A Mission of Mercy and Cultural Awareness

In more ways than she could have predicted, an Indian immigrant named Narinder Virk has relied on the kindness of strangers.

It was a stranger, after all, who fished her out of the dark waters of Channel Islands Harbor as she allegedly tried to drown her two young children.

And now, strangers have sounded the call at Indian organizations and in Sikh temples throughout Southern California: A Sikh woman in Ventura County acted in desperation and is in desperate trouble. We must raise $50,000 to pay her bail, we must find a shelter for her, we must tell her story to Westerners who otherwise could not comprehend the magnitude of her despair.

“We definitely want to help her,” said Dr. Amarjit S. Marwah, a Sikh community leader who practices dentistry in Los Angeles. “We don’t know if the judge understands what women sometimes go through in the Indian culture.”

Virk has never met the people working on her behalf. Some have donated to a fund for her day-to-day needs in jail--shampoo, toothpaste and the like. Women from India who live in Ventura County have called newspapers with a message: You can only know about this crime if you know about the slave-like lot of tens of millions of wives in thousands of villages.

But whether this mission of mercy will sway the strangers who matter most--12 of them, good and true--is anyone’s guess.

Juries in the county that boasts the safest cities in the United States are not known for their leniency. In the past, they have not been bowled over by the hey-I’m-the-victim-here defense.

Just last month, a Ventura murder defendant named Gladis Soto related a long, sad history of abuse at the hands of the husband she shot to death and later dismembered.

The verdict: Guilty of murder in the first degree--not to mention a couple of other circumstances that could extend her sentence beyond 50 years.

But Virk’s case is different, her sympathizers say.

They contend she was trapped in a tortured marriage and rendered helpless by the unbending values of her culture. For eight years, she lived just down the road from contented American suburbanites, yet a world away.

Virk can’t speak English. Nor can she read or write her native tongue.

She grew up the daughter of farm laborers in the village of Kalsingha, in the portion of the northwest Punjab called Amritsar. Brought to this country by the man her parents had chosen as her husband, she was isolated, abused, paralyzed with fear, her supporters say.

Why didn’t she simply pack up the kids and flee?

“The whole thing is about shame,” said a woman from India who now is a medical professional in Ventura County. “Divorce is like death; it’s better to die in marriage than to be divorced. In India when we go through these things, the shame is so great that to eliminate it, some women commit suicide and take the children with them.”

In many villages, a woman who can’t hold her marriage together is so fatally flawed that even her family won’t help her. She is a disgrace, a failure, a pariah, said the woman, who asked that her name not be used.

“It’s still the shame factor,” she said. “No Indian woman would want her story in the paper.”

To accept all this, a local jury must leap a cultural divide. After all, we live in a society where the concept of spanking stirs bitter conflict; can jurors who won’t hug a lost child for fear of a lawsuit excuse a mother’s alleged attempt to kill her own?

Dee Corona, the prosecutor in the case, declined comment.

Christina Briles, Virk’s public defender, called her client “systematically abused, manipulated and oppressed.”

Whether strangers will interpret that with kindness remains to be seen.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.