Cyanide in a Pot
The women of Kerala are reputed to be amongst the brightest, most educated, the most traditional and religious in South India. But something happened recently, that has shaken the men of Kerala so severely, that they are terrified of being poisoned thinking twice before eating the food their wives serve them.
It had to do with Jolly Amma Joseph, 47, a ‘kulasthree’, an ideal Indian wife and mother of two sons who had been living in a pastel-pink three-storey house in Koodathai, a small town of 12,000 people in the coastal Kerala state.
For 17 years, Jolly, a Catholic, embodied ancient ideas of South Indian womanhood. Docile, demure, pliant dressed in traditional silk saris, adorned in gold jewelry, this mother of two prioritised her home, her husband and in-laws above all else, catering to their every need before heading out to work as a professor. We can safely assume words like feminism or patriarchy were not in her vocabulary She had come here as a bride in 1997 after meeting and falling in love with Roy Thomas. The problem was Roy lied to her. He was unemployed and liked drinking.
Her mother-in-law controlled her movements. Her father-in-law controlled her finances. Jolly was no different to millions of women in rural India living in joint families: An India where every nine minutes, a case of cruelty is committed by either a husband or a relative of the husband; an India, where a crime against a woman is committed every three minutes; an India where 500 women are killed each year over dowry disputes. The men and their families killed for control, cash, property freedom to remarry, freedom.
Jolly lives in a world where 50,000 women a year worldwide are killed by intimate partners or family members—that’s one in three women, according to a 2018 UN report. This was her lot. Maybe not.
Jolly wanted the same things men who kill women want. Control, cash, property freedom to remarry, freedom. Jolly lied about her qualifications, and where she worked, she offered sexual favours to men who sold cyanide.
In August 2002, Jolly’s mother-in-law, Annamma, a retired schoolteacher fell unconscious after a meal of mutton soup and died. Six years on, Tom, Jolly’s father-inlaw, died after eating a plate of tapioca. Neither of the deaths was investigated at the time.
As her marriage to Roy Thomas, an unemployed alcoholic deteriorated, Joseph too, was found dead after a meal of chickpeas and rice. Next, Jolly’s husband’s uncle Manjadiyilby died after imbibing an alcoholic drink. He had been pushing for a post-mortem for his nephew. Next Shaju Sakhariyas, her husband’s cousin’s wife Sili and daughter Alphine died.
Jolly aroused suspicion when she married Shaji, her husband’s cousin. Jolly’s arrest and confession to poison all six came weeks before a man in another part of India was apprehended after confessing to killing ten people by giving them cyanide laced religious offerings or medicine and then stealing their cash, gold or silver.
This received no attention like the statistics in this column. Men killing women is ordinary. Last week six lovely women graced the front page of a daily newspaper in Trinidad. In fact, they were the faces of some of the 30 murdered women this year.
The T&T Police Ser vice noted that between 2005 and 2015, some 300 women were killed due to domestic abuse. The women in the Indian media suggested Jolly was pushing back at the wall of patriarchy that was crushing women for centuries. One Trini woman summed up women’s reaction everywhere. “Hurt people hurt.”
As Jolly got carted to the scenes of her crimes in Koodathai by police, hundreds of terrified South Indian men, some who had travelled a long way, stood on walls, craned their necks to get a glimpse of Jolly.
Women are fighting back. A Trini woman told me that when she was nine, she nearly dug out a boys’ eyeball for interfering with her, that she has fantasies of castrating perpetrators of domestic violence publicly.
Nobody thought the Me Too Movement would catch like fire, that men like Jeffrey Epstein would be behind bars, that a prince of England would be stripped of his duties for fraternising with him. That kind of abuse had been part of what it meant to be a man.
What Jolly did was evil. But the silent support she is getting from women everywhere says, “No more.” No more double standards.
Keralite men are now cooking their own food.