The Grave Outside Aizawl

The first time I saw Sai was in a photograph pinned to the inside wall of a closet in Delhi. She was standing in a pink frock, looking sullenly into the camera like a petulant child forced to stand still when she would rather have been doing something else, like tossing a ball and chasing puppies. I remember this photograph and I remember her sister, Marie, describing the whole family to me. For a year every time that closet was opened, Sai peeped out at me. Eleven years later I met Sai for the first time on 19th April 2009, buried in the hills outside of Aizawl, six-feet under. I swallowed a lump in my throat and cried myself to sleep that night. I was grieving for a child I had never known, a person whose voice I had never heard. All that kept coming back to me was her face from inside the closet, her body in the pink frock, her body under the earth. It all seemed like such a waste.

I stood staring at Sai’s grave, prayed for a while as Marie stood beside me and bowed her head. The sun turned orange and sank behind the hills and after a while Sai’s grave winked out of sight. I do not know how long the two of us stood there in silence. There was nothing else both of us could do. We drove back to my hotel and talked about how our lives had changed in eleven years. I was Marie’s first ‘mainland’ Indian friend to ever visit Mizoram. But I was bitter and angrier than I had been for a long time. I knew even without being told that Sai had died violently. Marie just wasn’t telling me how.

“So what happened to her?” I finally asked Marie.

“We got a call one night from the Delhi police. They asked us if she was our family. They told us she had died at AIIMS.”

“Was she sick?”

“No they found her by the side of the road in May 2007. One inspector Khan found her and they took her to AIIMS. She was there for a few days and must have given our information to the authorities. The cop himself was a minority. He did his best to help us.”

“What did the doctors say?”

‘Two liters of blood in her stomach. She had been hemorrhaging for some time.”

“Then she was obviously physically abused.” I hesitated, but I needed to know. “Was she sexually abused as well?”

“Yes, it was clear she had been beaten up. But we don’t know about rape.”

“What else did the police find?”

“They tried to pursue it. It seemed she had an African boyfriend and was into drugs.”

This was the third story I had come across of supposedly organized groups of ‘African’ students, who would indulge college going Indian women and involve them in drug-peddling rackets. While it was unclear to the police what Sai’s level of involvement was in the racket, there was no doubt she was also a drug user.

In her last days at the hospital twenty-year-old Sai had shown withdrawal symptoms, been abusive and shivered uncontrollably as the hospital staff had tried to calm her down. Somewhere in that phase she had been coherent enough to provide an address and a phone number in Aizawl. Even while her siblings were booking their tickets to Delhi, the police had called to say she had not survived the night. Marie had identified Sai’s body in the morgue and made arrangements to bring her back to Mizoram. She had also tried to follow the case up with police. There were no leads. Sai was a recluse. Her Mizo friends did not know who her boyfriend was and they did not include her in their activities. The so-called ‘boyfriend’ had disappeared somewhere into the gullies and by lanes of Delhi and would probably not be tracked down.

“What was Sai anyway to anyone in Delhi?” said Marie taking a drag of her cigarette. “Just another northeastern girl found by the side of the road.”

Marie’s cynicism was not lost on me. The category of the ‘northeast’ as a cluster of similar states has been reified in the imagination of ‘mainland’ India. Most north Indians do not know the difference between a Khasi and a Mizo, and quite truthfully, neither did I till I began studying the region. However, the essentialization of the northeast and its people has been complete and constructed over decades. In discussions with women in the northeast they say that they are more likely to be socially and sexually preyed upon in Delhi, than women of other ethnicities, because of a stereotype that has defined them as sexually promiscuous and ‘available’. They struggle with the consequences of this stereotype. They are forced to be more aggressive than usual in their dealings with people, and, many feel their natural dressing habits are curbed because they have to deal with the manner in which north Indians have a tendency to censure ‘inappropriate’ dressing with their gaze.

Northeastern people are blacklisted amongst certain communities of landlords for their non-vegetarian, treyf food habits. They are often pejoratively referred to as “chinkis” or “kanchas”. Whether we want to admit it or not the fact is there is widespread racism against the northeastern people in the rest of India. Racism! There I said it! Racism is not a fully developed debate in our country, for, the logic goes, how can a country of brown-skinned people be racist? Is that not something endemic to Western countries? It is about time that we began talking about levels of racism within our own country. Whether it is forcing dark-skinned women to be fair by artificial cosmetic products, or referring to Black people as “kallus” or “negroes”, or expressing racism in the form of excluding certain groups of people like northeasterners and Kashmiri’s from renting places; the fact remains we Indians are an extremely bigoted lot.

