what they already owed before they died, and could afford no more.
Shortly after her first anniversary, the bride was dead in a “kitchen accident” involving spilled fuel from the cook stove and a match. The groom’s parents were arrested, tried, and found not guilty due to lack of evidence.
That was not the end of the story, either. In a final, macabre twist that, had Kate not been a cop she might not have believed, two years later the groom was offered his dead bride’s younger sister in marriage. The girl’s family was forever “besmirched” (the article’s evocative word) by their daughter’s death, and could not hope to find a clean husband for the girl who remained. The groom was reported to be thinking it over while the prospective new wife’s family decided if its dowry might stretch to a refrigerator.
The whole story sounded fantastic to the point of absurdity, from the motor scooter dowry to the blithe assumption that the dead woman’s own sister might be willing to walk into this nightmare. Kate had been a cop long enough to have seen a little of everything, but this tale stretched credibility.
However, there were other such stories in the file—a dozen, fifteen, twenty-five sets of names, places, and “accidents,” Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and otherwise, from lower-, middle-, and upper-class families. It was appalling.
“Jesus,” Kate said finally. “This sounds like something out of the Dark Ages.”
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it? An indication of the complete and utter insignificance of women, just a burden to everyone. And the frightful irony of women oppressing women. But you know, I do honestly love India. I’ve been there half a dozen times and I’m only beginning to see the country. I love the place, the people, the way it opens my eyes and my heart to go there. Is your coffee okay?”
Kate hadn’t even noticed its arrival. She picked up her mug obediently and took a swallow. It was not hot, but it helped take the taste of those articles out of her mouth.
“And I detest the country as well,” Roz went on. “The people can be so incredibly rude, and gracious at the same time. They can be cruel and hateful, greedy and so affectionate.
“They call India the meeting place of opposites, and it’s true—extreme opposites, too, not the watered-down sorts of contrast we have in this country. There are the Jains, who wear masks and sweep ahead of themselves as they walk so they don’t cause harm to so much as an ant, while at the other extreme there’re these robbers who live in the hills and come down to murder and pillage, and they make movies about them, have fan clubs, everything. And of course every so often there’s a paroxysm of religious-slash-cultural hatred and a few thousand people are slaughtered.
“God, don’t get me started on India,” she said, although in truth Kate had been wondering how to get her stopped. “The ironies would make you howl. A people that worships a warrior-goddess, a religion that clearly says the main god is completely helpless without feminine energy, a country that has had a woman prime minister when we can’t even get one as a vice president, at the same time allows children of seven and eight to be married off, aborts female fetuses right and left, and sees six or eight thousand dowry deaths a year. Ten thousand? More—who knows?
“I’m sorry, Kate—you’re wondering what on earth I’m rattling on about. What I’m trying to say here is that we now have a bride burning in the city of San Francisco, a city you have sworn to protect. What are you, as a police officer, going to do about it?”
Kate was tired, overworked, and unconvinced, and she had no desire to sit at the receiving end of Roz Hall’s histrionic ire.
“Roz, enough with the drama, okay?” she chided. “I don’t work at City Hall. If you have evidence of a homicide—evidence, not suspicion—let me see it, and I’ll pass it on to whoever’s in charge of the case.”
Roz’s head snapped up and she fixed Kate with a look that for an instant had the hardened cop beginning to quail, just as the church members in the other room had done. Roz was a woman magnificent in her rage, her eyes glittering with it, her hair seeming to crackle around her head. Kate half expected sparks to come from her fingertips and smoke from her ears, and she moved quickly to placate this particular warrior-goddess.
“Roz, my friend, please. I’m just a cop. If someone killed a girl in this city then, as you said, it’s my job to put them behind bars. Ninety-nine percent of the time, if someone is murdered, there’s evidence. If this death is being dismissed as an accident, then of course I’ll ask for a closer look. But I do need to know why you think this girl was killed. Other than the fact that a lot of women on the other side of the world are killed by their husbands’ families,” she added.
Reason succeeded where honest emotion would have had Roz reaching for her Rolodex to summon lawyers and tame media moguls into battle. The waves of brute energy subsided, helped by the slowing effects of the drink. “Right,” said Roz, making an effort. “So, what do you need to know?”
Kate reached into her pocket and drew out her notebook and pen. “We could start with her name,” she suggested.
Chapter 8
THE GIRL HAD BEEN born Pramilla Barot a little less than sixteen years before in a small village on the border of Rajasthan and Gujerat, the disastrous third daughter of a struggling farmer and his hardworking but increasingly ill wife. When Pramilla was seven, her mother died giving birth to a son. The farmer, although he had been very fond of his wife, considered it a fair trade.
His first daughter made a successful and gloriously inexpensive marriage to a young schoolteacher with radical ideas, who declared himself willing to take the girl with only the bare minimum of dowry, and that to stay in the hands of his new wife. None of the wedding guests actually approved of this bizarre notion (although in truth it was closer to ancient dowry traditions than it was to the modern interpretation of dowry as little more than payment to any family willing to take a daughter off her father’s hands). Secretly, however, all the fathers were more than a little envious of how easily Barot had gotten off, and all the mothers were more than a little softhearted at the romance of the thing.
So it was that Barot embarked on the marriage arrangements of his second daughter with mixed feelings, knowing how easy it could be, but fearing that karma would come around and kick him in the teeth.
It did so, with a vengeance. The young man identified by the astrologer as an ideal match looked good enough on paper, as it were (although Barot was not exactly literate), but when his family got into the act, Barot felt as if he’d clasped a basket of boa constrictors to his chest.
They squeezed. Oh, not at first—oh no. Only when arrangements were in their final stages, when the first gifts had been exchanged and everyone knew the chosen date, did the boy’s harping mother flex her muscles and bare her teeth. The television chosen was not big enough for her fine son. The kitchen stove Barot was providing was inadequate. The rupees must be increased to cover the expenses they were incurring.
Pulling out was impossible. The girl would be marked as having been tried and found wanting, rejected by one man and therefore of questionable value to the rest. Barot’s future in-laws were careful never to drive their demands so high he was forced to withdraw entirely, but they upped the ante in stages that made him gulp, and tear his hair, but in the end submit.
The alternative, after all, was to be burdened forever with an unmarriageable daughter.
The marriage took place, the demands continued after the wedding parties returned to their homes, but by vast good fortune (and a vast number of expensive
Demands ceased, Barot took a deep breath at last—and looked at his fourteen-year-old Pramilla.
There was simply no money for her to get married. If Barot managed to raise it, he and his noble young son would starve. She was a pretty little thing, to be sure, and as bright and as helpful to her menfolk as a father could ask, but there was still no money.
There were offers, yes. A neighbor with an unfortunate facial deformity that made his speech nearly impossible to comprehend was willing to take the girl with only a small dowry. And a farmer in the next village was looking for a pretty young wife, but he was of a lower caste, and besides, Barot had heard talk about the man, and was too fond of his third daughter to feel easy about handing her over to a man who had not only gone through three wives already (all of whom had died of unfortunate accidents) but was older than Barot himself.
So Barot went to see his cousin and the cousin’s wife, who between them seemed to know everything and everyone between Jaipur and Delhi. It was the wife who came up with the idea of the advertisement in the Delhi
