After a Marriage for Love, a Death for ‘Honor’
A Young Bride’s Murder Links and Divides Two Continents
By DeNeen L. Brown and Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 1, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25827-2003Sep30.html
VANCOUVER, B.C.
In the cold end, it was her own mother who gave the final order to cut the young woman’s throat, who gave the order for the gang to leave the body in a farmhouse. At least that’s what the police in India say.
They say that the mother, an upstanding woman in Vancouver’s Punjabi community, spoke into her cell phone across an ocean, told the men: “Kill her.” And with the order, with the death of Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, a beautiful 25-year-old Indian Canadian woman known as Jassi, the family’s honor was restored. At least that is what they say, anyway.
Indian police have issued arrest warrants and sought the extradition of Sidhu’s mother, Malkit Kaur Sidhu, and the mother’s brother, Surjit Singh Badesha. Two years after the request Sidhu and Badesha have not been arrested nor have they been extradited. Through lawyers, the two have denied the charges.
“We don’t anticipate any criminal charges anytime soon,” says Cpl. Rhonda Stoner of the Ridge-Meadows Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “You have to have direct evidence and witnesses to testify and evidence to substantiate a criminal charge. . . . At this point, we don’t have that. It is very troubling that someone leaves our country and is murdered.”
Much of the case remains a mystery in Canada, a tale of intrigue. Despite all the trappings of this North American culture, with its human rights laws and politically powerful women, police and cultural experts say Jassi became caught in the wrath of her powerful Jat Sikh family after she married a poor rickshaw driver from her mother’s village and without her family’s permission. And although she lived in a suburb, worked at a mall and had citizenship here, police say being Canadian could not save her from one of the most ancient and little understood cruelties still committed against women: honor killings.
The family, which moved to Canada in the 1970s, has said little publicly, other than they’re grieving for Jassi and saddened by the charges. Badesha, Jassi’s uncle, told reporters that the family opposed the marriage because the husband was from Jassi’s mother’s village and has the same family name, which is said to be the same as marrying a family member.
“In our culture this is not acceptable,” he said. “But we did not kill her.”
Just like in an ancient story of forbidden love, there is a barrier, a rich family and a poor family, suspicion, a sleeping potion, and a desperation between two people to be together.
‘Love at First Sight’
In India, Sukhwinder Singh Sidhu, whose nickname is Mithoo, clings to memories of his first love. It was an afternoon in December 1994 when he first saw Jassi in the village of Jagraon, in the Punjab region of Northwest India. “We passed each other and we looked at each other for a moment,” Mithoo recalls. She was wearing a traditional salwar kameez dress. “She had her cousin with her. I was alone.”
Mithoo stands to the right of his mother and younger brother in the doorway of their home in the Punjab village of Konke Kalan. (Rama Lakshmi - The Washington Post)
Mithoo is talking in the courtyard of his family’s modest home in Konke Kalan, with a photo of Jassi leaning against a tree with bridal bangles and another of the two of them in front of a fake backdrop of the Taj Mahal. The image emphasizes how fleeting their time together was: a fake Taj Mahal and a surreal marriage.
“It was love at first sight,” Mithoo says. “Not a word was said. Then I mustered enough courage and went up to her cousin, who I had seen in the village before.” The cousin told Mithoo that Jassi was staying at her maternal uncle’s house. “I didn’t know she was from Canada then.”
Mithoo went home dazed. That night he sat in his courtyard, looking up at the house of Jassi’s uncle, the big house next door to his own. “Then she came out and stood on the terrace and looked toward me,” he recalls. Then she went back into the house and out the door and he saw her ride off on a motor scooter with her cousin. Her cousin got off the bike and Jassi rode toward Mithoo’s house, then stopped halfway, pretending the bike had stalled. “My mother heard Jass calling out to help and asked me to go help her. I went up to her and said hello. I asked what has happened. She said the scooter won’t start. I took my time to figure it, although I knew there was nothing wrong with it.”
