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‘His penis should belong to me.’

—Husband-killer Rajini Narayan

AFTER Rajini Narayan used petrol and a psychic’s candle to flambé her Hindu husband’s testicles—sending him from the comfort of their Adelaide home to the uncertainty of his next life as a crispy eunuch—her QC tried to explain: ‘She just wanted to do something to save her marriage’.

Twenty-two years earlier—before the house, the marriage, the groom and his gonads went up in smoke—the matrimony of Satish and Rajini started as it would conclude: in flames. It was a Hindu wedding and the old folks wished them well. The year was 1986 and a young Satish Narayan walked around a pit filled with fire and put a red sindoor dot on his new wife Rajini’s forehead, marking her as his own. It was an echo of the Hindu love story of Lord Rama who used fire to establish the purity of his wife Sita after he rescued her from the hellish fury of the demon king Ravana. Rajini was a Fijian-Indian and, like 80 per cent of Fijian-Indian marriages, hers was arranged. She regarded her husband as a god and tried to be the ‘proper’ Indian wife. By 2008 the couple and their three offspring had settled in the Adelaide suburb of Unley, having moved there from Canberra. They had been married for over two decades and the charms of domestic life were wearing thin even for subservient Rajini.

SATISH went out in a fluorescent blaze of fire and embers. The eulogies that ensued following his demise were substantially less glowing. The dead man’s daughter Jessica described her father as a wife-beating monster. ‘He was very oppressive, controlling and would often blackmail me if I didn’t listen or if I disagreed with his theories, philosophies, politics or ideology,’ she said. ‘He beat me at least a couple of dozen times a year … my mother was abused every day. It was so hard to live in such a hostile environment that, eventually, I left home.’

Rajini seemed to tolerate the verbal and physical abuse dealt out by her husband for over twenty years before she finally snapped. She thought herself deserving of punishment. ‘I did not like to be beaten [but] I told myself I had to be better, I have to try harder,’ she recalled. ‘I deserved it because in my mind I was not the perfect wife for my perfect husband … I idolised him. He was my hero.’ Rajini was often too scared to talk back to Satish ‘because you do not fight with your god. If he is talking you should keep quiet, you should keep your mouth shut and he will not hit you, but the moment you open your mouth you will get a few slaps’. As a submissive and doting wife, Rajini felt trapped, unable to stand up to her husband—and leaving the marriage was never an option. ‘Indian wives and girls are meant to be submissive, once you are married, you stay married,’ Rajini said. ‘If anything should happen it should stay within your house, within the four walls of your bedroom, nobody should know.’

But if Rajini could withstand the beatings to her body, attacks on her pride were a bridge too far. When she arrived at the view that her husband was having an affair it all became too much. Satish had given Rajini his email password—a court later heard—and she had found messages about the affair. ‘My husband loves another woman. He hugs her,’ she confided in a friend. Whether the infidelity moved beyond such seemingly tame, platonic displays never became clear. The court did not broach the issue of whether Satish’s offending bollocks were targeted because of their direct involvement in the affair or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and regarded by their incinerator as handy collateral offerings.

SHORTLY before 5.30 a.m. on Sunday 7 December 2008, Rajini entered her marital bedroom and doused her sleeping husband’s genitals with liquid from a container of combustant, later confirmed as petrol. Days earlier Rajini had visited a tarot card reader and left with a CD of the session and a candle. The professional mystic should have foreseen that handing over the candle was a bad idea. It was alleged this was what Rajini used to light Satish’s petrol-doused privates.

