Rubies of Fixated Pollination

She was my favorite daughter, a wailing mother

 One of the saddest and most irrelevant foreign spousal murders which could ever have been brought to the attention of the American viewer is that of Varkha Rani, a Hindi woman who, according to the dictates of caste and tradition, was a potential, then selected betrothal of Jasvir  Ginday, former employee of the Royal Bank of Scotland. In the YouTube video uploaded amid the furor of the trial, there is an insert of her mother’s outcry, before the eye is drawn back to the celebratory and vivid costume of their wedding day, a still photo of which leads The Independent’s byline, Ginday’s mauve turban, Rani’s veil and dress of translucent pinks. Under the long serving terms of Narendra Modi, such a lavish assertion of Hindu identity is as much a post-colonial place card as a Muslim hijab, and might even be reassuring to classicists who find comfort in preserving these said  traditions, if it wasn’t for the fact that this matchmaking ceremony was a façade. Ginday acquiesced to his mother’s matrimonial wishes to conceal a homosexual lifestyle which The United Kingdom’s ever burgeoning liberalism allowed him to pursue, and Rani, allegedly perplexed with Jasvir’s lack of desire for her, as the investigation reconstructed the timeline, discovers her husband’s ruse. Jasvir crushes her windpipe out of fear with a weapon of opportunity, then incinerates her body in a domestically purchased incinerator, pointedly referred to by presiding Judge John Warner as a “meticulous” plan for disposal. What it wasn’t was a particularly logical construct for not being outed, which is why it became a story with enough teeth to gain international notice, roiling through  The Hindustan Times and other Indian outlets to earn a lede in the BBC, which aimed for a fall-from-grace approach, emphasizing Jasvir’s mugshot, purportedly with Varkha’s scratches on his face, indicative of her attempt to survive. Once court reporters had finished wringing their hands with this new wave pathological behavior, hardly in need of further sensationalizing, it then became a tawdry documentary reenactment, repackaged in mildly playful series like How (Not) to Kill Your Husband, whose staying power is reflective of an anodyne for the incredulous and discarded to rally around John Walsh.

Marriages of appearance have been deployed as optimization commands for centuries. Henry VIII turned the Mosaic concept of divorce into a mechanism of ridicule which diminished imperial authority. The union of Charles and Diana made the continued reign of Winsor problematic; Governor Schwarzenegger’s merger with the Kennedy’s through Maria Shriver failed in terms of cementing a political legacy, but these are about prominence and suspension of disbelief, whatever questions they pose about the success of monogamy or its circumvention. If Jasvir Ginday wanted a token heterosexual union to work, (it’s difficult to know) such as that between Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, the public at large can still surmise, and has, that springing this on a nascent bride from the British Empire’s territorial crown jewel was overwhelming, even cruel in terms of its malignant narcissism. Killing Rani and then deliberately cremating her remains because she reacted in hurt and repulsion only accentuated how such malignancy escalates, leaving  those with sympathy for this young woman wondering if the penalty imposed, 21 years to life, wasn’t this side of too lenient. Elsa Lanchester didn’t have the benefit of Rani’s cell phone technology, but the devastation she expresses is as relatable as Varkha’s, who didn’t have the benefit of time to absorb such a manipulative deceit against her. The impetuosity of youth, the status of women in India in its restive independence, these items are no excuse for the febrile impotency of patriarchal insecurity burrowing itself in the undercurrent of social norms. This case also provides ample proof that homosexual activists don’t have the last word on the ever expansive progressive tent. Hinduism, by its very nature, expresses a certain degree of fluidity, hence there was no Christian condemnation waiting in the wings if this man had told mamma the truth. There may have been other consequences brought about by familial conservative mindsets, betrayal, disappointment, but none of that was worth the savagery of this “gay panic”. Sociologists might look at this crime as a failure of assimilation between the former ruling power and the nation it helped to equip once beyond the cataclysms of the 20^th century, but the failure may also lie with Britain’s leftist radicalism. Two years after Jasvir Ginday ignited the media’s oft puritanical mindset, in the opening year of Theresa May’s conservative Brexit government, Gordon Semple died in Stefano Brizzi’s flat, in an even more grisly autoerotic accident. How Brizzi squared his conscience in the limited evidence of life he offered his prison wardens, in the year before his death in the winter of 17, is between him and his troubled faith, but Semple was a constable, a middle-aged man with a partner at home, who should have had some knowledge of the seediness vice squads are still expected to contain, but there he was, on CCTV, casually scrolling through Grindr, looking for a hook up. No safety net in Andrew Sullivan’s extraordinary success with gay marriage here. Why should there be? The sexual revolution has emphatically taken the closet off its hinges.