Neha Rastogi-Abhishek Gattani case shows the many faces of domestic violence

I was listening to some chilling audio clips recorded by Neha Rastogi, an NRI techie, when she was being beaten by her husband. She had provided these as testimony in the Santa Clara court where her domestic violence case was being heard in March 2017. In one of the clips, he says he would like to stab her multiple times. I could hear their three-year-old daughter’s distressed voice in the background.

I have listened to stories of domestic violence before and seen the emotional and physical bruises the women victims bear. Each time, it’s distressing.  This time it was more so because I was hearing the woman’s pleading voice, the words of abuse and the sound of thwacking in real time.

Neha Rastogi, a technically qualified NRI ,living in Silicon Valley recorded these audio clips on her iPhone over a period of time. For ten years, she had suffered being beaten and verbally abused by her husband Abhishek Ghattani, the CEO and co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup Cuberon.  One of the recordings is of a beating which she received while they were having a technical discussion about fixing a bug. He uses abusive language on her all through and thrashes her till she says what he wants her to say.

“What is a bug?” he asks. “Come on, bi**h! What is a bug?” He beats her without even letting her answer.

There is no disputing it.  Domestic violence is all pervasive.  It knows no boundaries of education, location, economic stability or any of the other usual parameters we use for explaining violence of this nature.

Neha grew up in India, married a man picked for her by her parents and migrated to the US ten years ago.  She had a good job at Apple and worked with exciting new products like FaceTime and Maps. She had also worked for companies like Adobe and Cisco. Abhishek also had a good career before he co-founded his own startup.

Neha and Abhishek have a three-and-a-half year old daughter. On the face of it, they had the ideal life which would be aspirational for most middle class Indian families.  The rot within remained hidden because like all good Indian women, Neha had been brainwashed into believing a marriage like hers was worth holding on to.

Even though the abuse began very shortly after she was married, she hung on and even had a baby. Abhishek was arrested for the first time three years ago when a mailman saw him beating his wife on the sidewalk in front of his house. Their baby was just three months old then. Neha actually went and bailed her husband out and got his sentence reduced because she wanted to save the marriage for the sake of their baby.  She says she honestly believed then that he would reform.

It was only when she realised that nothing would change him that she started meticulously and secretly recording the abuse which often took place in front of their child. She was slapped when she was breast feeding her daughter, kicked violently in the stomach, made to stand all night at the foot of his bed when she was eight months pregnant… the list of horrors goes on. She was even forced to give up her job at Apple because of his threats and violence.

In July 2016, after a particularly violent round of abuse, she went back to the same police station and filed a complaint with all the audio and video evidence she had collected. But the odds were against her. The Silicon Valley justice system was anxious to prevent the deportation of Abhishek given the present political climate. So, although he faced  felony assault and domestic violence charges  he reached an agreement with the prosecution  and pleaded no-contest to the lesser charges of “felony accessory after the fact” and the misdemeanour of “offensive touching” which invited less than half of a 30-day sentence. The case has been rescheduled for one more hearing after Neha read out her powerful victim-impact statement in court .

“Offensive touching!" she exclaimed," Please explain to me is it offensive touching when a 8-month pregnant woman is beaten and then forced to stand for the entire night by her husband, is it offensive touching when a mother nursing her 6-day-old child is slapped on her face by her husband because he thinks she is not latching properly with the child, is it offensive touching when a women is flung to the floor and repetitively kicked in her belly, is it offensive touching when a woman is slapped nine times by her husband until she agrees to everything he is saying and then gets hit again for not agreeing with it sooner?”

The Rastogi-Gattani case has garnered so many eyeballs because the players are well educated achievers. For the uninitiated, it is hard to believe patriarchy is really alive and flourishing even in sunny California — the Mecca of middle class India’s dreams. It is harder to accept that an educated career woman put up with this sort of abuse for 10 years.

But, it happens all the time around us. The social stigma gets diluted and the perpetrators are forgiven when they are wealthy or are professional achievers.  Domestic violence and misogyny become almost acceptable forms of behaviour when they are coated with a veneer of sugar …  “it was job stress”, or “the poor guy had money problems and she splurged” or she was “disobedient” or “impertinent” or the ultimate  justification — “after all he is a man”.

Mani Rathnam’s latest film Kaatru Veliyidai, for instance, romanticises misogyny so beautifully. A handsome fighter pilot trained to kill has an affair with a beautiful young doctor who is head over heels in love with him. Under the spell of the fantastic photography and fabulous music, one almost begins to think that the obsessive love affair between the misogynistic hero and the beautiful and sensitive heroine is actually romantic. Why else would she keep returning to him? And the “happy” ending somehow patched together in a convoluted manner reemphasises the message that callous and insensitive behaviour can win a woman’s heart and keep her in a relationship forever. But in real life, misogynists seldom change. The romance quickly sours and the victim wants to escape.

Different kinds of violence can exist within a relationship… physical, emotional sexual. In such cases, consent and zero tolerance have no meaning. There are many areas of grey which are impossible for an outsider to fathom. The interpersonal lines are so twisted and entwined that after a while, escape becomes a dream.

Add to this the extra sauce of social opprobrium which we get in our society… “What will the neighbors and relatives say?” “Who will marry your sister now?” “Your duty is to put up with him and adjust.” “Who will look after you if you walk out?” “Your children need a father.”  Walking out therefore is not easy.

The reach of domestic violence is wide and all-encompassing especially in India where most people find it difficult to accept that it can take many forms. Physical violence is the most obvious, even though often women hide their bruises or pretend they had accidents in order to protect their husbands. Emotional violence is harder to prove. As for sexual violence, forget it! Indian law does not even recognise marital rape as a crime.

Yet women stay in bad marriages — often because they have nowhere else to go.  Even if the husband is a bigamist or is having an extramarital affair, they turn a blind eye because putting him behind bars would not serve any purpose.

Some years ago, I visited safe houses for Indian women in the UK, Canada and USA. Their problems were of a different order. Many of the women I spoke to didn’t even know the language of the country in which they lived.  They had been married off to men they had never met and brought directly from their small towns to an alien country. One woman told me she had sneaked out of the car while her abusive husband was filling gas and had hidden for two days till she spotted an Indian couple who had brought her to this safe house. But she still lived in terror as she had no papers.  Everything was with her husband.

I also met educated women who were working professionals in India but had ended up as brutalised wives without any papers in these safe houses. As a beautiful young software engineer with a big bruise on her face told me, “At least in India I could have walked out and found myself a job. Here, even my education and professional experience is a waste because I am a visa wife.”

A woman can be subjected to violence over a variety of “misdeeds” … not cooking tasty food, not controlling the children, being too beautiful, being too plain, being an achiever in her professional life, daring to have a mind of her own, not handing over her salary, being ‘dumb’…  and most importantly not bringing enough dowry from her parental home.  Just one visit to the burns ward at any hospital in any town will give you an idea of how many women have their lives snuffed out or permanently impaired because they didn’t bring enough dowry. Women who opt out of a relationship which is turning toxic are also in danger because they can be stalked, attacked with acid or even killed in broad daylight.

Domestic violence is a dark and secret activity. Abused partners are subjected to a form of  manipulation known as gas lighting.  The perpetrator plays with his victim’s mind, making her question her own memory, perception, and even sanity.

No wonder women stay trapped in such relationships until they reach breaking point.