A Tale of Two Love Stories

As I read about the ‘honour killing’ of Amrita Singh, the Rourkela girl strangulated to death by her relatives for the ‘crime’ of marrying a Muslim man, my mind inevitably went back 30 years in time when another inter-faith love story blossomed in the same Steel City but later went horribly wrong. Little, it seems, […]

honour killing

As I read about the ‘honour killing’ of Amrita Singh, the Rourkela girl strangulated to death by her relatives for the ‘crime’ of marrying a Muslim man, my mind inevitably went back 30 years in time when another inter-faith love story blossomed in the same Steel City but later went horribly wrong. Little, it seems, has changed in the three decades since that incident. As in Amrita’s case, the one 30 years back also ended in the tragic death of a young girl. [It is important to note that it is ALWAYS the girl who has to die to save the family’s ‘honour’, never the boy.] At a time when the youth is trying to break free of the medieval mindset and the barriers of caste, class and creed that have held the country back for so long, it is distressing to find that their parents continue to be trapped in a time warp.

My good friend ‘A’ (whose identity will have to remain a secret to respect his privacy) was a teacher in a college in Rourkela when he fell for a Muslim girl (who will be referred to as ‘F’ in the rest of the write up). Both of them were outstanding minds and it was perhaps natural that what began as an intellectual companionship eventually turned into love. But knowing that F’s parents would never agree to marriage between the two, ‘A’ had sent two of his close friends – I and another friend who was a lecturer in the same college – to her house to gauge her mother’s attitude without broaching the subject of his marriage. The girl’s mother was decency personified. She received is warmly and graciously and managed to convince us to have lunch. The conversation, mostly in English and Hindi (we could see that she was not very comfortable in Odia), lasted an incredible five-six hours, interspersed with a wonderful lunch, and covered a wide range of topics, including inter-faith relations in  India, though only on general terms. [I later found out that she was post graduate in English.] Midway through the conversation, her husband came for lunch and greeted us as warmly as his wife had done before.