had never been to court. But at Rozha’s request, I came to support her, and to get a glimpse of the legal rituals endured by so many women seeking justice for the wrongs perpetrated by family members.

We were here for a retrieval of property case: specifically, an almirah (wardrobe) full of past possessions. The room was spare. A thin tarp created walls, and the ceiling was open to the air.

Lawyers gathered in an area separated from clients by a wire cage, like a giant chicken coop. All men, the lawyers filed in at various times—loose interpretations of early morning that ranged from an eager eight to a dawdling ten. They removed their motorcycle helmets to reveal hair slick with oil. While Rozha and I sat erect on a small, wooden bench that could scarcely contain two bodies, they eased into chairs with armrests. Over the phone, Rozha had communicated with a lawyer who had been recommended to her through the NGO where she worked. She had only been told to show up early. We had no sense of the process. Rather than guiding us, the legal professionals made us sit quietly. If we met their gaze, their faces hardened to stone. We took the cue and looked away. Like so many rituals in Kolkata, from seeing the doctor to buying groceries, legal transactions were patterned according to codes that favored the wealthy and the deferential, those in the know.

The first hour passed quickly in the thick air of anticipation.

Then, with rising impatience, I stood up to ask, “When will my friend’s case be heard?” A man in a white shirt and black pants pocketed his phone—he had been showing his colleague a YouTube video of an American boy popping wheelies in a parking lot, encircled by fist-pumping children in baseball caps—and suppressed a laugh.

“Look, Madam,” he said, without actually looking at me, “it depends on when the Judge will be available. I cannot know when he or she will be free. You also cannot know. So there is no point pestering us.”

He returned to his Samsung Galaxy and pressed play.

An American boy held the edge of his skateboard and soared into the air. The crowd cheered. The lawyers laughed. We stayed still.

*

Rozha and I had met in the offices of the NGO where she had been hired recently. I had come early to the shelter that day in January, my hair still wet, shivering in the unexpected chill. I found her at the sewing machine, pedaling with the confidence of a pianist, pulling through rows of matching stitches on a rectangle of purple silk. The purses would be sold at exhibitions throughout the year, bringing in 600 Rupees (about ten dollars USD) per item. Rozha saw me and paused the rhythm of her right foot, took one of the sweets I offered her: a shondesh made of molasses from date palm syrup, a winter treat. We started with small talk, but within minutes she started to tell me about her life. I asked if it would be okay for me to record, and Rozha paused with Shakespearean urgency.

“Tell my story.” She spoke Bengali sentences with the occasional Urdu word nestled tenderly into them. “I have nothing to hide. Maybe someone can learn from it.”

“Tell my story.” She spoke Bengali sentences with the occasional Urdu word nestled tenderly into them. “I have nothing to hide. Maybe someone can learn from it.”

After the interview, I turned off the recorder and complimented her on a red, embroidered shawl she had draped around her shoulders. “Take it,” she offered immediately, placing it around my neck. I felt myself redden, both at the directness of her hospitality and my knowledge that despite having far less to give, she was far more generous. The scarf was pleasantly scratchy and with a faint smell of sandalwood—I took it gratefully and wore it every day that winter. Even now, it is a reminder of our friendship.

Rozha lived in Ekbalpore, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in the city. Muslims and Hindus have long lived side by side in Kolkata, yet the rise of right-wing ideologies has resulted in the marginalization of minorities even in a city built on syncretic religious practices and hybrid identities reflected in everything from fashion to food. A direct auto (three-wheeler vehicle) line went from the shelter in Chetla to her neighborhood, and we occasionally shared rides to attend a community support group near her home. She showed me the local landscape, a world within a world: fruit vendors with long, henna-stained beards who sprinkled chili powder on cut pineapple and pomegranate wrapped in today’s headlines, “fancy market” stalls decked with glass bangles in every color imaginable, tiny scraps of leather like confetti on the lanes where men sat in cement rooms stitching purses and shoes, and adjacent butcher shops with freshly-strung cuts of meat dangling precariously close to the heads of passers-by.

