Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.2]

Chapter Thirty-nine

(Present village of Teghin, Northern Pakistan)

Near the violence-torn area of Baluchistan, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, the local police had been on a manhunt for over a week. That investigation involved a crime only too common within the borders of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Once again, a husband was sought after for the disfigurement and brutal maiming of his wife's face. Such domestic violence remains commonplace within this rural society, where for centuries it has been believed that men have the inalienable authority to severely punish their wives, daughters or mother-in-laws for "dishonoring" them though a host of behaviors, even the unattended association with another male. Often these acts of brutality and permanent disfigurement are carried out upon a man's wife for simply neglecting him in some way or showing a disallowed independence. In this case, twenty-five year old Rahim Jamali, angered with his eighteen-year-old wife Khalida for spending too much time with her female cousins, returned home and beat her severely-a habit he was known for in the village Teghin. On this day, however, he proceeded to tie her hands and feet with lamp chords. Then producing a razor, he proceeded to slash her face repeatedly, cutting off her nose and lips.

After fleeing the scene of the crime, leaving his young wife to tend to her wounds alone until help arrived, Rahim went into hiding, presumably to the next village where he would be assisted by friends and relatives to evade the authorities. Khalida, who managed to survive the brutal assault, broke tradition of silence and pleaded to the authorities for justice. She even threatened to commit suicide by immolation, were Rahim not caught and punished for her attack. She had, after more than a week, come to the sad realization, as many women before her, that such crimes in this part of the world were slow if not ever to be resolved with any restitution for the woman or any just punishment for the male perpetrator.

Word of Khalida's disfigurement went out immediately to other villages and it appeared as a minor, if not commonplace story in an Islamabad newspaper. The incident was relegated to a small weekly column where "honor killings" and wife beatings were featured. Within eight days, however, while Khalida slowly recovered in the city's hospital, an unusual twist to the story developed, making news in all of Pakistan and even beyond its borders.

The police authorities themselves were shocked to find that in the matter of Rahim's discovery and accountability for the crime, uncharacteristic events, totally unknown to Khalida, had taken place swiftly and silently to eventually vindicate her mental despair and physical pain. Rahim's collapsed body, it seems, had been brought to another medical clinic in Islamabad by his relatives. While still alive, his upper torso and face were blackened by the effects of a mysterious toxin. His facial muscles were paralyzed in an expression of anguish. A medical examination revealed that the method of his severe poisoning was a high-speed puncture and injection by two metal darts into his abdomen. The tip of these short arrows were designed with a small chamber, which upon impact, released a pernicious amount of powerful poison, presently unknown to the medical staff, into his stomach cavity. Key to the investigation by the local police, and ultimately information which reached outside Pakistan, was the presence of a cryptic and small insignia etched or stamped onto the metal shafts of the arrows extracted from the victim's body.

Rahim's cousins could only tell the authorities that two females wearing traditional burkas were witnessed to have approached him as he stepped outside of a house. After each had shot him in the midsection with a silent bow-like weapon they had concealed under their clothing, the unknown women assailants quickly fled on foot. After six days of suffering as a result of the foreign toxin's pernicious effects, Rahim was released with permanent damage to his nervous system and digestive tract.