That was the first time they were close enough to touch. Jassi was wearing bluejeans and a black T-shirt. “She asked my name. Said she hadn’t seen me before. Then she asked what I did.” He told her he played Kabaddi, a game popular in India, and sometimes he drove a rickshaw. Mithoo, 18 at the time, had never spoken with a girl this close and he was trembling. He couldn’t talk straight. Jassi’s Punjabi wasn’t fluent. After three days of staring from the roof, the two finally were able to spend more time together at a mutual friend’s house.
“We sat in the living room and talked. She said she didn’t want to go back to Canada. She said she liked me. And now she had made up her mind that I would be everything for her. I also wanted to confess my feelings to her, but she beat me to it.”
He told her he was poor. “Whatever I have, this is it. But I will love you a lot. . . . I said this is no match. You are in Canada. I am in India. You are rich. I am poor. Our parents would also oppose.”
A thin wail of wedding music blares in the distance over the walls.
The Courtship
For two years Jassi and Mithoo spoke by telephone and wrote love letters. She wrote hers in English. (“Someone would read it out to me in Punjabi,” Mithoo says.) On the phone, they would cry. He wanted to sell his family land and move to Canada.
By then, her mother wanted Jassi to marry. Jassi told her she wanted to go to India to find a mate. “When she came, we used to meet after dark,” Mithoo says. “I would go and stand outside her room and we would talk across the window. She would keep saying, ‘Take me away. They will marry me off to a stranger.’ By now, I was also desperate to marry her.”
Together with an aunt of Jassi’s who was sympathetic to their plight, Mithoo says, "we made a plan. I used to bring her sleeping pills and her aunt would mix it with the food at dinnertime and make sure everybody was fast asleep. And then I would jump the wall and tiptoe into the house after 11 p.m. and meet Jass in her room. She’d hold me and cry a lot. She used to say, ‘I don’t want to go back to my parents.’ "
They decided to marry quickly and secretly. Jassi escaped by telling her parents, who’d come to India to help select a husband, that she was going to a relative’s house. “She came out and met me. . . . My friends were there as witnesses. She was in a red salwar-kameez. We had bought the red bangles for her. She wore some gold jewelry. It was a simple wedding. It took about 30 to 45 minutes. The priest asked why there weren’t any elders. I told him I was visiting. Then we went to the city of Ludhiana and then to the state of Chandigarh and stayed in different hotels.”
By the time Jassi left for Canada with her parents, they had become suspicious of her absences. “Toward the end of their stay, they started to threaten me and started telling me to stay away from their daughter,” Mithoo says.
Back home, Jassi applied for a visa to have Mithoo immigrate and sent the documents to him. “When my papers arrived, my parents found out. Word went around the village. Soon everybody was talking about it. My mother was very angry because I had not involved the elders in the family in my decision to marry.”
Jassi’s parents found Mithoo’s letters and immigration papers, and destroyed them, he says. Then they filed a complaint with the Indian police against Mithoo, saying that Jassi had been kidnapped and was married at gunpoint. “They kept telling her to leave me, otherwise they would kill me,” he says.
Police in India began searching for Mithoo, but by then he was in hiding. “I called Jass and confronted her and she told me the truth,” he recalls. “Jass even faxed a letter to the Jagraon police station saying that it was a false case and that she had married willingly. But the police wanted her in person to withdraw the case.”
In Jagraon, Mithoo received anguished phone calls from Jassi half a world away saying she was being held prisoner in her house without food. She escaped with the help of a friend, borrowed some money and flew to India. That was May 12, 2000. She and Mithoo went together to the Jagraon police station to withdraw her parents’ complaint. Jassi’s mother found out where she was. “Her mother called for her and spoke very lovingly to her. . . . Then she wanted to talk to me,” Mithoo says. "I first said no, but she kept calling to speak to me. . . .
“She said, ‘You have not done a good thing. You don’t know our power.’ I told her what’s happened has happened. But she kept talking of family honor.” He says he didn’t tell Jassi what her mother said because she still believed her mother had forgiven her.
Then one evening in June, they left to go to the dry cleaners. “I didn’t have my relative’s car, so we took the scooter. She was happy. We went shopping for the marriage party. We had dinner at a restaurant after that. I never thought they would attack me. I thought they would maybe trap me in false charges. . . . But I never imagined it would come to murder.”