Uma Dalal, an engineer, was married in New Delhi to a well-settled engineer working in a hi-tech company in the Silicon Valley, US, with great joy and happiness on both sides.
However, soon after she arrived in the US on a H4 Visa, things started to go sour. Her husband refused to give her access to money. She could not drive as he would not pay for driving lessons and she had no family or friends to go to.
Each time he accused her of not paying attention to his needs, her parents not being respectful to his parents in India, not giving enough gifts or valuable gifts to his family, Uma not cooking the food properly and once the complaint was that she had not put enough haldi (turmeric) in the dal.
Uma spoke to her parents on the phone, who told her to be patient and pleaded with her to make the marriage work and adjust. Uma endured, by the image of her own disgrace and her parents’ shame if she left her husband.
The abuse continued to escalate to the point where her husband began unplugging and taking the phone to work with him to prevent Uma from calling anyone.
Then the physical abuse started...a push here, a nudge there, a pinch here and a slap there. He sometimes joked about it and said that she had become oversensitive and could not take any teasing.
Once pregnant, things seemed to improve for a while, but then gradually became worse. Her husband now taunted her with the unborn baby.
He claimed it was not his; he wanted a DNA test, he did not believe her, he was sure it was someone else’s. One day he pushed her hard and she lost her balance and fell over. She felt the baby stop moving inside her, and was terrified that she had lost the baby.
This seemed to scare her husband a bit and there was no more violence, until after the baby was born. However, with her mother-in-law in the US for the baby’s birth, the situation escalated to the breaking point almost immediately. It seemed her husband had an excuse to hit her everyday and appealing to her mother-in-law worsened the violence. Her husband lay new demands on her like when she was supposed to get up, feed the baby, not feed the baby, cook and clean.
When the baby was eight-weeks old, there was a huge episode of physical violence. Uma’s husband was enraged that she was feeding the baby when he had asked her not to. He grabbed the baby and threw him against the wall. Luckily, the baby was unharmed but this time, Uma ran out of the apartment and asked the neighbours to call the police.
The police arrested her husband and took Uma and the baby away and called Maitri, a Bay Area based non-profit organisation helping South Asian victims of domestic violence on her behalf.
Maitri volunteers worked with Uma for almost two years providing her transitional housing, peer counselling, legal assistance, and job search assistance. Uma stayed in the transitional home for almost one year and used that time to get additional educational qualifications, a driving license and a job that got her a work visa.
She saved for an apartment, and completed the legal process for a divorce and the custody of her son. Her mother came over from India to help her, while she worked. The lawyer helped her get custody of her baby and child support from her ex-husband. Today, Uma is the confident and bright woman she was before the three years of hell she endured with her ex-husband.
“We helped over 980 women last year. Our clients belong to all professions — engineers, doctors, nurses, hi-tech marketing and sales executives, homemakers and others. Their educational level may vary from a PhD to a high school; they may be multi-lingual or mono-lingual, come from every state in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, may have none or one to two children and can be of any religion or faith,” says Sonya Pelia, President of the Board at Maitri.
The number of victims has steadily risen over the past years. “Our clients face transnational abandonment and joint/extended family abuse besides spousal abuse. Large numbers of victims are unaware of their legal rights, and may be economically dependent on the batterer,” says Sarah Khan, a program director at Maitri.
Anu Natarajan, Council member in Fremont, says, “It would be very easy for us to ignore the problem of domestic violence in our community but the problem will not disappear.”