Summary
It is now evening. Benare is summoned to the witness-box but does not want to go, so Mrs. Kashikar pushes her forward. She is stricken and silent. Sukhatme is pleased with the whole thing and puts on his gown to seem more authoritative. He tells the others to sit appropriately and says it is time for Benare to take the oath.
Benare says nothing. Samant tells her softly it is just a game, but Mrs. Kashikar takes her hand, puts it on the dictionary, and smugly says the oath for her. Everyone accepts this and Sukhatme begins his questioning by cheekily calling her Leela Damle instead of Leela Benare. He asks her age but she will not say anything, so Mrs. Kashikar blurts out that she is thirty-two. Kashikar will not accept this, but Benare’s silence also frustrates him. They decide she is thirty-four.
Sukhatme dramatically withdraws his question about her age, and Kashikar grumbles that society should revive the custom of child marriage and “Marry off the girls before they attain puberty. All this promiscuity will come to an end” (66).
Sukhatme wanders behind Benare, who jumps when she hears his voice. He asks how she has managed to stay unmarried at such a “mature” and “advanced” age (67), as well as how she missed her chances at marriage. At her continued silence, Sukhatme says he closes the examination for now.
Benare gets up and tries to leave again, but the door is locked, Ponkshe blocks her, and Mrs. Kashikar steers her back. Sukhatme calls Mrs. Kashikar, who is eager to take the box. Sukhatme asks how such an educated and well-brought-up girl—Mrs. Kashikar corrects him and says “woman”—is unmarried. Mrs. Kashikar states that anyone who wants to get married can do so in a flash, but some women today do not care about responsibility. They only want comfort, and the fact that women work today means they do not need to marry. This is why society is flawed: all the promiscuity and women getting “everything” without marrying. Sukhatme presses her on what she means by this; she implies sex but does not say it.
Continuing, Sukhatme asks Mrs. Kashikar if she has any proof where Benare is concerned; Mrs. Kashikar gestures and implores them just to look at Benare’s behavior. She is too free with men: too loud and too jokey. She asks why it is ok for Benare to have Professor Damle at home alone after a performance. Benare says nothing.
Sukhatme brightens at this tidbit and pushes for more. Mrs. Kashikar explains that last September, she and her husband volunteered to drive Benare home after a performance, but she went off with Damle instead. Sukhatme asks about Damle, and Mrs. Kashikar tells him Damle is a family man with five children. He wants to know if Benare sought Damle innocently, as a “responsible elderly person” (69). Mrs. Kashikar retorts: Damle is old, but what about Balu?
This surprises everyone. Mrs. Kashikar says hotly that Benare pursued Balu, too. Sukhatme beams, Benare is silent, and Balu is embarrassed. Sukhatme gleefully calls Balu back to the stand. Balu is hesitant but obeys.
When Sukhatme begins, Balu shakes his head as if to say Benare did not come onto him, but Mrs. Kashikar insists he told her she did. Balu is reluctant, but Mrs. Kashikar keeps butting in until her husband rebukes her. Finally, Balu says that after a performance Benare took his hand; he told her it was not proper, and she whispered not to tell anyone. At this, Benare speaks up and says that this is a lie. Kashikar bangs his gavel and reprimands her.
Sukhatme is pleased with the state of affairs and states to the room that Benare clearly pursued a younger man, almost a younger brother, and tried to cover up her sinful deed. She threatened harm, he adds, and then asks what Balu did next. Balu, boldly, says he slapped her and told her he would not stay quiet.
After Balu finishes, he is excused. Mrs. Kashikar is surprised he did not tell her about the slap before. Ponkshe insists that he be the next witness, so he is called to the witness-box and eagerly takes the oath. Ponkshe looks out and asks tendentiously why Benare carries a bottle of TIK-20, a powerful bedbug poison, in her purse. He relates how, ten days ago, one of her pupils came to him with a note asking him to meet her in the Udipi restaurant near the school. He did not want to go, of course, but he was curious. Benare came in and ushered him into the family room there so no one could see them. She told him of her problem, and when she took a hanky out of her purse, he saw the bottle.
Sukhatme asks what they were discussing. Benare is shaking her head vigorously as if to tell Ponkshe not to say anymore. Ponkshe says she wanted to marry him. Everyone in the room is shocked, especially when he goes on and says she told him she was pregnant. Benare looks like a “block of stone, drained of colour and totally forlorn” (74). Karnik asks if this is true, and Kashikar wants to know who the father is. Ponkshe says Benare swore him to secrecy, but Kashikar impatiently tells him the cat will soon be out of the bag so he might as well be honest. First, though, he wants to know why Benare would want to marry Ponkshe if she was pregnant by another man; he also wants to know what Ponkshe told her in response.
Ponkshe replies that he was not willing, of course, but he would be happy to tell them all of his conversation with Benare after he saw the bottle of poison.
