To everyone she spoke to about her marital worries, it seems, Vismaya V Nair also made it clear that she did not want to leave her husband, Kiran Kumar, the man who had put her through a year of harassment for more dowry. For him, accounts say, 1.25 acres of land, 80 sovereigns of gold, and a Toyota Yaris were “scrap”, and the 22-year-old wife a “waste”. In June 2021, a year and 20 days into her marriage, Vismaya died. Eleven months later, Kiran was convicted of dowry death, harassment and abetment of suicide. The court gave him ten years in prison, and the many who had sympathised with the victim, who perhaps knew someone going through something very similar, shook their heads in disbelief. Ten years seemed too little, they murmured, but it was the maximum punishment the lawyers fighting for Vismaya’s justice hoped for.
At her home in Kollam, Vismaya’s parents look resigned, the judge’s verdict bringing momentary feelings of justice. But it is not yet a year since their daughter died, aged only 22. Thrivikraman Nair, the father, says he is going through his punishment for getting his daughter married to a man who asked for a dowry. No parent should ever give away their daughters to men who ask for dowries, he told TNM in an interview.
He also has a word of advice for young women getting married – to not think that they have been abandoned once they get married. Vismaya always had a room here, he says, sitting in the house they once lived together in. “A room built in the colours she wanted… and as long as we have food, she’d have too. Father and mother never abandon daughters but these children (the daughters) think of what the society will say, of the shame it may bring the family. Vismaya hid a lot from me,” Thrivikraman says.
The question is, what led Vismaya to think in those lines, fear the society, and hide unpleasant truths from the family she loved. She had left home only a year ago, till then led a “free life” in her father’s words. Photos framed in the house show her having fun with the parents and her brother, Vijith. When and how, in those years up to her early 20s, did she pick up these “lessons” of keeping up face? Why did she think the facade of a happy marriage was more important than life itself?
In the judgment order that came out Wednesday, quite a few witness statements corroborate one thing: Vismaya didn’t want the marriage to end. Despite the torture, the evident signs of physical assault, she told those she confided in: she said she loved Kiran and wanted to make the marriage work.
In January 2021, after a painful episode of watching the daughter and the son (Vismaya’s brother) get thrashed by Kiran at their front porch, Thrivikraman had gone to the police, but it ended in a “compromise”. No complaint got registered. Two days later, Vismaya, who was dropped at her parents’ house, went back to her marital home with her father to get something. But once there, “Vismaya unilaterally decided to stay there for the remaining examinations,” her father stated. Vismaya was doing her Bachelors in Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery. Her father added, “Actually she feared the social blame [of leaving the marriage] and that is why, she abruptly decided to continue her stay in the matrimonial home.”
Vismaya feared the social backlash, according to her father. Dr Revathy, her sister-in-law, had similar thoughts. Vismaya, who had at one point, revealed all her problems to Revathy, reduced contact later on. Once, when Revathy sent her the contact of Women’s Cell to raise a complaint against her harassment, Vismaya “preferred to face the situation by hiding the brutalities on her,” Revathy’s statement said.
At the time Revathy and Vijith were getting married, Vismaya was again at her parents’ place, taken home after they saw how unhappy she was at Kiran’s place when they visited with wedding invitations. There were talks of dissolving the marriage after Vismaya spoke out about the agony she’d been through. But weeks later, Kiran came along and took her to his place again. Revathy, in her statement, said that she felt, “Vismaya was trying to avoid a social stigma.”
Vismaya knew the kind of treatment that awaited her at Kiran’s. He hadn’t liked the car he got as part of dowry. He wanted 100 sovereigns of gold and got 80. And every chance he got, he would abuse her for it – in words and deeds – the various witness statements say. Knowing what was in store for her, it might seem puzzling that she kept going back. It is not, really, if you are familiar with the way families function and girls are raised in Kerala. To the daughters who call with complaints, most parents give “advice” to this effect: If you are called names, adjust. If you are slapped, let it go. If you are beaten black and blue, bear with it. But never get out of a marriage.
