Why Me?

A STORY WRITTEN BY: AMNA KHAN
A TRAGEDY BASED ON TRUE EVENTS

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

I saw Paul running into Colette and returning her, her identity instead of burning it, her Claudine manuscripts. I have seen Nietzsche sitting in his armchair by the fire crafting the most impactful words about one’s identity that would resonate in the world for centuries. I saw him writing and erasing and writing and then erasing it all over again before he wrote “To become what one is; one must not have the faintest idea what one is.” I slightly smiled over this truth and travelled ahead of me to see what will happen in the future. I met my future self, as young as I was, because time never ages, it only passes. Time remains ONE. The past, the present, and the future, they are man-made constructs.
I scanned through the bits of me. There were trillions of miseries with in the nanoseconds, but I chose to witness the most silent one. They say lost time is never found again, but what about the lost identity? Can it be found? No, I don’t think so. Let me take you into another region, a region that is so different from Europe, let me take you to Haripur Hazar Pakistan. It was the 21st century, July 18th, 2011. She was sleeping in her chaarpai and the buzzing of houseflies woke her up.
She was startled to see that she has been late for the school. She got up, washed her face, drank some cold water, wore her abaya with the veil and left her room. Before leaving the house, she paid a visit to her father who was near his death. The poor man had dementia and paralysis. Without saying anything to him and to save him from the trouble of recognizing his own daughter, she leaves. On her way to the bus stand, she looked at her finger. She thought to herself that her finger lacks a ring, although she has been nikkahfied to her cousin, but the ruskhsati was still pending.
She passed a motorcycle and stopped to look at her face. She admired her beautiful eyes in its small side mirror and then she remembered she has to be in the school otherwise her class would be out of control without their teacher. She started walking fast and finally reached the bus-stop.
The bus wasn’t there or may be it had gone or hasn’t come yet. She was in her own thought bubble and suddenly something hit her face and then travelled down her body. She felt an excruciating pain within her tendons and ligaments. Her veil had started digging itself into her skin. Soon the cloth and the skin became one and her voice shut itself behind bars called fear.
Her vision started melting as she saw two men on a motorcycle with scarfs wrapped around their faces in the midst of July. She fainted. On opening her eyes, she found herself soaked in water. A crowd of men were trying to put barrels and barrels of water over her to rinse the acid out of her skin. She fainted once again. I passed in form of days, and I waited for her to wake up.
She finally woke up and her sister-in-law told her the very first news that her husband to be has broken off their Nikkah by saying ‘TALAAQ, TALAAQ, TALAAQ’ thrice over her passed out body. He has left the village as people considered you a whore, a prostitute who had been shown her place by depriving her off of her beauty. He couldn’t take it anymore. I saw the words turning themselves into tiny swords as they hit her soul. A doctor came in and explained to her that she has been attacked by someone with the battery acid and that she will need multiple surgeries to look more of a ‘normal’ again. Nothing made sense to her. The pain crawled in once again and she gestured to see herself. She ran her fingers through the rough bandages and tries to walk. The pain was immense, but she needed to see with her eye, what has been left off of her identity.
The nurse tried to come inside the bathroom with her, but she asked to be alone. She hinged the door and started walking towards the mirror. She faced the mirror without looking into it. She gathered all the courage in the world, took a deep breath and saw a heinous face in the mirror. It wasn’t hers. The words escaped her throat in form of a scream. She screamed with such an intensity that the blood was drawn from her skin. Her tears, as they hit her burnt skin, caused so much agony. It all stopped, her eye stopped blinking, and she opened the door. There she saw the nurse and her unconcerned sister-in-law. ‘Why me?’ she questioned everyone in the room and then sat on her bed. Fifteen days passed and I heard her repeating the same words silently over and over in her head, ‘why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me? why me?’.
She searched for a closure, but couldn’t find one. On August 2nd, the news of her father’s death came. They took her discharge from the hospital and went home. On entering her house, she didn’t shed a tear. She didn’t cry over his death as she cried over her mother’s eight years ago because she knew how miserable life sometimes could be and death is the only way out. An FIR had been registered by her brother and after 2 months of attack, the culprits were arrested by the police. I saw the policeman asking one of them about the reason behind their doing and he told him that they didn’t have any personal grudges with the girl, they were given a task to throw the acid on the girl who will be waiting for bus number 8 on the bus stop.
They usually stole things or were paid to fight in herds, but this job of throwing acid was their first time. They confessed that they were given instructions from an anonymous number to finish off the task and after the task would’ve been completed, the money will be sent to the men’s house. They never received the money as they threw acid on the wrong girl just because she fitted into the description provided by the man over the call. She was mistaken to be someone else just because she wore a black abaya and veil.
The most shocking thing that I heard in that investigation room was that the other man told the police that he would take full responsibility of the incident by marrying the girl. Her brother was sent the proposal and he accepted it as he saw no hope of getting married left for her.
The girl denied the proposal and asked her brother to throw the men behind bars. A few weeks later, the men were sentenced to two years in prison. Two years? Seriously? I have no heart, but even something within me cried. It was unfair, yet the most shocking thing has yet to be disclosed. The attackers were released after a month of staying inside the jail. This news shattered her. As Chiyo Sakamoto has once said, "The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains", he was talking about people like her. She decided to leave with her cousin sister who had already been living in a welfare center in Lahore. It has been twelve years, and she hasn’t moved on. For the first five years after coming to Lahore, she didn’t go out of the center. She confined herself within her own body and if someone would come and talk to her, she asked them ‘why me?’ over and over again. The acid didn't just burn her face, it burnt her life. Being burnt was traumatizing beyond limits, but the society burnt her again and again with their questions and tantrums. She asked herself the same question for many years, “why me?”. She was not the one at fault, then why did she go through these atrocities in life? I saw her closely, she had no happy ending. The society had turned her into a monster like Frankenstein; heinous, unaccepted, and unloved.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein.