Sometimes when I’m making tea and waiting for the tea leaves to boil, I just watch the vessel. The water remnant from its wash fizzles and evaporates in seconds from putting it on the burner. Imagine the temperature then at which it is being boiled. Probably if you tried putting your hand there then you would smell the flesh burning. You wouldn’t be able to stand a nanosecond of that heat let alone anything else.
It gets me thinking about those women who attempt suicide by burning themselves or conversely, those who are burnt by their family members. Well, sorry to burst your bubble…but it is not fiction that exists in otherwise pointless saas-bahu soaps but also in many households mostly in North India and also in countries like Jordan, Pakistan, and Palestine.
You may be familiar with the term “honor crimes/honor killings”. This dreadful practice came to my notice atleast, when the Reader’s Digest carried an article about a young girl in Palestine, Samera who was found in a well with her neck broken, killed by her mother and brothers more to preserve their honor than her promiscuity.
Girls are killed or sometimes maimed, mutilated, burnt by their own family members mostly fathers and brothers. It is, they feel, the failure on their part to fulfill their responsibility to keep the girls in check. The accused are let off if they give some compensation to the victim’s family. The maximum sentence is for 3 months to one year. Many times, teenage boys are made to do the job so that they are let off with a lighter sentence than the adults.
In India, parts of Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh this custom still exists. If a girl from a higher caste marries a boy of a lower caste, then both of them are sometimes severely punished by mutilation or at times even death. In most cases however, the boy manages to escape the punishment either by absconding or getting off with a lighter punishment. But the Panchayat makes sure that the girl does not escape. One example is that of Geeta Rani and husband Jasveer who were killed by members of Rani’s caste for having married irrespective of their caste (Punjab, India).
In one absolutely shocking case in Turkey, a woman was killed by her husband because he heard another man dedicating a song to his wife over the radio!! Women are killed for infidelity, asking for divorce, not serving meals on time and sometimes ironically, if they “manage to” get raped. A father-in-law burnt his daughter-in-law because he felt that she had not washed her son’s clothes properly.
When I see or hear of such instances, I feel, more than the male domination and the establishment of their own principles, of the lack of humanity of such people. How can they????? is all I can ask because I am horrified when I see the picture of a woman in Pakistan whose heart doesn’t give out even though she has over 93% burns…she has a child to look after….I see a woman with holes where eyes and ears should have been, a woman who has nothing on her chest but burnt, peeling flesh…..all this for what gain??? On grounds of suspicion??? On the basis of a dream, a rumour, jealousy, Power…..total control over a woman, over her fertility, her ability to reproduce so that she does not toe the line where they are afraid to tread….Create a new race without anyone from their own community….that too eloping without permission…it wouldn’t do to let them go now would it????
Perhaps J K Rowling, albeit unknowingly, summed it up rather well – Mudbloods cannot be tolerated and blood traitors will have to die……