Benare stands and yells out for him not to do so, but Kashikar implores him to continue. Benare stands before Ponkshe and urges him not to say anything. Kashikar bangs the gavel for order, and Mrs. Kashikar grabs Benare’s one hand and tells Rodke to get the other. The two keep guard over her.
Ponkshe begins to recount their conversation. He says they talked of aimless things, like Sukhatme not being a good lawyer, having a poor practice and ill luck. They discussed how Kashikar torments Rodke because he thinks the boy is involved with his wife since they have no children. Karnik wants to know if she said anything about him, such as his being a rotten actor.
Ponkshe relates Benare’s comments about her belief that experience comes with age and a man should want that in a woman. Yet this experience is hard: it gives pain to the person who has it and is usually intolerable to others. She has a bride in mind for Ponkshe, but he will need to know she has gone through a “shattering heartbreak” (77) and her situation is hard because she wants to bring up the child, and it is only on account of that child that she is still living and wants to get married. He asked who the scoundrel was, and she said he was not a scoundrel but that he fell short even though he was great and wise. She rued that she worshipped his intellect but he only wanted her body. He slips that she said she could not find a place in Damle’s life.
The group gasps when they hear his name and Kashikar bangs the gavel, reassuring Ponkshe there is no problem breaking his oath in court. Ponkshe continues that Benare fell at his feet. She pretended that it was all a joke and laughed when he expressed his confusion and distaste, but he could tell she was not joking because she had tears in her eyes.
Sukhatme thanks Ponkshe for his evidence and excuses him.
Analysis
By Act III, there is no going back from this mock trial. The “evidence” against Benare becomes increasingly damning and wielded most cruelly. Anil Singhal writes, quoting the scholar Shubhangi Raykar, “By pitting Benare against her male coartists, [Tendulkar] 'questions the stock notions of morality and attacks the hypocrisy of basically weak but arrogantly cruel yet apparently friendly people so eager to lynch a woman who happens to violate their moral code.'” Indeed, in this final act, Benare is increasingly crushed by the weight of the accusations and condemnations levied against her. Sukhatme, Mrs. Kashikar, Kashikar, and Ponkshe are particularly voracious and sadistic in their persecution, and begin to use Benare as a stand-in for all the ills of the current societal moment. As ever, truth, opinion, and fiction blur together, leaving the audience/reader not quite sure what is going on with Benare but feeling increasingly guilty for this unsolicited peek into her private life.
The commentary from the “witnesses” links Benare to wider social problems, but ultimately, such commentary is subjective, misogynistic, exaggerated, obfuscating, and deflecting. Everything they say smacks of patriarchy and paternalism; Benare is apparently the scourge of society because she is unmarried at the “mature… advanced”(67) age of 32 (or 34, which is what they arbitrarily decide her age is to make her seem even more pathetic) and because she behaves too freely. She is deemed pathetic because she has missed her chance at marriage, and, as Mrs. Kashikar states, “Anyone who really wants to can get married in a flash!” (68.) This, of course, is ironic since Mrs. Kashikar’s marriage does not seem altogether that appealing (Kashikar is even disrespectful to her in this very examination); it is also frustrating because it implies that marriage is the only thing worth aspiring to and that a woman who lives outside the confines of such a union must be considered a freak and deleterious to society.
Mrs. Kashikar also rails against the fact that unmarried women “don’t care about responsibility”—a specious claim—and that they spread “promiscuity…throughout our society” (68). Her attacks against Benare become more agitated and unreasonable, perhaps indicative of her latent resentment towards Benare’s freedom. She cries, “Should there be no limit to how freely a woman can behave with a man? an unmarried woman at that? no matter how well she knows him! Look how loudly she laughs! How she sings, dances, cracks jokes!” (69.) Tendulkar seems to wonder: If a woman must be condemned for laughing and singing, then what hope is there for her? Agreeing with his wife on the subject of promiscuity, Kashikar sneers that the social custom of child marriage—an unfathomably retrograde and depraved custom—be reinstated because then “All this promiscuity will come to an end” (66).
Balu returns to the stand to offer an absurd account of Benare’s desire to “seduce” him, and he flagrantly lies on the stand about the slap to make himself seem more manly and powerful. Even when Karnik later corrects the record on this, Sukhatme quickly concludes that “this means it is true the accused was pressing Rodke to marry her. The only difference in what you say is about who slapped whom” (79).
But perhaps the testimony that is the most gut-wrenching for Benar—and, by extension, the putatively sympathetic audience/reader—is that of Ponkshe, who reveals through his recounting of recent events with Benare that he is a duplicitous and unreliable friend (and not just to Benare, as he gleefully and glibly insults other members of the troupe through the guise of faithfully recounting his conversation with Benare on the day in question). It is Ponkshe who exposes Benare’s bottle of poison, her pregnancy, and the identity of the father.
