The new bahu on the block is a killer. Ekta Kapoor’s popular depiction of daughters-in-law flitting about in Kanjeevaram silks with heads full of sindoor on TV are now replaced in popular imagination with the kind that laces your supper with cyanide.
Just like Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, based on a real-life case, Jolly Joseph evokes a curious reaction; the gender of the criminal is crucial to our facial expressions. Murderer men are greeted with a shrug —of course, they kill, brutes that they are with nasty tempers and petty motives.
Women though are more nuanced creatures, aren’t they? Why they kill, whom they kill could never be random. Indeed, did they kill at all? Regular victims of marital rape and domestic abuse, of inequality and oversight, what can these feeble creatures be up to? Add to that society’s unease with female sexuality.
A male killer is a straightforward case, a daylight event, while a female killer is a shut box, a shadow at midnight. Her looks, her demeanour, any coquetry or amour, everything is up for analysis. Jolly Joseph, the merry widow of Kozhikode, is accused of having committed multiple murders by the age of 47. What started off as a hobby seems to have become an addiction. Seemingly keeping the feminine mask intact—that of being a caring housewife—she is said to have done away with all her antagonists: a mother-in-law, a father-in-law, a first husband, an uncle by marriage, a potential step-daughter and her second husband’s first wife. The TV reportage on this has now turned into an endless list of whodunits.
Jolly is in police custody, ostensibly singing like a canary. Her second husband, Shaju, went from being a suspect to a saint in TV headlines. Press itself accorded her maiden-name status soon, addressing her as Jolly Joseph instead of Jolly Roy or Jolly Shaju, as if to signify her solo status as operator.
In footage that defies middle-class belief, Jolly is seen standing with policemen almost as if a colleague, back in her marital home, pointing out proof against herself. For days during questioning she is supposed to have worn the same salwar-kameez she was arrested in, as no change of clothes was sent for her from home, either her father’s or her husband’s. Her son too appeared to have given up on her going by the few words he spoke to reporters. When the news that the graves of her alleged victims were to be dug up first came, Jolly only expressed worry about her sons’ futures. She did lose all consciousness when the exhumations actually took place.
The homicides are horrific enough for the average man to take in, even the lying about holding a prestigious but fictitious post at a reputed institute is perhaps understandable—what gets the common man’s goat is the implied immoderate and illicit lust. Jolly is said, by her own initial testimony, to have dated profusely within the neighbourhood. It’s her sexual predator status that tilts the portrait of womanhood hanging on musty tharavad walls far more than her fondness for cyanide as a spice.
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