Till honour do us part

“Vaat ee dees?
Komdi kaa piece!”
From The Enquiries of Ignis Piries Ed. by Bachchoo

There is something rotten in the town of Aylesbury, or so the rumour goes. The police have gone out of their way to deny this particular rottenness following the murder of 40-year-old Assia Shahzad.
The murder took place, the police believe, on the first floor of her £600,000, six-bedroom house in Aylesbury. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Her son, one 21-year-old Usman Shahzad, and another youth of 16, who can’t be named as he is still an underage suspect, have been arrested and taken into police custody for the murder.
Assia has (had?) three children and was estranged from her 45-year-old husband who, as a consequence, did not live in the same house. She and the estranged husband were partners in a taxi firm.
Rumour has it that she had admirers or men friends and again, according only to rumour, these liaisons were known to her son Usman who resented them. He has been held as a suspect and charged with murder but is, of course, presumed innocent until proved guilty. Assia’s father and her own family are, as can be expected, devastated and distraught. They are immigrants of Pakistani origin and one may assume that Usman is a third-generation immigrant. The rumour mill calls the murder an “honour killing”: a son washing in blood the honour of his family.
Hamlet says of the disgust generated by his mother’s adultery:
“Nay but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty”.
Hamlet, though probably the only famous “honour” murderer in literature, is not motivated primarily by this Oedipal or puritanical impulse. He has also been instructed by his father’s ghost to avenge his father’s murder by killing his incestuous mother and uncle. And perhaps there were no police in Denmark with whom he could lodge an FIR — as we do in India. Besides, he wasn’t an eyewitness to the murder and only has the word of a ghost to go on. Could he present such evidence in a court? Could the witness be summoned in daytime court-opening hours? No, he had to take revenge himself and he goes through the celebrated agonies of conscience and convoluted justifications for prevarication and procrastination before he acts.
In the Aylesbury murder no such motive of an eye for an eye exists and neither does any of the agony of prevarication. It is, according to the Pakistani rumour mill of Buckinghamshire, a “pure” honour killing. It is only fair to say that the police, who may have more information than is publicly available, have tried to diffuse the idea of honour killing in this instance, though they haven’t come up with any other motive. Was it a family dispute between mother and son — over money? Over a prescriptively chosen and rejected bride? The murder trial, if the accused or others are ever charged and brought to court, should make that clear.
The British police don’t like honour killings, just as they don’t particularly like gang feuds. Honour killings are very often seen as involving the subsequently fired honour of more people than the first ones to initiate the killing. The others who feel dishonoured by the killing itself seek revenge and, as with drug-dealing gangs, one murder leads to another and another. A headache for the cops. They would much rather a robbery motive.
Honour killings are, the world over, undertaken by people who live in communities which still regard the conventions of love, marriage and sex as matters of traditions whose origins lie in religious diktat. The natives of Britain, Scotland, Wales and Ireland may find sexual liaisons or marriage across class boundaries distasteful, unworkable or particularly stimulating (the penchant for “rough trade”; Lady Chatterley and Mellors!) but the distaste hasn’t ever, since the Middle Ages, stimulated murder. Again, Catholics marrying Protestants or Christians marrying Jews, may not be popular in Northern Ireland but it would at worst lead to the couple being ostracised rather than put to death.
Hamlet’s agony, so uniquely and strongly realised by Shakespeare on the Elizabethan stage is today viewed as the drama and dilemma of a long-past, even pre-Elizabethan, age. In today’s British family, if mum and dad were separated or divorced and mum had boyfriends, the children would probably go on holiday with him and would be most unlikely to do away with mum or the boyfriend while there.
In the Pakistani and in the Sikh immigrant communities honour killings have taken the shape of luring or forcibly transporting the offending family member — a daughter who refuses to go along with an arranged marriage to her cousin, a divorcee who sees other men — to Mirpur or the Punjab and having them murdered there.
It is a measure of the isolation of South Asian immigrant communities in Britain that in three generations the hold of emotions, traditions and questions of honour attributable to the feudal past is still suffocatingly, murderously strong.
In another instance, six years ago, the body of a young girl was discovered on the banks of a river in northern England. She had been suffocated, stuffed into a rubbish bag and disposed of. The police arrested her parents, Pakistani immigrants, on suspicion of an honour killing as stories of the girl’s resistance to marrying a cousin and enabling him to come to England on a British passport emerged. The police couldn’t put enough evidence together to convict the suspects so the murder remained unsolved.
Now the second daughter of the house has stepped forward and told the police that she was a teenager at the time of the murder but can provide eyewitness evidence that her parents did indeed kill her elder sister. The fact that the parents have now set out to induce the third sister, the youngest, into an arranged marriage of the same sort has, the potential witness claims, convinced her to speak out against them.
The parents have been arrested for the alleged murder and their daughter who says she is willing to help convict them has been taken into protective custody by the police who fear that the question of “honour” in these cases involves more than the immediate family. It is possible, they feel, that relatives or supporters from the clan or community will attempt to suborn, harm or do away with her.