Looking for Pinki

Sixty-year-old Baisakhi Machowar from neighbouring Tunturi village says she is “shocked”. Machowar,who has been delivering babies for the last 40 years,says she remembers cutting Pinki’s umbilical cord and that the baby was a girl. “Her father gave me three kilos of rice and a saree. They were very poor so I didn’t get any money from them. I’ve been midwife to all his children. Now,I hear people are saying that she is a boy. I don’t believe it,” says Machowar.

Pinki’s house in Tilakdi is full of ‘gifts’ she got from winning in a tournament in Jharkhand: a cow in the cowshed,a gas cylinder in the house and a scooty parked near the courtyard. A Honda City is also parked outside the house,a sign of the prosperity that Pinki brought to her family.

Pinki’s mother Pushparani sits inside the house,baffled by the arrest of her daughter.

Pushparani and her husband Durgacharan,a driver who stopped working once Pinki started earning,heard about her arrest a day later,when the news flashed on television. Pinky,26,was arrested on June 14 after her live-in partner alleged that she was in fact a man and accused her of rape.

“As a mother,I know that Pinki is my daughter. I pray to God that she gets justice,” says Pushparani,fighting back tears. “I heard from our neighbours that the woman who accused her had come to Tilakdi before but I’ve never seen her. I once visited Pinki in Kolkata and saw that woman there. She used to stay nearby. I don’t know why she is making such accusations,” she says.

Pinky’s sister Jhumka,the youngest among six siblings,speaks of the good times they had the last time her sister came home on Bengali New Year on April 14. “She brought sweets for us. It was a good day. It usually is whenever didi comes home,” says Jhumka.

The family has the support of the villagers. “We have seen Pinki grow up and achieve what she has today. We have no doubt that the woman who is making these allegations is conspiring against her. After Pinki is cleared by the court,this woman should be investigated,” says Hemakanta Kuiri,secretary of the local Hemanta Basu Club and Library at Tilakdi.

Some of Pinki’s friends in Tilakdi and neighbouring villages,however,admit to having had doubts about her gender. Shilet Kuiri,who works as a cook at the Tunturi Uccha Madhyamik Bidyalay where Pinki studied till class VIII,remembers how confused he was when he first saw her.

“I got this job when I was 17. Very early one morning,I came out of my home and was running when I saw a tiny figure approaching from the other side. I couldn’t figure out if it was a boy or a girl. I shouted,‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ She answered: ‘I’m Pinki. I’m a girl’. From that day,we would run together every morning,following a fixed route through neighbouring villages—from Deuli to Semali to Marcha to Suisha to Dangnung to Noari,then Tunturi and finally to Tilakdi. If she was not a girl,I am sure she would have told me,” he says.

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Shyamal Chandra Mahato,the physical education teacher at Tunturi Uccha Madhyamik Bidyalay,spotted Pinki’s talent early. He saw in her the potential to sprint beyond the borders of her village and district. Pinki was nine when she started training under Mahato.

When Pinki won at a block-level event,she was noticed by the coaches of the district who included her in their athletics squad in 2001. A year later,she won three events at a state meet at Salt Lake stadium. After her win,Eastern Railways offered her the job of a ticket collector,getting special clearance from Delhi since she was only 16 then. The Railways has suspended Pinki after her arrest.

Pinki,who has been training and living in Kolkata since 2002,made her mark on the international stage two years later,winning two bronze medals in the 400-metre and 800-metre races at the Asian Indoor Athletics Championships. Pinki also won a gold as part of the 4×400-metre relay team at the 2005 Asian Indoor Games with Iyleen Samantha,Santhi Soundarajan,and Mandeep Kaur. At the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne,she was part of the 4×400-metre relay team that won silver and was part of the 4×400-metre relay team that won gold at the Asian Games in Doha. Again in 2006,at the South Asian Games in Colombo,she won the 400-metre,800-metre and relay gold.

