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Trainspotting For
Death
Sanjay Suri
South
Asian women in Britain are committing suicide at a rate three times
that of the national average. Of the 240 suicides on rail tracks in
Britain last year, 80 were Southall women, mostly Sikhs. The victims
typically come from Punjab, are educated, and married off to men who
lack similar educational or professional backgrounds. Brides are
trapped into domestic slavery, suffer abuse and have no one to help
them
 The cold figures tell a chilling story. Take the many thousands of
miles of rail track in Britain on the one hand, a couple of miles of
of rail track through the west London suburb of Southall on the
other. Consider that of the 240 suicides on rail tracks last year,
80 were on just this track around Southall, and most of them were
Sikh women. That in a population close to 60 million, the Sikh
population is about half a million, and that of adult Sikh women a
fraction of that. That's an average of over a suicide a week on the
tracks through Southall and Slough, another heavily Punjabi area
down the line. Finally, the suicide rate among who are described as
Asian women is three times the national average.
The total number of rail suicides rose last year from 203 suicides
on rail tracks in 2005. This year the suicides have risen even
further, and again on the Southall tracks. The suicide rate seems to
have gone up since the landmark incident involving 27-year-old
Navjeet Sidhu two years back. Navjeet took her five-year-old
daughter Simran and her son Aman Raj, just a month short of his
second birthday, to Southall train station. "I'm taking my children
to see the fast trains," she told station staff. She then grabbed
her two children and jumped in front of the Heathrow Express, the
fast train from the airport into Paddington. All three died
instantly. Six months later, Navjeet's mother Satwant Kaur threw
herself in front of a train at the same spot. She too died on the
spot.
Many more cases of suicide followed that of Navjeet. Suicides have a
way of becoming contagious—when Marilyn Monroe committed suicide in
1962, suicide rates in the US rose by 12 per cent. The train company
on this route, First Great Western, has now stepped up security at
railway stations, with additional monitoring on CCTV. Fencing by the
sides of the tracks has been firmed up, and a close watch kept on
passengers, particularly those on the platform where the fast trains
go by—for many the fast track to suicide. Several suicide attempts
have been averted this year through staff action.
The staff have more than the lives of Sikh women on their mind—they
want trains running on time; a suicide on a track disrupts train
services for hours. First Great Western has one of the poorest
records in Britain for the late running of trains—largely as a
result of suicides on the tracks. The company alone records half of
all delays to railway services in Britain, according to a recently
leaked internal report. The usual driver language for such delays is
"person under the train".
While stronger fencing and platform checks could prevent such
suicides, they scarcely are a remedy for the reasons driving the
women to suicide. "The situation is alarming," says Southall MP
Virender Sharma. Sharma, who discussed the problem at length with
 Punjab officials and British High Commission officials in Delhi on a
visit last month, says many among those Sikh women killing
themselves are from Punjab who came to Britain after rapidly
arranged marriages with the munda from vilayat.
In one case, a girl from an exceptionally well-connected family from
Punjab committed suicide. "She had no one to turn to," says Sharma.
"And she was afraid to go back. Because she thought people back
there would make fun of her. " In one family after another, such
mismatched matchmaking ends in tragedy. Punjab parents multiply
their ideas of family wealth in Britain by 80 or so. The kind of man
the girls are married off to is a typically basic sort of trader who
sometimes earns well enough up to a point, but has more attitude
than education. The favour done by bringing a bride to England has
usually to be paid for by domestic slavery, sometimes lessened if
she can deliver a son early enough.
There are many more women who suffer. A death makes no difference.
It just paves the way for more dowry into the household. Many of
those who kill themselves are well-educated, and from the more
well-off families of Punjab—one of the Southall women who died
recently had an MBA degree. And that itself seems to become a
problem. "It is culture shock," says Sharma. "There are very few
girls from Punjab who are not graduates.
I have seen girls come here who have masters degrees in English, in
economics. Their families arrange marriages with boys here who are
not professional, not educated."
In one case, "a window cleaner working here got married to a
well-educated girl after telling her parents he was an engineer in
England," says Kailash Puri, agony aunt and novelist, who has long
been a support to Punjabi women in distress in Britain. "And then
the man and his mother can't handle the education and sophistication
of the woman. But if you ask me who is primarily responsible, I have
no doubt at all. It is the mother-in-law."
And for every woman who commits suicide, "there are thousands of
others who are suffering," she says. "So many of these homes become
hellish. There is just so much talk of killing, and dying and
suicide around the home, it drives many of these women to actually
kill themselves." Many mothers-in-law are actually receptive to the
idea of driving the young married woman out of the house, or to
suicide. "They do not seem to care one way or the other, because
that clears the way to bring in another daughter-in-law—and more
dowry. Again and again, I see that dowry is one of the biggest
issues."
Of course, many such cases lead to divorce, or the bride running
away. "The woman finds some pretext for stepping out of the house,
and just goes back to India." But for those not prepared to fight it
out in court or return to India, the railway tracks offer a grisly
alternative. Says Puri: "The girls feel very protective of their
parents; one said to me her parents spent all this money on the
wedding, and her return will bring a stain on her father's turban,
and she will never let that happen. A time comes when there is
nowhere to go to, nowhere to turn to, and they begin to think of
suicide as the only liberation from hell." This is the woeful
template that sees brides flying out of Delhi and Amritsar, dreaming
of a new life in England, but whose dreams and hopes end tragically
under a fast train in an alien land.
(Courtesy Outlook Magazine)
21
November, 2007
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