Indian Woman’s Death Tied to Cultural Clash

She was a woman without a country, torn between two cultures.

Having tasted independence during her five years in the United States, she was reluctant to return to her native India, where her birth as a female consigned her to a subservient role.

And yet the pressure to conform to some Indian customs was too great to resist--even from 9,000 miles away.

A successful clothing designer and distributor, with a town house in Woodland Hills, Mandeep Kaur was urged by her family to marry and marry quickly, for she was already in her 20s and living on her own, disgraceful by Indian standards. But finding an Indian husband who could accept her life style as an American entrepreneur, consumed by her work and neglectful of household chores, would not be easy.

Declined Arranged Marriage

Declining her parents’ offer to arrange a husband for her, Kaur selected her own mate, Nandan Lal, a man she had met in India through a school friend but knew only casually. They married in December, 1983, in a traditional ceremony at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi. Kaur returned to the United States, and Lal, who had to wait to get a visa, joined her early this year.

In August, Kaur’s struggle to reconcile the conflicting ways of life of her native land and her adopted land ended in her death--and in Lal’s arrest for her strangulation. They were both just 25.

Police said Lal told them that he became “fed up” with his wife because she was too domineering. In the words of one of Kaur’s friends, Lal came to the United States thinking that he had married a traditional Indian “lamb” but found, instead, that she was a “bucking bronco” from the West.

No one disputes that Lal killed her. The only question is why.

Police said Lal admitted that he choked his wife to death on Aug. 18 and hid her body in their bedroom closet before dumping it in the desert near Barstow, where it was found Aug. 25, substantially decomposed.

Murder or Manslaughter?

According to his attorney, Lal claims that he killed her in the “heat of passion” following an argument, which is tantamount to manslaughter.

Her family believes that he killed her because she wanted to leave him and cut him off financially; in other words, that he murdered her.

A Van Nuys Superior Court jury will decide the question, possibly as early as January. The case is tentatively scheduled for trial Jan. 9.

In the meantime, Kaur’s friends and relatives are blaming themselves for not recognizing the depth of the couple’s marital chasm.

Shortly before her death, Kaur had gone to a Beverly Hills law firm to talk about a divorce, but her parents, arguing that she would bring shame upon herself, persuaded her to try to work it out.

“She talked about divorce, but I said, ‘Don’t do it in a hurry. Think about it,’ ” her father recalled. “Divorce is not so common in India. It’s not so easy to find another husband if you’ve been divorced.

“Now I am feeling that I am very guilty,” he said. “If I had agreed to the divorce, maybe she would not have been killed.”

News item--Feb. 11, 1984: “ In a recent 12-month period in New Delhi alone, 610 wives died of burns, presumably because husbands soaked them with kerosene and set them afire in search of another dowry. “

Kaur’s father, Mohanjit Singh, believes that the trouble began with the dowry, which in India involves much more than passing on the family china.

Although dowries have been outlawed in India, the practice of paying substantial sums to the groom’s extended family continues. According to Vasisht K. Malhotra, an Indian who directs USC’s Center for Intercultural Studies, it is not unusual for women to die in mysterious kitchen fires if the in-laws feel that the dowry was insufficient. The practice is commonly called “bride burning,” Malhotra said.

In a telephone interview from New Delhi, Singh said that his daughter’s marriage was his first experience at providing a dowry. Singh, who is affluent, claims to have presented Lal’s parents with more than $10,000 in clothing, jewelry and cash, but said he inadvertently forgot to provide for Lal’s aunts, uncles, cousins and other relations.

Doubts on Dowry

“After a time, his family wanted more,” Singh said. “We should have given to the boy’s relations. They expected it, and they got angry.”

From that moment on, Singh asserted, Lal’s family did not accept Singh’s daughter as a good match for their son.

“I would not say that the dowry caused the killing, but, certainly, his relations were not happy with my daughter right from the first day,” Singh said. “Ultimately, he was in a situation where he was sandwiched between his family and his wife.”

Joann Shaikh, Kaur’s close friend, said Lal believed that his wife had a ready pipeline to her father’s income and that he expected to live off that money. But Kaur was determined to make it on her own, Shaikh said, without her father’s help. And, by all accounts, she had made a success of her business, which earned her about $100,000 a year.

Motivation Questioned

Lal’s father, reached by telephone in New Delhi, refused to discuss the case, except to say that he did not believe that his son was motivated by financial greed.