Rozha was divorced. She grew up in a middle-class Muslim family with four other siblings, and she was utterly devoted to her parents. In her early twenties she busied herself helping her parents manage the household, and supervised the weddings of her two brothers and two sisters. She married much later, though she was not particularly interested in the idea. Her parents, wanting to fulfill their responsibility and see her settled, arranged a match with a well-established family. The family took 50,000 rupees in dowry. Her parents acquiesced; they also gave her a full set of gold jewelry to take with her in marriage. Rozha’s brother, who was settled in Hong Kong and earned well in a foreign bank, gifted the groom-to-be an expensive mobile phone, a gold ring, a foreign-made three piece suit, and an Adidas jacket. As she told me this, Rozha described each token fondly, down to the brand, the color, and the monetary value.

Despite all this investment, Rozha did not find peace in her new home. For one, her husband chafed at life in a joint family. To soothe Rozha’s new husband and give his daughter comfort, her father arranged for the two of them to live in an apartment that he owned elsewhere in Kolkata. While a happy couple may have been grateful to live privately, to Rozha this plan isolated her further from family and friends. Within the walls of their apartment on the periphery of the city, among unfamiliar neighbors and streets she didn’t know, her husband’s nature became more apparent. Her husband tried to start a business, but he soon squandered the investment and sold his gold ring. The waste of her brother’s gift was not lost on Rozha. It became an omen for the slow revelation of her husband’s behavior.

Distanced from other family members, Rozha’s husband began to abuse her. The most distressing was the emotional torture—humiliating and threatening her, isolating her from family by preventing phone calls and visits. The fear resulted in a slow withdrawal of her sense of self. She reached a point where she was barely able to speak. Even afterward, the acquired reticence would take years to shed. Rozha’s husband controlled where she went, whom she talked to. He was easily angered by family and by strangers. Once, he hit a taxi driver for going the wrong way. Another time, he slapped Rozha in the middle of Park Street, a bustling commercial area, right across the face with his open palm. Outwardly she remained calm to salvage her safety; inside she recoiled.

A few years into marriage, Rozha gave birth to a son. Her husband was initially smitten with the baby boy, but soon stopped sparing their son his anger. Rozha feared most that he would hit her son in these outbursts, and anytime they were together her hands shook with anxiety. It did not always take violence; the mere threat of it would do. Yet Rozha couldn’t tell anyone, not even her mother—her closest soul—because she was worried, as so many women are, that such news would upset her mother’s already fragile health, would tank her flagging electrolyte levels. If Rozha’s mother heard that her daughter was being treated this way, she would faint. So Rozha stayed silent, trying above all to protect her son.

I had moved to Kolkata to study domestic violence, seeking stories of women’s marriages, especially how they reconciled the paradox of abuse from the very people they loved and cared for. These questions brought me back to my birthplace, not because there is more violence in Kolkata than back home in Palo Alto, California—in fact, we know from studies on domestic violence conducted by the WHO that prevalence of intimate partner violence ranges from 30-60% worldwide and spares no community—but because I wondered how abuse mingled with cultural ideas of intimacy, love, and responsibility in this place.

Rozha’s story showed me both how universal and how culturally particular domestic violence could be. Part of my work took place at a shelter for women with psychosocial disabilities, run by an NGO providing important mental health outreach in the city. Rozha joined the organization during her struggle with depression, an illness provoked by the stressful experiences of marital abuse. Through medication and group therapy, she worked to rebuild the psychic cracks. One tool was vocational therapy, where she learned how to use a sewing machine. She volunteered her time in the shelter for many months, and was recently offered a paid position. It would be a way to get back on her feet, support herself while she lived at her father’s home, to do something of meaning. Part of her new beginning would involve reclaiming fragments of the past.

Part of her new beginning would involve reclaiming fragments of the past.

