Trial by DNA for Gulf workers’ wives

Instances are not rare when desperate wives volunteer to undergo the DNA test to convince suspicious husbands of their fidelity.

Like Nafeesa (not her real name). Her husband had been in a Gulf country for the last seven years. Seven barren years when the couple failed to produce a child, years during which society and relatives castigated her for her `barrenness.’

But, finally `Fate’ was kind. Nafeesa got pregnant and gave birth to a child — a bonny boy, a replica of her husband.

Did it make the family and her Gulf-based husband happy? Not if the events thatfollowed are any indication.

Her husband, as is the case with many Gulf-based husbands, had nurtured doubts about the fidelity of his wife. He denied that he was the father of the child. How could she become pregnant after seven years?

He refused even to touch the baby. He went to the extent of seeking a divorce.

A frantic Nafeesa, stigmatised before family and society, approached the Vanitha Commission requesting a DNA test to prove the paternity of the child.

`Please restore my honour. I am not a fallen woman. I have not strayed,’ she pleaded.

Another Sita, stripped of her honour. Ever compelled to prove her chastity!

The Commission obliged. The DNA test proved that the child was indeed her husband’s.

Was the husband compunctious? Remorseful? Compassionate? Or, ashamed that he had subjected this faithful woman to a traumatising test, virtually victimising her by doubting the paternity of his own child?

Far from it. He was just self-righteous and defiant.

Says Vanitha Commission chairpersonSugatha Kumari: `His sister was all remorse. She came and took her sister-in-law’s hand, but the husband stood mute and indifferent, though he had wrought such abject humiliation on her. I pointed out that his wife had passed through fire and asked to him to beg her pardon, to take his child in his hands.’

`If it is my child, I will look after it,’ the man had answered gruffly, taking the child whom he had refused to touch so far.

`Nafeesa was a deluge of tears, a moving testimony of the unbearable agony of her plight. But she was determined to go with the man who fathered her child. And, she walked out, a copy of the DNA test in her hand, her head held high, her body erect,’ Kumari recalls.

Nafeesa is not an isolated symptom of an increasingly spreading malaise. Psychiatrists across the State admit that many `Gulf husbands’ harbour the Othello syndrome (delusional disorder) about the chastity of their wives and demand DNA tests.

Quite often, even the DNA tests fail to convince them and they bringthese unfortunate women before psychiatrists, hoping that hypnosis or some abracadabra would prove their suspicion true.