Suicide station

Outlook reports on well educated brides coming from Punjab, to be married to uneducated men and their mothers, are leading record numbers to jump in front of trains. When will their parents realize that marrying a person from England or the US is not a passport to the good life. Background checks are essential.

Flawed marital priorities fuel a thickening tragedy among young brides in Southall

SANJAY SURI
Circle Of Death
Suicide among South Asian women in Britain is three times that of the national average

Of 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.


Morbid chain The Sikh population in Southall is about half a million
Many such brides from Punjab find themselves on a one-way ticket to hell. 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

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