*

We wandered to the perimeter of the waiting area to get tea. The lawyers did not yet look our way; they seemed to be continuing with their morning routine. Occasionally, one of them would get up with a folder and walk to the courthouse behind. Next to where the public waited, a balding man sat cross-legged on a raised wooden platform: the chaiwallah (tea seller). In front of him, plastic dabbas with assorted tea biscuits: the unassuming rounds of Marie biscuits, perforated square cream crackers, and the crimped edges of bourbon cookies laced with sugar. Tea boiled in a saucepan on a double gas stove, one pot bubbling with cream and spices that formed a puckering skin of milkfat, another with fragrant black tea steeped with fresh ginger. When we asked for two cups, he poured them out from a metal canister. Those, along with a biscuit each, came to eight rupees (about thirteen cents at the time). Tea was within everyone’s budget, and the bald man was the busiest person in the place.

“So, what’s in the almirah?” I finally asked Rozha, curious about the contents of the object we had come all this way to retrieve.

For me, the word almirah conjured images of tall, steel wardrobes secured with celebrated Godrej locks, containing saris and kaftans, old wedding crockery and family ornaments. I imagined my late grandmother, the furtive way she would wave us into her bedroom, untying a ring of keys from the knot of her nightgown and carefully sliding open a set of steel doors to reveal another locked box, from which she might extract a beaded glass ornament threaded onto a necklace, a metal-worked figurine, or a handloom sari that was too colorful for her present decade—things that were hers and only hers to give. For many Indian women, items in the almirah are the only inheritance within patrilineal structures, the domain of things under lock and key that they had earned through marriage and could call their own. For the rich, a space to hide gold jewelry away from domestic workers; for the poor, an aspirational piece signifying that they have generated enough material stuff to be worthy of placing on a shelf and locking up.

“A three-piece suit,” Rozha replied, “that I would rather burn than give to him.”

The almirah was itself an expensive item of furniture gifted by her father during her marriage, a time that now felt like a past life. It contained nothing of significant monetary value—her in-laws had long since pawned off her gold jewelry—but each token was priceless in its own way.

“But how did the almirah end up here?” I asked again, thinking it was stored somewhere in the rosy halls of the colonial-era court.

“Oh, it’s not here!” Rozha laughed. She explained that the almirah sat in the Ekbalpore Police Station, where it had been ever since she first filed the police case for stolen property. The police had seized the wardrobe from her marital home when she filed a claim for it several years after her marriage ended. Now, she required a judge’s order to authorize its release from the station and back into her possession.

Rozha worried that her ex-husband would turn up to the court unannounced. He had a way of getting everyone on his side with his easy charm, his smooth words. This had happened before: at the previous court date he came and made a fuss. He hadn’t made the process of separating easy. Earlier, he had harassed her so much that she almost agreed to drop the divorce case just so he would let her be. Once, when we were driving from the NGO where we both worked into the Ekbalpore neighborhood where she lived, she pointed out the house where she used to live, where her husband and in-laws still stay. Her husband remarried a woman with whom he had an affair while they were still married. She often saw his now-wife and child, thin and in tattered clothes, wandering around the market stalls. It made a clean break impossible.

“I have survived so much,” Rozha said now, taking quick, small sips of the hot tea. Yet she seemed unruffled.

Three hours later, we were ushered into the courtroom to wait for our appearance in front of the judge. Outside the courtroom, people queued up in lines far more organized than we were accustomed to seeing in Kolkata, ordered in place by barking officials. The judge was young. She wore her black gown tucked into a ruffled collar. Save for her bindi, she reminded me of American TV judges, the Judies, the Hatchets. As she attended to the cases that precede ours, the courtroom soundtrack noisy with the inevitable scratches of human sound, the chh chh chh of bodies readjusting on creaky wooden benches, the ehg ehg of suppressed coughs, the shhhht of an uncontainable itch, the whooe of tension relieved, superimposed on a background of deferential silence. We were given a seat at the benches while many others—poorer, less literate men—stood in the back. One of the lawyers who had been enjoying skateboard videos scurried to the high table to hand over Rozha’s documents.

