The living dead

bangalore: the mood within is dull and dreary. you walk in with a foreboding that all is not pleasant inside. your hunch is right. inside the women''s destitute home, the ambience is bleak, and the faces of the inmates uniformly grim. the younger women are going about the daily chores, the older women look wasted and the invalid are confined to bed.some in the twilight of their lives are impatiently waiting to give up the ghost, their only deliverance from years of loneliness and bitterness. the younger lot are not the least euphoric about womanhood or the flush of youth. patience is already wearing thin. ten years hence, they know life will be ditto what it is today -- empty, lonely, meaningless -- except for the years added on. years of deadweight. they bond because they realise that the sum and substance of their brief dalliance with life is the same, only the players and the circumstances are different. in their world shorn of solace, it is comforting thought --that like them there are others who have been through fire. literally. your eyes rest on sumathi, momentarily. you look away instinctively as the ugly sight makes your stomach churn. what is left of her face are just charred remains and skin stretched to the extreme where her neck should be. there is no chin, the lower lip just hangs and mouthing words is a gargantuan task. that''s not all. her hands are a mangled mass of charred flesh. and she tells you, the rest of her body is as bad. sumathi is a discard. nobody wants her, not her family -- they have other daughters to marry off. not her husband or his family. why would they rally behind her? the young woman holds them responsible for her life going up in smoke. sumathi is a tell-tale example of a barbaric society. where avarice and the lure of the lucre cannibalises man. squarely put, sumathi is a victim of dowry torture. an act so commonplace in indian society today, she becomes another figure in the statistics. in the destitute home, all the inmates are victims of dowry harassment and desertion. in one stroke, the lives they had embarked on with promise and expectation have destroyed them, for ever. today they are trying to scrape up whatever dignity that''s left to lead honourable lives. for their own sakes, at least. sumathi''s story is tragic. when she was 18, her parents arranged her marriage with someone they perceived a "good catch" , totally against her wishes. sumathi wanted to enrol in a nursing college. trouble started within months after the marriage. suddenly she was alone. her parents were helpless and her in-laws tyrants. her husband pitched in with his family as their orchestrations for more dowry grew louder and vicious. taken aback, sumathi acquiesced at first, but later, when she held her ground, they rained blows. physical torture followed, destroying the child in her womb. the last straw was when her mother-in-law, in collusion with her son, doused sumathi with kerosene, lit a match on her and left her in a locked house to perish. she was rescued by neighbours and rushed to hospital. she suffered third degree burns, but survived. shattered, she refuses to see deeper meaning in her survival. she should have been just left to die in a ball of fire, she says. today, she moves about like an apparition in the destitute home. she knows she is finished. but life is not for her to take. live it she will. as for her killers? the last she heard, they had gone scot-free on a legal toehold they got in a lower court. the case has however moved to a higher court. sumathi awaits justice. only that gives meaning to her life. meerajohn@indiatimes.com.