For anyone who has ever felt disarmed, disoriented or rudely intruded upon when being woken from slumber by the fairly innocuous sound of an alarm clock, spare a thought for the late Satish Narayan and what caused him to be dragged from a deep, dreamy sleep. Satish woke to the disturbing scent, sight and sensation of his manhood aflame. Such a scenario is a bad start to anyone’s day but Satish’s Sunday was about to get even worse. Jumping out of bed and flailing about in fright, Satish knocked over a container holding the remainder of the petrol, causing it to spill over the rest of his body. And with the sudden whoomp of a quick-spread petrol fire—he self-combusted. The fire spread from the flaming husband through the rest of the Narayans’ Unley townhouse and then onto an adjoining property, causing damage of up to a million dollars. An off-duty nurse attended the blaze and was able to render at least some initial aid to Satish who was suffering burns to 85 per cent of his body. The rest of the family escaped the blaze unhurt while Satish was rushed by ambulance to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Rajini was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, arson and three counts of acts to endanger life. Satish battled on for nearly three weeks but on Boxing Day 2008, twenty days after the fire, he lost the fight and took his last breath. Rajini’s charges were upgraded to murder.

ACCORDING to prosecutors Rajini had come clean on the motive of her crime in its immediate aftermath—chatting to neighbours gathered out the front of the inferno. ‘My husband loves another woman,’ the scorned Rajini explained as flames from her family home licked the sky behind her. ‘I’m a jealous wife. His penis should belong to me. I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else. It’s just his penis I wanted to burn. I didn’t mean this to happen.’ The fiery phallus became the subject of even greater focus at Rajini’s bail application, forcing court reporters to attempt to craft genteel family-friendly prose from the unseemly subject matter.

The 44-year-old self-made widow was freed for home detention on $15 000 bail wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet and on the order she undergo continuing psychiatric analysis. After contemplating a plea bargain Rajini pleaded not guilty to murder and arson. Rajini’s defence lawyers said their client had not intended to kill her husband but had just wanted to keep him on the straight and narrow by burning and ‘purifying’ the tip of his penis. Lindy Powell QC said Rajini feared she was in danger of ‘losing her god’. Channelling the mind of her client as she lit the wick on that fateful night, the silk waxed lyrical as to what was running through Rajini’s mind: ‘You say you loved her. I’m going to burn your penis. I’m going to tell your family what you have done’. Once the fuse was lit and hubby combusted, Ms Powell said, there was immediate remorse and Rajini had tried to save Satish and her three children from the fire.

The jury acquitted Rajini of murder by majority verdict but unanimously convicted her of manslaughter. This meant nearly all of the eight women and four men in the jury box agreed with Ms Powell that Rajini had not intended to kill Satish. Rajini dodged jail after being sentenced to six years’ jail fully suspended. Prosecutors appealed saying the penalty was too soft for such a premeditated crime. They argued ‘the sentencing judge erred by failing to consider the length of time for reflection between [Rajini’s] anger whilst reading the emails, and when she obtained the candle and petrol and committed the offence’. But Rajini kept her freedom when three court of appeal judges confirmed the original sentence stating the case was ‘unique’. For Satish, a Hindu cremation finished the job his maltreated missus had started. Rajini kept mourning her dead husband. And the robust Narayan children said their lives had ‘ironically’ improved since their mother sent their father to a fiery grave.

IN INDIA there is an alarming form of usually fatal domestic violence called ‘bride burning’, also known as ‘dowry deaths’. In these horrific incidents the husband or in-laws of the newly married woman set fire to her. The crimes are often motivated by unhappiness about the size of the dowry that accompanies the bride into the marriage. The bride is typically doused in kerosene inside a house and then set alight with the resulting death blamed on a kitchen accident. British medical journal The Lancet recently estimated there were 100 000 such deaths in India every year. In suburban Unley, Rajini Narayan put a distinctly Australian twist on the disturbing Indian phenomenon, creating ‘groom burning’ as terminal revenge for cheating.

In the end Rajini’s motivation all came back to that other milestone of life: her and Satish’s fiery wedding ceremony. ‘A bizarre idea came to me,’ Rajini would later explain. ‘I would use a candle to burn the tip of his penis. It would be like circumcision, or just like he placed that red dot on my forehead at the wedding. It was like I had all the powers of the goddess to save my husband, my lord … it did not occur to me that it was going to be dangerous.’