Adultery – When The Choice Is Between Suicide and Murder

After narrating the Story of catching his cheating wife red-handed with her paramour in their matrimonial house and getting beaten up. Saikat continued …

Suicide or murder

“But then I felt that committing suicide for an Indian man will not serve any purpose. No one will even notice, no one will bother. Only my parents will cry for a few days, my friends may remember for some time, that’s it. My cheating wife will still claim alimony from my parents and without any proof of adultery, she will continue to live in my flat, enjoy everything that I had earned and in my absence, my retired and sick old father will have to pay the loan and alimony to my wife. Because she would be a burden on them.

I felt, that my mother will probably end up being a servant to her, cooking and doing household chores while she enjoys more with her paramour. Else my parents will be threatened with 498a and the lives of my brother and sister will be ruined. I thought that suicide due to an adulterous wife was not an option at all, especially when she was alive. When I thought of the character of my wife’s family, I was almost certain that she would get divorce officially by filing false dowry cases to extract money from my ailing parents.

When I did not find any legal recourse to my wife’s adultery, I did feel like killing her while asleep. But I am not a criminal. When I see blood, I faint. I am a very peace-loving and law-abiding citizen and committing murder was not possible for me. But the situation was pushing me to be a criminal to save my ailing parents and other family members and I was resisting that feeling.

There was another feeling in me that I would be eventually murdered by my cheating wife or her paramour. Because that is what we see in such cases. Even in recent times, I remember we saw an IAS officer committing suicide because of wife’s adultery. Most often these cases are not even properly reported and no one even comes to know about these.”

He took a long breath and continued ..”I was continuously feeling that if I did not murder her, she would murder me and my parents would not be able to run after the courts and end up paying their hard-earned money to her family.

I was not courageous enough to do anything against her cheating. Not only because I was a coward, but also because they were powerful. Our legal system had not left anything for men to get a legal reprieve in such cases. I started losing sleep, losing health and losing focus in my career. As a result, my performance in my office deteriorated. I used to get flak from office, home and no one knew or bothered to know the reason.

All my family members decided to meet a good advocate and hence we went to a very prominent criminal lawyer, who is now a high court judge. However, that was the worst experience I have ever had. After waiting for hours in his crammed ‘living room’ when I was guided into his chamber, the room was already full of people. Lawyers, common men, and only two chairs were vacant for us. The moment I sat on the chair, he asked me to start, while he continued to chat with others and take phone calls. I spoke only for five minutes and I was very sure he didn’t hear me out as he was speaking with others, taking phone calls etc.. Surprisingly when I asked him what could be done, he just asked me to file a case. Nothing more, nothing less. My session was over is five minutes.

I was so depressed for that huge money loss that day, I was sure that there was no recourse for me. His words were just bogus words for me and didn’t have any weight. I came out paying the huge price for being a male.

Afterwards, we decided to meet her parents along with my parents but those criminals in a way shouted and did all the wrong things and showed that I was cruel to her and tortured her for dowry. When I told them that how an unknown man can come to her room when I am not there, her mother replied – “Even unknown guys come to my room when no one is there in the house. What’s the big deal?” Her father, who was a top bureaucrat in WB at that time, was also supportive of her and abused me to the full extent.

I didn’t see any hope of justice. I was only circling around the thoughts of murder and suicide. Soon, I lost my liveliness. I was a living corpse. Dying every moment, but not able to die because my parents would have had a worse time. I could not murder her whole family, too. If I did, newspapers would have reported that as – “husband murdered wife and family in ‘suspicion’ of her adultery“, even after I caught her red-handed in her illicit relation in my house. Everyone would have known that I am the culprit, and I should have come out of the marriage peacefully but no one would have bothered to see what I was going through.

Thankfully for me, she didn’t murder me while I was thinking of my next steps. But she did threaten me to commit suicide many times and made me afraid. But to my surprise, I did not notice that much activity from her side with her paramour. Maybe, they had become so clever that she was able to hide everything from me while continuing her affair. But as I was not able to spot anything, I thought after the incident she had changed herself, until 2009, when I got yet another shocker of my life…”