Pity poor Faieza Desai. On Monday she was at Cape Town International airport to welcome back the judge at the heart of the Mumbai jiggery-pokery and was immediately lauded by at least four daily newspapers for standing by her man.
The alleged rapist had ‘returned from India to the arms of his wifeâ€, said one paper in treacly tones. ‘A stoic wife stands by her manâ€, said the headline in another, next to a picture of the couple striding out of the airport accompanied by Dumisa Ntsebeza who appeared to be scratching his head in puzzlement — a bafflement shared by many.
What was going through Faieza Desai’s mind as she kept her teeth clenched in that frozen smile, and faced the cameras?
I bet she wanted to knee Judge Siraj Desai in the groin for exposing her and her children to this level of toe-curling embarrassment. No matter how supportive a wife you are, the knowledge that the world now knows that your husband took hasty advantage of a few nights away from home to get in some extramarital nookie (consensual or coerced, we may never know) has got to sting.
‘My wife has been a pillar of strength and I must thank her publicly,†said the judge.
And well he might (and not just because as manager of the Western Cape Judo Club she probably knows just the right moves to knock his testicles up into his tonsils). As cuckolded political wives have known for ever, nothing works as well to start clearing the reek of opprobrium from a man who has been caught with his pants down, as a supportive appearance by a dutiful wife.
When Faieza Desai appeared at the airport this week she was not just lending her husband her support, but her respectability too. As Hillary Clinton did for Bill after the unfortunate cigar-in-the-intern incident, Desai’s good-wifely glow helped to redeem the image of Judge Desai from suspected rapist just released after a week in Indian chookie, to that of reliable, beloved family man.
Clearly the Desai camp has some clever public relations advisers. While Mark Isaacs dandled his traumatised children in front of the press to reinforce his status as paterfamilias, Faieza Desai said nothing but smiled bravely. When Isaacs bellowed about how Judge Desai had ‘violated what is mine†it appeared his outrage was not about any trauma his wife, Salomé, may have suffered, but about damage to his property.
What is interesting is not just that Faieza Desai was willing to expose herself to the public gaze to protect her husband, but the alacrity with which the media picked up on this.
Perhaps this was because, despite his protestations about appalling Indian prison conditions, the good judge had been allowed to give almost daily interviews on his cellphone and there really was no new angle to the story. Or perhaps it was because, prior to his arrival, his chief spin doctor, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, had managed to convince Salomé Isaacs to withdraw the rape charge.
Whatever the reason, the assembled hacks needed a fresh peg to hang the homecoming on, and luckless Faieza Desai was it.
Amid all the uncertainty of reporting on who did what to whom, it is less taxing and more comforting to be able to fall back on to ancient archetypes. Simple stories with well defined villains and good guys are easier to write than complex, nuanced ones and so there is a tendency to revert to ’emotional shorthand†or ‘labour-saving devices†— the clichés that offer us a way of telling the reader ‘you know how it is†without actually going to the trouble of doing so.
Judge Desai is cast in this tale as the returning hero, having bravely survived the horrors of a foreign jail after a lucky escape from female perfidy. ‘I’ll never be near a girl in a hotel room in my life again,†he told reporters jocularly, which shows that not only does he think he has done no wrong, but that he was simply the innocent victim of a set-up. (And when did it become acceptable again to refer to grown women as girls?)
To hear him tell it, he was simply minding his own business when along came the raven-haired temptress and embroiled him in an international embarrassment. Ah, to be a powerful man in South Africa. Any common-or-garden rape accused (of the type he sends down daily) would still be languishing in a sardine-packed cell because he couldn’t afford bail. Instead Judge Desai had struggle icons rushing to bear witness to his character, and working to improve his catering and sleeping arrangements. Clearly the Mugger of the Nation — as a twice convicted felon herself — knows all about judges, having appeared before several in her time.
So why did Faieza Desai show up at the airport instead of waiting for her husband at home? Perhaps it is because if she played the role of outraged, wronged wife it would merely feed the media frenzy. Perhaps after so many years of marriage it is just not in her interests to make him look bad, and have him reduced to not just a philanderer but a jobless, unemployable one at that? Or maybe her loyalty is a lot more complex, cutting across issues of family, politics and a shared history.
While Faieza Desai is presented as the mute, perfumed wife, ‘more precious than rubiesâ€, welcoming her straying sod home with open arms, I’ll put money on the reality being vastly different.
Loyalty, pride or just plain self-preservation may have played a big part in her decision to appear at her husband’s side, but forgiveness? My guess is that’s a long way off.