It was about 9am when two men walked into the Thrissur Rural Vanitha Police Station with an urgent demand a couple of years ago.
They wanted the police to summon a woman immediately. “She has to be called here now,” they told the then Station House Officer Vinaya N A.
The two men were the woman’s husband and father-in-law. Their ‘complaint’ was about her decision to leave home.
The woman had two daughters studying in Classes 1 and 8. The men told the police that she was planning to leave them behind and go away to another town. They wanted the police to stop her.
Vinaya, however, decided to hear the woman’s side as well. She was called to the station.
She was not dressed as someone who had been called to settle a family dispute. She arrived at the station with a packed suitcase. “It was clear that she was determined to leave,” the retired officer recalls.
Vinaya spoke to her separately, away from the two men. The woman explained her position.
“She had been offered a job as a beautician at a shop in Malappuram. The salary was Rs 25,000 a month,” Vinaya recalls. “She had to reach there by 5pm that day, or she feared she would lose the opportunity.”
The woman had been without a job for some time, as she had faced humiliation due to her financial dependence on the husband.
But there was another question. What about her daughters?
The woman argued that taking care of children was not the responsibility of the mother alone. The grandfather and father could take care of them at least until she stabilised in her profession.
Vinaya then called the men back. The question she posed to them was simple: If the woman had an opportunity to work and the children could be taken care of by the father and grandfather for some months, why should she be stopped?
The men fumed. “They started accusing me of trying to ruin their family,” the former officer laughs. “I became their problem.”
Vinaya, however, did not see a crime in a woman wanting to earn a living.
“As the children were being left with family members, I didn’t find her aspiration for financial independence to be a sin,” she says. “I was convinced that she wasn’t abandoning them. She was actually striving to provide the children too with a better life.”
The quarrel, however, continued at the station. Thumping on her table, Vinaya told the men that the woman could go to work and that they had no right to prevent her from leaving.
The woman was allowed to leave. The men too left, seething and shouting.
But that was not the end of the story. “The woman eventually returned and set up her own beauty salon. They are a happy family now,” the former officer smiles.
For Vinaya, the incident remains one of the many ‘cases’ that never appear in crime statistics. No FIR. No arrest. No chargesheet.
“Many lives have been changed through the women’s police stations,” Vinaya recalls. “Our work is not only about crime. We also have to step into people’s lives and understand what is happening there. We guide people, help resolve misunderstandings, offer informal counselling....”
This, she says, is a side of policing that often remains invisible.