Saquinder Sidhu starts his day with a ritual. Quietly, in the heat and haze of the early morning, he takes a pen and writes the name Jassi in the palm of his hand. And all day, many times a day, when he's feeling sad and needs the comfort of her memory, he opens his hand, looks at her name, and whispers it to himself.
Jassi was his wife. Tall and slim, with flowing long hair the colour of a raven, she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. They flirted, met secretly, and fell in love. Theirs was a romance of stolen phone calls and desperate letters, of furtive rendezvous charged with the excitement of being together and the fear of being found out. They both understood theirs was a forbidden love.
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Jassi Sidhu was Canadian; her immediate family long ago traded life in the agricultural heartland of India's Punjab province for a new and more promising future in British Columbia. She grew up in two worlds, between the socially unencumbered and informal ways of the west, and the more traditional rituals of her ancestral culture. When she was in her late teens, her family followed the accepted custom and began to help her search for a suitable husband.
Instead, on a trip to her maternal home village, she met Saquinder, known to everyone by his nickname, Mithu. He was impossibly good looking and athletic. But he hardly met the criteria for suitability, and they both knew it. He lived in a two-room cement and brick house with a widowed mother and younger brother. He drove a rickshaw taxi: a cross between a motorcycle and open air jeep, that can seat about ten people if they squeeze in, and can transport as many as 60 if they climb on the roof or clutch the many handrails protruding from all directions. Technically, he belonged to the same cast as Jassi, but, though unrelated, they shared the same last name and their ancestors came from the same village, all details that made him unsuitable. As well, he was her economic inferior.
Mithu and Jassi eloped five years after their first meeting; she was 24, he was 23. The collection of saris and jewelry she had been accumulating for a much more public and elaborate traditional wedding were back in Canada. This wedding was a secret, attended only by Mithu's closest friends.
Back in British Columbia, she contacted the federal immigration government, and unbeknownst to her family, applied for permission to bring Mithu to Canada. Soon, it all began to unravel. Her family discovered her secret, and her uncle Sirjit Singh Badesha registered a case against Mithu with the Punjab police, alleging she'd been forced, at gunpoint, into an illegal marriage. On the strength of those allegations, the police began to hunt for Mithu; he went into hiding; his friends were arrested and beaten. In Canada, Jassi ran away from home, and, discovering her bank account frozen, borrowed money from a collection of friends in order to buy a plane ticket. She flew to India, hoping to set the record straight with the police and bring her husband back to Canada.
Two months after she arrived, early on the evening of June 8 Jassi was riding on the back of a scooter driven by Mithu, when they were attacked by men waiting in a car at the side of a deserted road. He was beaten and left for dead. She was taken to a nearby farm house, where, Punjab police allege, her killers made a fateful call to Canada. Her body was found the next morning, in an irrigation ditch, her throat slashed by a sword.
In The Murdered Bride, the fifth estate reveals new information about what happened that night, and who the Indian police believe was involved.