Thrivikraman, in the many statements he gave the media over the last year, said that he was in the dark, only the mother knew how much Vismaya suffered. In the TNM interview he says “mothers are like that”, they tell their daughters to tolerate everything, because it is easy to break things and difficult to put them back together. If Vismaya grew up with the belief that women are to tolerate anything that came their way after marriage – beatings or bruises – these words from the mother might have reinforced it.
An audio clipping of a conversation between Vismaya and her father also emerged recently. In the audio, Vismaya could be heard telling her father of the torture she was going through and how she cannot bear it any longer. She was scared, she’d be beaten, she wanted to come back, she said, but never quite seemed to be able to stay put and not try to give her marriage another shot.
While Vismaya’s parents couldn’t save their daughter, the more bitter truth is that Vismaya didn’t believe she was worthy of being saved if she left her abusive marriage. Sajitha, her mother, said in her statement that “Vismaya was willing to adjust and adapt with the strange ambiance in the matrimonial home”. She corroborated her husband’s statement about the night Kiran beat up both their children, and Vismaya chose to go back shortly afterward. For Vismaya’s return to Kiran’s house, “she [mother] ascribed the reason that, in view of the upcoming marriage of her brother, it is not desirable to stay in the parental home and if she does so, the neighbours may make sly innuendos,” the judgement convicting Kiran notes. It is not clear if it was Vismaya’s opinion or the mother’s. Either way, she went back.
Beyond social pressures, it seems that Vismaya, like many young girls and women, picked up an idea about love that was based in misogyny and subjugation of the woman. Nipin Niravath, who calls himself a ‘mentalist’, and was approached by Vismaya for help in solving her marital issues, also corroborated that despite the abuse, Vismaya maintained that she loved Kiran. He spoke of Vismaya revealing that once Kiran had stomped her with his boots. Nevertheless, “she wanted to resume the matrimony with” him.
Thrivikraman elaborates in the interview, “She told the mentalist that the first man to touch her is Kiran and she couldn’t leave him.”
Another dusty old idea that girls are raised with: the importance of virginity and chastity, the first chapters of being woman: you need to remain a virgin till you are married, and once you are married, then that’s it, no one else can touch you or love you. Your body, and the right to touch it, primarily remains with the man you’ve married, girls are taught. Vismaya, perhaps absorbed this lesson very early in life, and thought it best to stick with it through thick and thin. Not the showering of verbal abuse coming within days of her marriage, not the insults (Revathy’s statement said Kiran body-shamed her and called her ‘Suppandi’ – a comic character who is stupid), not the stomping with the boot and the physical hurt, not forbidding her contact with her family, not even the lack of love, seemed to deter her from wanting to maintain the marriage.
Sajitha, the mother, stated that even when Vismaya was living with them, “she loved her husband so much.” Vidhya Muraleedhar, Vismaya’s friend that she chatted a lot with and knew her situation, stated that even when the parents decided to dissolve the marriage, Vismaya didn’t want to. “Vismaya was not in favour of the dissolution of marriage and she had a deep-seated intimacy towards the accused,” the judgment quotes Vidhya as saying.
Vismaya’s “love” for Kiran may seem astounding to people unfamiliar with how insidious and normalised domestic violence is, and that it continues to be, to an extent, justified within matrimony. It can be further confusing for a young woman growing up with such ideals and then experiencing physical intimacy with the same man who beat her in the day. She hadn’t known any better and didn’t plan to. Walking out of a marriage, of her first relationship, the possibility of a life after that, all of it must have seemed too remote, too difficult. Every time she went to her parents’, after another episode of unbearable torture, Vismaya kept returning to her marital home. The idea of a sacred married life so drilled into her, the shame of a divorce so scary, that she - like many women continue to - felt compelled to be abused over and over again. Perhaps if she were older or had more exposure, had help for her mental health, Vismaya might have known she had far better, more liberating options.
(With inputs from Geetika Mantri)