Her Honor spoke, in English: “You did not pursue the case.” She was referring to a 498A, a criminal domestic violence suit, implying that having done this would have made the retrieval of property far easier. It was beside the point; she was here for a property retrieval case, but the clerk had lost the documents. Rozha, who was not asked to speak, could not clarify this fact.

The lawyer requested her Honour to reauthorize the paperwork to generate the release form. There was a quick nod of assent, an exchange of raised eyebrows, and the tap of keys on a computer. We were then ushered out of the courtroom, and made to wait in the wire-mesh cage until the clerk returned with the paperwork. Justice delivered through forms was like a gemstone: produced over immense periods of time and under great pressure. When the form arrived, I was in disbelief that it actually happened. Five hours since we entered Bengal Lock-Up. Too many cups of tea from the cross-legged man with the biscuits.

We walked to a Xerox machine located on an empty field behind the waiting area, where we finally let out a sigh of relief. I urged Rozha to make five, six, copies, handing her a ten-rupee coin; she laughed at my paranoia. For good measure, the camera on my cellphone captured her form for posterity, the document that, in all its obsequiousness, testified to our act of waiting. It went like this:

In the court of the W. 6th JM, Alipore

State vs. Jabedua Rahaman

The humble petition on behalf of the defacto complainant Rozham Ara

Most Respectfully Yours:

That your petitioner amends for prays for returning the almirah

seized by the concerned P.S. Ekbalpur which is lying at the melkhana of the P.S. as such prays for call for I.O. Report.

That unless your Honour allows the call for I.O. Report of the seized almirah, your petitioner will be seriously prejudiced [?- illegible]

In this circumstances it is humbly prayed that your Honour may graciously be pleased to call for I.O. Report for the ends of justice.

(And for this act of kindness your petitioner as in due shall ever pray.)

*

Rozha and her husband had a son. She never told me his name, and I never dared to ask. Of all the things Rozha endured, watching her little boy be hurt was the hardest one. When the boy learned to walk, his father began to intimidate and even hit him. As a playful toddler, when the boy tried to grab his father’s mobile phone, Rozha’s husband grabbed a stick from a tree in the backyard and beat him. The scene is etched in her mind, still.

“Why are you hitting him?” she had asked.

“You be quiet, or I’ll hit you too,” was his response.

“Why are you hitting him?” she had asked.
“You be quiet, or I’ll hit you too,” was his response.

From them on, Rozha tried to protect her son, reminding him to be quiet and well-behaved, especially in the evenings, as soon as his father came home. Rozha prayed to Allah to save this child from the cruelty. She would hold him close to her chest when her husband walked away after outbursts of anger, feeling her hands shake as she buried them in her son’s tousled hair. He began to go to school, her shy boy, who loved chasing frogs, counting flowers, and reading the shapes in the cloud. Growing up in their apartment on the outskirts of the city, with no company from his cousins or grandparents, he explored nature and found amusement and company of plants and creatures.

When Rozha’s son was five years old, he drowned in a lake on his way home from school. She never did find out what happened and why no one got help. Was he running too fast with his classmates, tripped on a shoelace, stumbled down the edge of a hill and into the algae-coated water? Did he get lonely, pause to seek out his reflection in the water, lean forward and find himself submerged? Or did he stop to catch a dragonfly or pet a bird, separating himself from the gang of children who walked home together?

In nightmares, she sometimes saw her husband pushing her son’s head down underwater. They were in the bath; the bucket was only twenty centimeters high or so, but it was enough to drown a boy. Waking up in a cold sweat, she knew this was not what happened: Her husband had been at work, and his initial reaction to the news was shock and grief. It quickly turned into anger, and he redoubled his abuse towards Rozha, blaming her for the death. Rozha’s siblings took turns staying with her in their apartment; her father implored her to move back to Ekbalpore, which eventually she did. The almirah came with them, back to Rozha’s in-laws house—the one next to the primary school—where her son’s school uniform, his hat, his sweet-smelling bedclothes, remained untouched.