Pinki’s coach in Purulia,Mohammad Nadim Akhtar,who trained her in 2001-2002,is not surprised at the current controversy. “When she first started training,there were a few who said she had the body language of a man. But she is our district’s pride,why should we have raised our voice when she was getting accolades?” he says.

In Kolkata,fellow athletes remember her as an “aggressive loner” with a history of “rough behaviour”. In November 2004,she was arrested after a gun was recovered from her possession at the Habibpur railway station but was released later.

Sushanta Sinha,her coach at Sports Authority of India’s Salt Lake campus where she trained till 2010,says he repeatedly tried to tell her to get an education but she never heeded his advice. “She had bust-ups with other girls in the camp. We also heard that she was a late-nighter who enjoyed the good things in life. But as an athlete,she was very talented and to us,that’s what mattered,” says Sinha.

Some of Pinki’s colleagues in the national team had refused to share a room with her. Some of them speak about how she “lived on the edge”. The big fall,they say,was perhaps inevitable.

Three years ago,during a National Athletics meet in Madurai,the Chennai team had raised questions about her gender. “The Athletics Federation of India (AFI) advised Pinki to withdraw from the meet and a controversy was averted. That was the last time she featured in an athletics event,” says an AFI insider.

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It’s a quiet afternoon at Bidisha Pally in Teghoria on the northern fringes of Kolkata,the neighbourhood where Pinki lived. A neighbour says,“Pinki never spoke to anyone here. The doors and windows of her house were always shut. In fact,I’ve never seen her face as she would wear a helmet whenever she went out. She was a speed junkie,whizzing past on her motorbike.”

Pinki’s two-storeyed house is quiet too. It was in this house that Pinki lived with her partner who is now accusing her of being a man and raping and abusing her. Before she moved in with Pinki,the woman lived in the neighbourhood with her husband and her daughter. The two became friends. Three years ago,when she separated from her husband after some differences,which she says were created by Pinki,she and her daughter began living with Pinki. They became close and she says she realised then that Pinki was a man. “Pinki is a man. All his friends were men but he had many girlfriends. He used to hit and abuse me,even in front of my daughter,” says the 30-year-old.

In the three years that she was living with Pinki,she says she even visited Pinki’s home in Tilakdi village five times. She says she earned a little,singing at programmes and getting occasional compering assignments at small functions in and around Kolkata,but was mostly dependent on Pinki.

“I was a single woman with a child. I couldn’t return home to my parents. I had to stay with Pinki after my husband left me. I want him to be punished. He cheated the entire world. The government and the sport officials helped him,” she says.

A few kilometres away from Pinki’s house is Uma Medical,the nursing home where the police took her for a gender determination test after the complaint against her. She was categorised ‘male’. Hospital authorities refuse to speak on the matter now.

An officer of the Baguihati police station says,“After the test,Pinki sat in the investigating officer’s room with her head down on the table. She looked completely broken.”

Since Uma Medical is a private hospital,Pinki was later taken to a government hospital at Barasat in North 24-Parganas on June 19. However,a six-member medical board declared the test inconclusive,after which she was referred to Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital (SSKM) in Kolkata.

On June 25,several tests were conducted on Pinki at SSKM Hospital,which were to be reviewed by an 11-member medical board. However,authorities say the hospital didn’t have the requisite equipment to conduct one of the tests—the karyotype chromosomal test. SSKM superintendent T K Ghosh had asked the court to give them more time so that they could source the equipment to conduct the test. Pinki’s 14-day remand in judicial custody at the Dumdum Central Jail,which got over on Friday,has now been extended till July 12.

Meanwhile,the debate over Pinki’s gender goes on. Leading gynaecologists in the city say that genetic problems often lead to a dual sexual identity. “You do find women with male features because of some genetic reasons,” says Arun Tantia,a gynaecologist. “There is a possibility that the athlete might have gone for a sex change after retirement,” says another gynaecologist,Partha Sarathi Banerjee.

Pinki retired from sports in 2010 after being injured in a road accident while she was returning home after inaugurating an athletic championship in Purulia. After her retirement,she had hoped to train athletes. But the current controversy has put those plans on hold.