Lal’s attorney, deputy public defender Barry A. Taylor, said that Lal’s family had a substantial amount of property, although not as much as Kaur’s family. Lal, as the eldest son, was due to inherit the property upon his father’s death, Taylor said.

“This is not a case of a poor kid running after a rich man’s daughter,” he said.

Whatever Lal’s motive for taking Kaur as his wife, Singh feels responsible for pushing his daughter into marriage.

“She didn’t know him well,” Singh said. “In deference to my wishes, she married him. In the Indian culture, normally, the marriage is arranged by the parents. But we are a progressive family. She suggested him, and I agreed.”

Hemant Sahai, Kaur’s friend and business associate, said Kaur chose Lal out of desperation.

“The parents did not like her living alone in the United States,” he said. “She was given a choice: either she marry or she come back to India.”

Kaur’s father said the arrangement also suited Lal, who wanted to immigrate to the United States. Because Kaur already had a permanent-resident visa, he said, Lal could more easily secure his own entry into the United States by marrying her.

“It seemed like the minute he got the visa, he stopped loving her,” Singh said.

Kaur returned to the San Fernando Valley shortly after the marriage, but her husband’s visa was delayed by a clerical problem and he was unable to join her for a year.

Lal spent the better part of 1984 unemployed in Denmark, awaiting permission to travel to the United States. Kaur was sending him about $500 a month from her business revenues, her father said.

Serious Trouble

Within a few months after her husband arrived in the United States, Kaur began reporting to her parents that the marriage was in serious trouble.

According to Sahai, Kaur wrote home in the spring that, “I have everything that I want in my life, but I have nobody I love to share it with.”

She complained that Lal drank too much, hit her and refused to work, living instead off her income, Singh said. Kaur told her parents that, on one occasion, her husband became “very angry” with her and burned her hand with a cigarette, he said. Lal’s lawyer described him as a “moderate drinker,” but would not comment on the other accusations.

The couple lived in the Warner Center town house that Kaur purchased four years ago for $130,000, her father said. By all accounts, Kaur was a workaholic. Her husband, who was unemployed, often accompanied her to swap meets where she sold her fashions, but was not actively involved in her business, friends said.

‘A Sad Puppy Dog’

“He was like a sad puppy dog who walked quietly behind her,” said Kaur’s neighbor and friend, psychologist Mary Anne Rust. “That was not the way for the Indian man.”

In August, during her mother’s visit to Los Angeles, Kaur said she wanted to sell her business and return to India with her mother. But before her mother left on Aug. 14, she persuaded Kaur to postpone any decisions until Sept. 9, when her father was scheduled to visit.

On Sunday, Aug. 18, she was dead.

When Kaur’s friends and relatives inquired of her whereabouts, Lal told them that his wife had gone on a business trip to Santa Barbara and would return in about three days, according to testimony at Lal’s preliminary hearing. By the end of the week, her friends had persuaded him to file a missing person’s report with Los Angeles police.

But after interviewing him and talking with the victims’ acquaintances, police grew suspicious of Lal and asked him to take a lie detector test, which he failed, Detective Duane Burris testified at the Oct. 24 hearing. Lal finally confessed to the killing and led detectives to the remote spot in the desert where he had abandoned the body, Burris said.

Forbade Visits and Calls

Lal claims, in his defense, that his wife controlled every aspect of his life, forbidding his family to call or visit him, Taylor said. In addition, Lal maintains that his wife would not allow him to associate with friends and refused to let him work, requiring him to beg her for each dollar he needed to buy cigarettes, the defense attorney said.

“He had no support system in this country,” Taylor said. “He said she gave him absolutely no freedom. The house was a mess, and she would go away on business trips and leave no food in the refrigerator.”

Burris testified that Lal told investigators “he just could not take it any longer.”

“He said he felt better about telling somebody. He didn’t have any friends he could really talk to.”

Esther Morrison, a paralegal with the Beverly Hills law firm of Richard D. Fraade, confirmed that Kaur came to the office shortly before her death to talk about leaving her husband.

Hard Decision

“She told me that she was very upset with her husband, that he was beating her,” Morrison said. “She was crying. It was a very hard decision to make. She was very afraid of him. This was the last resort.”

After talking with her father, however, Kaur wavered and decided to delay filing the papers, Morrison said.

“She cried and told me, ‘All I want to do is to be a good daughter and make my parents proud of me,’ ” Morrison recalled.