Rozha’s husband started to leave the house at night, and hardly concealed the fact that he was having an affair with a woman in the neighborhood. He left home to be with her, and a year later they had a daughter. At this point, Rozha filed a domestic violence case against him for his prior cruelty and his adultery. He then begged her to take him back and said he would not grant her a divorce unless she dropped the case. While she initially felt betrayed, her feelings shifted when Rozha learned that the object of her husband’s current infatuation was not doing well: she had contracted tuberculosis, as had the woman’s baby. Seeing the emaciated woman in tattered clothes shuffling around their neighborhood, Rozha felt pity, and a quiet relief at her own escape. She did not want to resume life with her husband, despite the social costs of being alone. This much was now clear. Though she had moved out long ago and had no incentive to pursue a legal divorce as they were no longer married in her eyes, nor in the eyes of Allah, she ultimately agreed to her former husband’s demand to a “mutual” (a mutual divorce precluding any maintenance claims on her part).

Rozha moved back with her parents. The next decade of her life involved various domestic arrangements: living with her brother in Hong Kong and helping to raise his daughter, moving to her married sister’s home in Metiabruz, and living with her father in an apartment in Ekbalpore after her mother passed away. When I met her, Rozha had just moved to live with a married female friend whose husband was in the Navy and often at sea. The friend’s husband earned well and could support an extra mouth to feed. Rozha stayed in their two-bedroom flat, helped to care for her friend’s three children, shared a bed with her friend and her teenage daughter, and began her sewing work at the NGO.

*

The property release form in our hands, we had one final step. Hailing a taxi, we took the paperwork from the court to the Ekbalpore police station so it could be processed and the report generated, which would then be signed, stamped, notarized, and brought back to court so that the Judge could then authorize the station to release the held property. The cost of a lost form or bureaucratic error in this process was steep for the client, and provided more opportunity for the lawyer’s gain.

Waiting in the police station for an officer to help us, we witnessed a strange scene: a woman wearing a simple sari ran into the room shrieking, crying, in response to which a circle of male officers and community members surrounded her and yelled. She refused to calm down. I wondered if she was a thief, a sex worker, or simply one of so many wronged women. One officer laughed. We stood on the periphery of the scene until it dissipated.

Then we approached with our request and were ushered to the back room where an officer handled forms. Unfortunately, the female police officer who had been helping Rozha with her case thus far was not present. When we explained what needed to the elderly man helping us, he said, “If you want your work done quickly, let there be an exchange.” We refused his request for a bribe, instead naming the woman police officer who was well-respected here. He filed the form. I watched it enter a sea of papers on the ocean of ink that was his desk, gripping the Xerox copies more tightly in my hand, wondering if it would ever re-emerge.

On our way out of the station, we found a friendly officer in a hallway. We asked him where the held property was stored, and he pointed to storage rooms at the back of the station. We took a peek: a whole room full of almirahs jostling each other for space, long and short, wooden and steel, narrow and squat. In the congregation of wardrobes we could not spot Rozha’s ones, but an officer assured us it is there and then shooed us away.

A month later, Rozha called and told me that the police station had finally released the almirah. She had taken it to her sister-in-law’s apartment in Metiabruz, as there was nowhere to keep it where she lived.

Later, she would open it and show me her son’s old clothes (taking out the tiny green kurta he wore on his last Eid, she ran her hands along it as if coaxing the most hesitant tendril in the garden), the Tonka truck he loved to roll across the floor, and the Kashmiri shawl of indigo blue on which her husband had hand-stitched identical flowers of yellow and pink thread.

“He was a talented seamster with a steady hand,” Rozha acknowledged, allowing this compliment of her husband’s handiwork to sit in the room with us. Now, it was Rozha who made a living out of running thread at the NGO. The almirah would at least gather dust in the corner of a room that she considered home. It was complicated. A sister-in-law is not a sister, and a brother is not a father, but at least this was more of a home than the marriage she left behind.

Author’s note: ‘Rozha’ is a pseudonym.