Domestic violence victims of California’s Indian diaspora find a sacred home

LOS ANGELES — Anu appeared in the classifieds in 1999. She’d finished her bachelor's degree and returned to her family in Kerala, a state in southern India. Anu’s parents placed an ad in the marriage column of Kerala’s state newspaper in search of a husband for their daughter. Not long after, her future husband called from Downey, California. He visited her and then proposed. Already once married and divorced, he wanted a small civil wedding, but Anu insisted they wed in a Hindu temple.

At 32, Anu—a pseudonym to protect her privacy—left India to live with her husband in Southern California. But she said he began abusing her verbally, and sometimes physically, after just a few weeks. Not long after, he took her passport from her.

Anu’s experience is representative of an oft unseen trend among immigrant wives in the United States: According to a 2008 study, for 72 percent of domestic violence victims who immigrate for a spouse, abuse starts or increases after the move to a new country.

The violence that started in Anu’s home is common among Indian women in their home country, too.

When Anu married her husband, 65 percent of married women in India had endured abuse from their husbands. A crime against women was committed every three minutes in 2006. Today, 57 percent of boys and 53 percent of girls ages 15-19 believe wife beating is justifiable, according to a UNICEF survey.

While divorce is becoming more common in India, the country still has one of the world’s lowest divorce rates: Only one in every 1,000 marriages ends in separation.

“Violence happens across all situations,” said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the South Asian Network, a legal aid organization for South Asian immigrants in Artesia, California. “Divorce, though, is very uncommon, very stigmatized, very frowned upon. It’s a scarlet letter.”

But Anu decided to leave her husband anyway.

In 2001 she called SAHARA, an advocacy group for South Asian immigrants, for help. Within hours, the agency sent a car to a nearby park. The driver brought her to one of the few places Anu still felt safe: A nearby Hindu temple, Gayatri Mandir.

Two years later she and her husband finalized their divorce.

Since then, Anu’s mother has encouraged her to move in with her brother in India. Most divorced women in India return to family members after a marital split and eventually establish an independent household. But Anu wanted to raise her daughter in the US.

“My family cannot get over my heartbreak,” Anu said, “but I think God has something else for me. Through everything, I always saw my goddess smiling at me.”

Today Anu, 47, and her 15-year-old daughter live in the same bedroom they moved into the day she left her husband. They share the kitchen with two other women who, escaping domestic violence, also fled to the shelter.

Anu began working at temple events for 30 dollars a night—her food money. She eventually became a US citizen. When she needed a car, the temple gave her a loan. When she found a steady job, she began paying rent.

“[Women] can stay for six months, they can stay for years—we have no limits,” said Dhirubhai Patel, a temple trustee and founder of the shelter. Anu and her daughter call Patel and his wife “uncle” and “aunt.”

Anu will move out as soon after she becomes a registered nurse, she said. Currently she is a certified nursing assistant, working nights in the postpartum unit at Kaiser Permanente.

More than 20 women have passed through the shelter’s six bedrooms since it opened in 2001.

One, Patel said, finished her bachelor’s degree in finance and moved to Chicago for a job. Another, Anu said, sat each night in a darkened bedroom. When she invited the woman over for dinner, she always brought her ex-husband into conversation: ‘How could he do this to me?,’” she’d ask.

“When somebody has a fight with her husband and they don’t know what to do, we help them through the divorce,” Patel said. Only two husbands have actually come to the temple to find their wives. Several couples have reunited. But most of the men just hire divorce lawyers.

Anu felt so desperate that she returned to her husband in 2002, but it wasn’t long before the abuse began again and within months she was back at Gayatri Mandir.

“I was very attached to my culture, so I forgave and went back,” she said. “That really pushed me backwards.”

The shelter’s women lean on the temple community for legal and financial support. Most of them never worked in India or the US, but “we try to find schools for them, and the doctors associated with the temple help them find jobs,” Patel said.

Anu is no longer among the 12 percent of South Asian immigrants living below the poverty line.

But despite the life she has made for herself and her daughter, she plans to return to her family in Kerala, a state in India’s southern tip, after she retires and her daughter begins a life of her own.

She wants to start a home or social club for divorced or unmarried women who are expected to serve their brothers’ families, because her own experience has made her acutely aware of how isolated some of the women must feel.

“I have been a mother; I have been a wife, a sister-in-law, a daughter-in-law. I want to do something for my soul,” Anu said. “Marriage is not the ultimate joy. There are further, better things.”