Well,actually at the risk of grossly turning you all off, if any of you ever have read "Femina", the Indian woman magazines, few years back, it used to have an agony aunt column of late Pearl Padamsee. Her column used to be replete with such gross incidents.
I don't remember the exact year, but it was a late 90 isuue. There was this 17 year old girl who had lost her mother young and had got badly involved with her 42 year old dad. The worst part was, the dad himself was equally involved. It was sick to read. The girl wanted to marry her dad and had written in to ask if such marriages were allowed and how she cud make it possible....that neither she nor cud her "dad" cud bear to live without each other.......It was sick, beleive me. If any one of can look up the 90's issue of Femina & Pearl Padamsee column, U will find it.
The other two incidents that I came across was worse. The first was in Allahabad, UP, and I was in Standard 5. We had a maid who used to do our chores at 5.30 in the morn. Everyday she used to come and cry in front of my mom while doing her work.I, as a child, thought probably her husband beat her up, a very usual phenomenon among the poor in India.But when I grew up to a little understandable age, I began hearing whispers long after we moved out of there and only visited some close friends in the neighbourhood. Then when I was in 11th standard, that maid died. It was then I came to know that her husband had turned her out of her own house and had started living with their own 14 year old daughter and that was the reason she used to cry every morning in our house.....her name was Saraswati....I still get shivers when I think of that lady....my mom never likes to talk about it....perhaps beleiving if you pretend such things don't exist, they don't. I also learned that many of the ladies had thrown Saraswati out of job because they beleived her story would be a bad influence on their husbands and daughters.....she died heart broken, shunned by all...and that heartless man lived on shamelessly with the equally heartless and shameless daughter.....
The second one is right before my marriage ..... a case of incest in which the teacher mom turned her husband to the police for raping their 14 year old daughter continuously for the past 3 years....This was in a small town called Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh. It became a big story there.
So yes, the reality is these things are very much prevalant in India. Only no one chooses to talk about it.
Anupamaa
