Maybe it was the fact that we were standing in the parking lot of Kozhikode Medical College (KMC), fenced by tilted scooters on their stands, but Brijesh T appeared more a machine than a man. His face was a blank and his movements were mechanical. The building, its corridors, counters and waiting chairs were almost home to him for a good part of the three years his mother was in and out of the hospital after renal failure. And this is where he met Athira, his bride-to-be, in the Dettol-doused dialysis ward of the medical college’s super-speciality wing, where she worked as a lab technician. It is where he finds himself again, days after Athira had been hacked to death by her father, Rajan, in a case of honour killing.

Brijesh holds onto the rear-view mirror of a scooter for support. “All my life, it never occurred to me that I am a dalit, or backward in any manner. I have heard about the discrimination people face, but those were things that happened to others, not me,” says the 27-year-old jawan who suddenly finds himself thrust with a new identity.

One sunny day in the second week of March, Brijesh had just finished a game of football in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, where he is stationed, when he got a phone call from his girlfriend saying she couldn’t bear the torture at home and had left it. Athira was brave like that, with a child’s persistence. She had a job before she turned 20 and believed she was in a position to make life choices. After a quick pit stop at a friend’s home in Kochi, she took a flight to be with Brijesh. The couple found happiness amidst chaos for a day or two. Then their phones began to ring. Following an abduction case filed by her father, the Areecode sub-inspector asked the couple to get back home.

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Ten days before the Supreme Court declared illegal any interventions by khap panchayats to end a marriage between consenting adults, deep in the south, in a small town in Malappuram, Kerala, was the making of an honour killing. On March 16, the claustrophobic cabin of Senod K, Areecode sub- inspector, was so packed to the gills that two of the police officers had to step outside to accommodate the families of Brijesh and Athira, their friends, and a handful of townsmen.

“In front of all these people, when a father approaches the police wanting his daughter back, agreeing and assuring that he would allow her to marry her boyfriend, who should we send an unmarried girl off with — a boy whom she hasn’t yet officially married or her father?” Senod asks without really looking for an answer.

The more Senod talked, the more convinced he became that he wasn’t in the wrong. “Rajan (Athira’s father) was not an alcoholic, he had no criminal records, and he looked after his family. When I looked at him, I saw a worried father who wanted back his only girl child.” So the police convinced the girl that she would be safe at her home, and that the police would come to her aid if there was any trouble.

Like a scene out of the 2017 Malayalam movie Kismat , which chronicled a true inter-faith love story set in Malappuram, Brijesh remembers how the woman constable pressured Athira to abandon him and obey her parents if she desired a happy life. That day, the police had taught Athira the mathematics of love: to measure love in years, they pitted the father who had loved her since her birth against the boy who had loved her for a mere three years.

“Had she felt safe in her house, would she have hurriedly taken a week’s leave from work and come to me? Even as we sat at the police station that day, listening to her father agreeing to get us married, I knew it was too good to be true. All the while, his eyes betrayed him.” Brijesh remembers the many times Rajan had threatened him over phone that he wouldn’t let them live peacefully. But he had thought that the threats were directed at him.

After Athira went back home, Rajan began drinking heavily for two straight days. He drunkenly warned her against going to work. While Brijesh alleges that Athira had approached the police for help at this juncture, Senod denies it.

Kerosene. Hammer. Axe. Knife. Athira very likely saw it all coming. Long before her father burned her trousseau, chased her around the neighbourhood with a kitchen knife, and stabbed her thrice in the chest in a neighbour’s house, where she and her pounding heart were in hiding.

BLINKHONOUR

In cold blood: Brijesh remembers the many times Rajan threatened him over phone that he wouldn’t let the couple live peacefully. But he had thought the threats were directed at him

 

Brijesh recollects waking up in the middle of the night and phoning her to check on her. But her phone was switched off on the afternoon he was busy shopping for the wedding. “I never thought he would do it in broad daylight, with so many witnesses. We shouldn’t have come back, it was a trap.” After his 45 days’ leave, Brijesh will go back alone to Bareilly, to the quarter that had been sanctioned for him and his wife-to-be.

At the KMC, visitors are emptying out after the afternoon visiting hours. The security guard is arguing with a bystander who had misplaced his pass. “Everything is unchanged here,” Brijesh says, yet he feels disoriented. “We have taken this road so many times, I can still see her around.”

Honour killings had been unheard of in Kerala. But it was at the crux of Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, where she says thatthese stories go back to “the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” The right to take life belongs to the state, but in this instance, the life-giver assumed it as his right, while the police became an unwitting accomplice. I ask Senod if he feels guilty for sending Athira back. His reply is straight from the heart, “ Angane thoneetu karyam illalo. Njangal police-ukaar alle ” (I can’t afford to feel that way. We’re policemen).

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Elsewhere in the same district of Malappuram, on March 26, a police station was the venue for an inter-caste wedding — the bride was a cop. A feast was organised on the station premises and the policemen spoke about how this marriage would be a role model for their small town. The social fabric of Malappuram is replete with such dichotomies. Many small towns grapple with the clash of progressive values and deep-rooted casteism.

An Ezhava by birth, Poovathikkandi Rajan had been exposed to the teachings of Sree Narayana Guru, a social reformer born into the same caste. ‘ One Caste, One Religion, One God for man’, ‘Ask not, say not, think not caste,’ he had heard these sayings innumerable times in his growing years. But these slogans of equality failed to shield Athira from the deathly blows her father dealt her, over the caste of the man she wished to marry.

Coincidentally, just before speaking to BL ink , Dr Bushra Beegom RK, professor, department of sociology, University of Kerala, received a distress call from a student who was being physically abused by her husband, while her parents, struggling to clear the debt of her wedding, turned a blind eye and refused to take her in. “The thought doesn’t enter her mind that she probably can manage without a husband and her family,” points out Bushra. “Through serials, movies and songs, we are impressing on a young girl that her aim in life is to find the right man. Even as she pursues an education and a career, in her head she has been trained to believe that she is the responsibility of her father or husband. In such a society, how is there hope for a woman, irrespective of age or marital status, to be treated as an individual?” she asks.

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Owing to the lifelong work of reformers such as Ayyankali and Sree Narayana Guru, Kerala, despite being a caste-ridden society, is also one that is deeply aware that discrimination is regressive. Casteism, however, remains a secret wound, one that is bandaged from time to time and hidden under crisply-pressed clothes. One that bleeds only when poked.

KR Meera, novelist and feminist, who has explored man-woman relationships in her writing, puts the blame on the intellectual gap between men and women in a progressive society. “We have empowered our women, but our men aren’t on the same footing. We continue to live in a society where a father believes that it is his right to live his daughter’s life by making her choices for her. The women in Kerala are aware of their rights, but they are constantly having to deal with men, as well as a society that doesn’t accept an empowered woman. This incident is just a small proof that our society is in a state where fathers aren’t as grown-up as their daughters, husbands aren’t grown-up as their wives, brothers are not as grown-up as their sisters.”

Akshaya Pillai is an independent journalist in Thiruvananthapuram

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