Kaur’s friends and relatives describe her as fiercely independent and headstrong, an unusual Indian woman who was determined to make it big in the United States.

“From the time she was a child, she had ideas that were different from everyone else,” Shaikh said. “Her mother used to say, ‘My God, she’s so Western. They must have switched babies on me at birth.’ ”

Kaur earned a degree at a fashion design school in New Delhi and joined her father’s clothing manufacturing firm as a designer in the 1970s.

Moved to U.S. at 20

After several family trips to the United States, Kaur decided in 1977 that she wanted to live in America, Singh said. But her parents objected, saying that, at 17, she was too young. They told her that they would give their approval when she turned 20.

In 1980, she moved to Los Angeles and took on an American name, Mandy.

She enrolled in some business classes and worked for a year in an accounting firm, also selling some of her fashions at swap meets on weekends. As her one-woman business blossomed, Kaur quit her accounting job and devoted herself exclusively to selling clothes that she had designed and her father’s company had manufactured, friends said.

She operated her business out of her garage, which was piled high with silk and cotton outfits that were shipped from India.

“Her father is a very wealthy man, but she had to do it herself, without his money,” her friend Sahai said. “She started from scratch and built up a very successful business.

“The work was everything for her. I was amazed at her capacity for work.”

Shaikh, who serves as secretary to the Indo-U.S. Business Assn. in Los Angeles, said she first met Kaur in 1979, while on a business trip to India, and promised her parents that she would look after Kaur when she moved to the United States.

Unusually Independent

“It’s unheard of for an Indian girl to leave home before marriage and certainly to go to a foreign country,” Shaikh said.

“I was to be her protector,” she added tearfully. “I guess I didn’t do a very good job. I knew they were having problems, but I had no idea it would come to this.”

By all accounts, Kaur was a rebel. While still living in India, she cut her hair, which is forbidden by her Sikh religion, friends said.

After moving to Los Angeles, she remained close to her family, phoning her parents in India an average of three times a week. But she also embraced Western ways and broke several rules of Indian culture and her religion.

Kaur wore her hair in a short perm, dressed in Western clothes, almost always ate American food and, most notably, smoked cigarettes, although never in her parents’ presence. In the Sikh culture, according to USC’s Malhotra, smoking is “absolutely the worst thing you can do.”

One reason Kaur chose Lal as her husband, Shaikh said, was because he was Hindu, not Sikh.

“She made it very clear that she did not want to marry a Sikh,” Shaikh said. “She didn’t want a man with a turban.”

Hoped to Postpone Marriage

With Kaur’s seven-day-a-week work schedule, Shaikh said, she had hoped to postpone marriage for several years.

“She was too busy with her own career, like many other American women,” Shaikh said.

Her passion for her business also translated into a disdain for the traditional role of the Indian woman.

Friends said Kaur disliked having visitors from India drop in on her at all hours of the night, expecting to be put up in her home, and had no interest in cooking or cleaning.

“I had several discussions with Mandy’s mother about the role of women in India,” Kaur’s neighbor, Rust, said. “In India, women do what their husbands want. I think that’s why she came to the United States and why she was reluctant to go back.”

Rust, who described Kaur as a “very lovable, charming girl,” said that Lal may have expected a more traditional wife.

“I think part of the problem with the marriage was that you think you’re marrying a little lamb and end up marrying a bucking bronco because of the cultural changes,” Rust said.

Devoted to Career

But Shaikh maintains that Kaur discussed her ambitions with Lal before marrying him and that he knew she was devoted to her career.

After reviewing the evidence at the preliminary hearing, Van Nuys Municipal Judge James M. Coleman ruled that the prosecution had presented enough evidence to hold Lal for trial only on charges of voluntary manslaughter. The prosecution appealed the ruling to Superior Court, however, where Commissioner Alan B. Haber reinstated the murder charge.

After all the evidence is presented at the trial, Haber will tell the jury which degree of murder, or what lesser charge, to consider.

First-degree murder requires proof of premeditation and malice, while second-degree murder is unplanned. Voluntary manslaughter is an intentional killing, but one that is provoked by a sudden quarrel, drunkenness or other factors that alter one’s thinking, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Deborah L. Kranze, who is prosecuting the case.

Kaur’s parents said they will come to Los Angeles for the trial and will press for a first-degree murder conviction.

“Nothing can bring our daughter back, that’s the unfortunate thing,” Singh said. “But all we can do is not hurt her soul. If he gets away with this, it would be a terrible thing.”