Hear Usha Narayane's Story

Story from Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

The fetid ditches of Kasturba Nagar ooze sewage, stink, and hopelessness. The inhabitants are Dalits-Untouchables. Most of them have dark complexions and signal in their clothing and bearing that they are poor. They live in shacks on winding dirt lanes, which turn to a stew of sewage and mud whenever it rains. The men of Kasturba Nagar drive rickshaws or work in menial or dirty jobs, and the women work as housemaids, or they stay home and raise the children.

In this improbable setting, I, Usha Narayane, shook off despair and thrived despite the odds. I'm a self-assured women of twenty-eight: short, with long black hair, a round face, and thick eyebrows. In a land like India that has long suffered from malnutrition, pounds can be prestigious, and I have just enough weight to hint at my own success. I talk nonstop.

My father, Madhukar Narayane, is a Dalit, too, but he is also a high school graduate with a good job at the telephone company. My mother, Alka, is also unusually well-educated: Although she married at age fifteen, she has a ninth-grade education and is literate. Both parents were determined that their children get a solid education as an escape route from Kasturba Nagar. So they lived frugally and saved every rupee to educate their children-and they accomplished something heroic. In a slum where no other person had ever gone to college, all five Narayane children, including me, graduated from university.

My mother was delighted and a bit horrified at what this education had wrought in me. “She’s fearless,” Alka said. “She doesn’t get frightened by anyone.” I graduated with a degree in hotel management and seemed destined to manage a fine hotel somewhere in India. I already had escaped Kasturba Nagar and was preparing to take a hotel job when I came back for a visit-and collided with the ambitions and self-assurance of Akku Yadav.

Akku Yadav was, in a sense, the other “success” of Kasturba Nagar. He was a higher-caste man who had turned an apprenticeship as a small-time thug into a role as a mobster and king of the slum. He ruled a gang of hoodlums who controlled Kasturba Nagar and who robbed, murdered, and tortured with impunity. The Indian authorities would have prevented a gangster from preying so ruthlessly on a middle-class neighborhood. But in slums with Dalits or low-caste residents, the authorities rarely intervene except to accept cash bribes, and so gangsters sometimes emerge in such places as absolute rulers.

For fifteen years, Akku yadav had terrorized Kasturba Nagar while shrewdly building a small business empire. One of his specialties was the threat of rape to terrorize anyone who might stand up to him. Murder left inconvenient piles of bodies, requiring bribes to keep the police at bay, while rape is so stigmatized that the victims could usually be counted on to stay silent. Sexual humiliation was thus an effective and low-risk strategy to intimidate challengers and to control the community.

According to neighbors in the slum, Akka Yadav once raped a women right after her wedding. Another time he stripped a man naked and burned him with cigarettes, then forced him to dance in front of his sixteen-year-old daughter. They say he took one woman, Asho Bhagat, and tortured her infront of her daughter and several neighbors by cutting off her breasts. Then he sliced her into pieces on the street. One of the neighbors, Avinash Tiwari, was horrified by Asho’s killing and planned to go to the police, so Akku Yadav butchered him as well. Akku Yadav continued his assaults. He and his men gang-raped a woman named Kalma just ten days after she gave birth, and she was so mortified that she doused herself with kerosene and burned herself to death. The gang pulled another woman out of her house when she was seven months pregnant, stripped her naked, and raped her on the road in public view. The more barbaric the behavior, the more the population was cowed into acquiescence.

Twenty-five families moved away from Kasturba Nagar, but more Dalits had no choice. They adjusted by pulling their daughters out of school and keeping them inside their homes where no one could see them. Vegetable vendors steered clear of Kasturba Nagar, so housewives had to trek to distant markets to buy food. And as long as Akku Yadav targeted only Dalits, the police didn’t interfere.

“The police were very class conscious,” I noted. “So if you were lighter-skinned, then they thought you were higher class and they might help. But they would swoop down on anyone darker skinned or unshaven. Often, people went to the police to complain, and then the police arrested them,” I said. One woman went to the police to report that she had been gang-raped by Akku Yadav and his thugs; the police responded by gang-raping her themselves.

My family was the only one that Akku Yadav didn’t torment. He gave us a wide berth, wary that our education might give us the power to complain effectively. In developing countries, tormenting the illiterate is usually risk-free; preying on the educated is more perilous. But finally, when I was back for my visit, we met head on.

Akku Yadav had just raped a thirteen-year-old girl. He was feeling cocky. He and his men went to the next-door neighbor of the Narayanes, Ratna Dungiri, to demand money. The thugs smashed her furniture and threatened to kill her family. When I arrived after, I told Ratna to go to the police and file a complaint. Ratna wouldn’t, so I went to the police and filed a complaint. The police informed Akku Yadav of my actions, and he was enraged. So he and forty of his thugs showed up at my house and surrounded it. Akku Yadav carried a bottle of acid and shouted through the door for me to back down. “You withdraw the complaint and I won’t harm you,” he said.

I barricaded the door and shouted back that I would never give in. Then I frantically telephoned the police. They said that they would come, but they never did. Meanwhile, Akku Yadav was pounding on the door.

“I’ll throw acid on your face, and you won’t be in a position to file any more complaints,” he roared. “If we ever meet you, you don’t know what we’ll do to you. Gang rape is nothing. You can’t imagine what we’ll do to you.”

I shouted back insults and Akku Yadav replied with vivid descriptions of how he would rape me, burn me with acid, slaughter me. He and his men tried to batter the door down. So I turned on the cylinder of gas the family used for cooking and grabbed a match.

“If you break into the house, I’ll light the match and blow us all up,” I shouted wildly. The thugs could smell the gas, and they hesitated. “Back off, or you’ll get blown up,” I shouted again. The attackers stepped back.

Meanwhile, word of the confrontation had rushed around the neighborhood. The Dalits were deeply proud of my schooling and success, and the thought that Akku Yadav would destroy me was agonizing. The neighbors gathered at a distance, not knowing quite what to do. But when they saw me fighting back and hurling abuse at Akku Yadav, finally focing his gang to retreat, they found courage. Soon There were a hundred angry Dalits on the street, and they began picking up sticks and stones.

“People realized that if he could do this to Usha, there was just no hope,” One neighbor explained. Stones began to fly towards Akku Yadav’s men, who saw the crowd’s ugly mood and fled. The mood in the slum begame giddy. For the first time, people had won a confrontation. The Dalits marched through the slum, celebrating. Then they went down to Akku Yadav’s house and burned it to the ground.

Akku Yadav went to the police, who arrested him for his own protection. Apparently the police officers planned to keep him in custody until the mood cooled and then to let him go. A bail hearing for Akku Yadav was scheduled, and rumors spread that the police were planning to release him as part of a corrupt bargain. Hundreds of women marched miles to the courtroom and though they felt out of place, they sat up front. Akku Yadav strutted in, confident, sensing that the women felt out of place. Spotting a woman he raped, he mocked her as a prostitute only to be hit on the head by her sandal. All the women from Kasturba Nagar pressed forward and surrounded Akku Yadav. They threw chili powder at them and the police fled. The women passed around a knife and stabbed Akku Yadav to death while he pleaded for mercy, even slicing off his penis. The bloodied women marched back to the village with their head held high and they rejoiced for their freedom. The police arrested me for planning the attack but the women of the village all claimed responsibility so that I would be set free. Women need to stand up for one another and join with human rights revolutions. We should stop turning the other cheek and begin slapping back.