Romeo & Juliet in Rainbow Land

HONOUR killings are deeply rooted in ancient traditions in communities throughout the world. When I read about Sonu and Vishal, two teenagers from different castes who fell in love, and were murdered by their own families in India in 2001, I was  deeply touched, and decided to visit Alinagar, their home town, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, commonly called the rainbow land.
Uttar Pradesh is a lively state where the multi-hued Indian culture has blossomed from times immemorial. Blessed with a variety of  geographical features and cultural diversities, Uttar Pradesh has witnessed the activity of historical figures like Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. Rich and tranquil expanses of meadows, perennial rivers, dense forests and fertile soil have made of this state the ideal setting for various holy shrines and places of pilgrimage, such as the majestic Taj Mahal mausoleum. The state of Uttar Pradesh plays an important role in the politics, education, culture, industry, agriculture and tourism of India.
When I set out on this journey, however, I did not realise that my life and that of my colleague's would be threatened.

Out-of-the-way place

I started from Delhi with Maureen Nandini, a journalist from Kolkata, early one morning in March, looking for Alinagar, which we couldn't find on the map. Nobody at the bus station in Delhi had heard of it. All we knew was that it was near Muzaffarnagar. On our arrival after a four hour bus journey we decided to ask the police who were sitting around a table in the shade, drinking tea and playing cards. They told us there was a bus to Shamli from where we could catch another bus to Alinagar. So we headed back west for 200 miles, and finally arrived in Shamli late in the afternoon. It was too late to proceed to Jhinjhana, the nearest town to Alinagar, so we checked in at the only hotel in town.
Early in the evening, as we walked to a nearby teashop, I could feel the hostility from the locals which soon transformed into direct physical attacks. As they walked past they jostled me, and a group followed us to the teashop where they threatened to kill us if we didn't leave town immediately. After a heated discussion we returned to the hotel pursued by some of the men. We decided to remain in the safety of the hotel for the rest of the evening. During the night the banging on the iron gates of the hotel woke us up several times. In the morning the manager told us that a group of men had offered him money to allow them to enter the hotel. A rickshaw took us to the bus station, the driver pedalling with difficulty in the dark chilly morning, and after what seemed an interminable wait the bus arrived.

Dangerous reportage

We reached Jhinjhana when it was still covered in early morning mist.  We stopped at a teashop on the corner of a road which we later learned was the road leading to Alinagar, a kilometre away. A heavy greasy atmosphere hit us as we entered the low-roofed teashop. Next to an open window a man was frying sausages and little cakes. We felt the strong gazes of the men sitting at the other tables. It was a shock for them to see a Western man and an Indian woman, who was clearly from the city, arrive at the teashop.
After a few minutes, a smartly dressed young man approached us and asked us, Who are you, what are you doing here? We  told him we were journalists looking for a place called Alinagar. Yes, I know where it is, he replied in Hindi. Maureen asked him who he was. The only word I understood was police. I am a journalist, he replied for a police newspaper. When Maureen told me he was working for the police, I became worried, but he showed us his press pass and spoke a few words of English. He told us he covered the murders of Sonu and Vishal in Alinagar, and the trial of the family members involved in the killings. He called another journalist on his mobile who was a local reporter for Amar Ujala, a Hindi language daily. He had also covered the murders at the time and arrived soon after. 
We explained that we wanted to visit the village where Sonu and Vishal were killed by their families and community in an honour killing in 2001. Yes, we know Alinagar well. The owner of the teashop, Ashok Kumar Sharma,  is Vishal's uncle. He came over to join us at our table and offered to accompany us to Alinagar as it was far too dangerous for us to go alone. A few months ago, a western team of TV journalists were kidnapped for five days, and then thrown out minus everything except their clothes.
After a cup of milky tea, we started walking the one kilometre to Alinagar. At the beginning of the road leading to Alinagar, on the left, there was the cinema. Opposite it, large billboards advertised Bollywood films on martial arts and passionate romance. Beneath them motionless men were waiting in the cool of the morning. Along the street women were cleaning and cooking breakfast, children in school uniform were walking in silence, while black dogs looked from the distance. Two holy men dressed in orange passed by without looking at us. Five hundred metres from the village is the white cremation ground surrounded by poplars where Sonu and Vishal were cremated at midnight to conceal the crime. People walked past in silence. Some looked at us with curiosity, but they knew that we were looking for the story of the two young lovers killed for falling in love.

Genesis of a tragedy

The house where the tragedy took place is on a leafy corner of the little street with the six houses that make up Alinagar. Next to it is a red brick house where Vishal's family lived, and opposite is Sonu's family mud house.    
The community have lived together for generations around a large mango tree in a courtyard linking the six houses, surrounded by sugarcane and wheat fields where the children play and grow up together. Vishal was a high-caste Brahmin, while Sonu was a member of the lower caste Jat community. Their families knew they had been seeing each other for some time, and would have been happy for them to marry, but a woman from another caste spread rumours in the village about the relationship. Initially Sonu, a 16-year-old girl, and Vishal, a 15-year-old boy, met at the woman's house, and Vishal paid her for allowing them to meet there. When he refused to continue to pay her, they started meeting under the mango tree. One evening, the woman went from door to door telling the villagers about the couple sitting under the tree. The villagers locked the couple up in a house while the village elders had a meeting, and decided that the teenagers would have to be killed because they had brought dishonour on the village and the community. The elders told the boy's brother and sister-in-law and the girl's parents that the families had to hang both children with their own hands. The families were from minority castes in the village, and so were forced to carry out the village elders' decision. After they killed the couple they burned their bodies on a joint pyre in the cremation ground to hide the evidence.

A sari in the field

Word had got out, however, and the killings were widely reported in the media. The police arrested six people including Vishal's brother and sister-in-law, and Sonu's parents, who are now serving life sentences. The police are still looking for other villagers who have gone into hiding. Both families have left the village and have moved away to other districts, leaving behind only the horror of the story.
I found it difficult to understand why such a brutal murder had been committed in these beautiful and fertile surroundings. Blue wild flowers, Jangli Phool in Hindi, were flowering everywhere. An abundance of water from streams, rivers and irrigation channels watered the numerous trees, mango, guava, eucalyptus and neem. Neatly stacked piles of round balls of dung, used as fuel for cooking, were scattered throughout the village. In the midst of this beautiful landscape a sari lay abandoned in a vast wheat field. And I asked myself, Why is it there, who did it belong to?