The problem really gets complicated when we impute some qualities to certain races and ethnic groups. The associations in the mind become permanent. For instance, say “Muslim” and many would automatically think “terrorist”. “Mizo girl” would mean “easy” for many simply because she belonged to a certain ethnic stock where the women had been unnaturally and incorrectly defined as sexually promiscuous. There is tyranny, which comes with such categorizations, and these are not imagined word associations or categories.

We can only speculate what happened to Sai. She may have been the victim of a hate-crime, abuse by her boyfriend, or like many other women in Delhi, another statistic in the crime graph against women of all ethnicities. We will not know. But what we do know is that the police did not pursue the case possibly because Sai was Mizo. It did not seem important enough to pursue when other more high profile cases were probably around waiting to be flashed on our news networks. Everyone forgot about Sai because she was a minority from a state that commands a grand total of one seat in the Lok Sabha.

This is at one level a story about representation. In the US there is a term to describe the importance given to cases of violence against white women or their disappearance as compared to how much coverage similarly treated black women get. It is called the Missing White Woman Syndrome (MWWS). Some stories are just more newsworthy. People would rather consume a story about a white Natalee Holloway than a black Natalee Holloway. Similarly, urban young women in India are more likely to make headlines once felled by violence than a similarly placed woman from a minority community.

Sai came from a broken home and from a society that was uniquely ordered and controlled by the Presbyterian Church.

The extremely strict norms of permissible behavior, social interaction and the structuring of life around the Church, its looming presence in politics and society had created, said Marie, youth that “went crazy” when they went to other cities. A second interviewee, who wished to stay anonymous, said Mizo youth did everything in extremes in Bangalore and Delhi. Many could not cope with curriculum requirements and switched streams often jumping from sciences to arts.

Sai had fought to go study in Delhi. She lasted all of two years there. Her family said she was conscious of her differentness in Delhi, never an introvert she turned into one. She became a loner, grew quieter and got into a relationship that no one seemed to know anything about. The drug use started with the relationship and possibly ended with it too and her death.

Did the big city do her in? Or was it her own society that had curtailed her to the extent that she could not adjust to the pressures of urban living and contestation. Or was it just a lousy boyfriend? The blame game could possibly go on forever but her family thinks it was a little bit of all. And, as Marie stated, there was lack of a social network of Mizos that could present a united front and take care of their own in Delhi by recreating a social geometry of the displaced. Others disagreed. They said such networks were in place in Delhi University. The Mizos did have Church services every week in Green Park. It seemed Sai had just not known how to tap into one of these support systems.

Twenty-year-old Sai had been incapable of dealing with urban adult life. The tragic and violent end that she faced alone, inconsolable, angry, depressed and despondent reveals the extent of her mental trauma. To fit in, be part of a social scene where she could be included and seen as popular, her sister commented, she caved into social pressure about substance abuse and its “coolness” quotient. But the unraveling, I think, began long ago. It began with coming from a uniquely ordered society, transitioning to a city that can only function at a frenzied pace, being exposed to the rigors of urban living, competition and lacking the skills to cope with upheavals, and being marked as different.

The awareness of being the “other” is a unique one and can be psychologically crippling. I am an “other” in the US, an “other” in the northeast. Sai was an “other” amongst many in Delhi. She was probably conscious of her disempowerment, of her status as being part of the lot that didn’t count as much, the lot that could easily be excluded. Her loss of control over her social dynamics, her failure to deal with peer pressure and stresses of urban living compounded the choices before her. Not surprisingly, in the absence of a mature support system the choices she made were self-destructive, but probably seemed rational to her at the time because in many ways they empowered her temporarily, however false that empowerment may sound to our ears.

Sai simply ceased in May 2007. But like her many young men and women from Mizoram, from the northeast struggle to come to terms with their identities, face discrimination in various ways and ultimately find themselves ghettoized into small communities in urban India. Politically, the consequences of this process are translated into a macro-level distrust between the central Indian state and the entire region, and its disparate units.

Sai’s story is intensely personal for me. She was someone I knew and didn’t know. I knew about her childhood and her family, yet I never spoke to her. I knew who she was through her sister, yet I never once thought of her as the unknown Mizo girl by the side of the road. In writing about her death, trying to reconstruct her life through the eyes of those who knew her, by piecing together a story, a narrative of what became of her and how it all ended for her; I hope to resurrect her.

So I stood looking at her grave and thought about what I would say. This was it!