Aurat March

Daily in the Burn center where i am working, i receive patients who are victims of domestic abuse. In 9 months , there have been more than 20 cases of female patients who were victims of domestic abuse that led to severe burns and in some cases even death. A couple of them had not filed a legal case but expressed their predicament tearfully when i interviewed them as a part of history taking.  There was also one male victim of vitriolage in this time.

Talking to them was an experience that revealed the true essence of their helplessness to me. A generalized version of their stories ( and no two stories are too different from each other ) is that for years women face emotional , physical and sexual abuse at the hands of men who are their guardians ;in most cases their husbands. The last kind of abuse is the hardest and most uncommon for them to call out, because usually any kind of sexual behavior on a man's part is seen as his right by the wife, a supposition further cemented by the feeling that sex is perhaps always supposed to be painful for the woman.

Yet , i am not talking about the grey lines here . i am talking about a man setting his wife on fire because she asked him for money to manage expenses , a man pouring boiling hot water on his wife because she was late to bring him warm water for his bath , a man pulling his wife's hair until they came off in his hands,and we could see baldness in places, not explained by the burn at all. I am talking about acid being thrown on the face of 20 yr old beautiful Naila, which led her to lose both eyes. She became blind in front of our eyes, her cries of despair owing to her maladjustment to her new blindness are still alive in my memory. I have seen a post mortem where an axe had to be extracted from the skull of a girl in her late teens; the axe her brother had killed her with because she loved someone.  I have looked for any signs of remorse in the face of the family but not found any. To say that i have been surprised to the extent of numbness wouldn't be wrong. What was about slogans and demanding equal respect, pay and status , became an internal void ; a hole that ran so deep that anyone who talks about feminism in mocking tones, hurts me instead of offending me now.

Why would it offend me? It is your viewpoint. But i have only sadness for the people who can overlook the realities of the society and mock the struggle for women rights, again pointing out what's right and wrong about women by putting them into boxes. I am not offended but hurt, because it was the same concept, the same entitled thought which is behind your judgement that the women who parade on the streers with bold slogans are 'without shame and honor" that led to qandeel baloch's brother murder her in her sleep. That led to the deaths we couldn't reverse. That led to the lack of justice i took personally. This is the stuff my nights, my nightmares are made of.

Women tolerating abuse because they have nowhere to go, women not getting a divorce despite criminal behavior of their husbands because it is for the woman to compromise in a marriage, according to one of my patients " jo jootian talaq k baad sab se khaani hain, wo banday se kha leti hoon " ( the treatment i would get from everyone after divorce, i would rather get it from one person ) . i have seen women either defying or justifying their existence. I have seen men shameless, i have seen them without a worry, i have seen the ugly concepts of women being their property being openly validated by the society.
.  My question to you, yes the girl who puts up pictures on facebook, can engage in conversations with men, is probably educated, is that how different do you find yourself from the ghairat brigade that led to the deaths of countless women? What is ghairat? Does it even deserve a mention in today's time when we are supposed to believe that a person's life or her choices that do not harm others, are her own property?

Yes, you say men suffer too . But do they , in reality , objectively speaking, suffer anywhere near to that , even a fraction of it ? Check the statistics of rape, harrasment, domestic abuse and any other crime against women. Or simply, ask yourself whether you can go to get yougurt from the nearby shop at 11 pm or do you send your brother ? Do you not instinctively recoil in public places ? Is 20 to 1 proportion not telling you anything at all? Or is this a universally ordained principle that no faction of population might actually be more oppressed than the other ? Is it better to hide the truth behind face saving forced neutral conclusions?( Had it been the case we would never have abolished slavery or racial discrimination in its worst form)

  For the men, You may not agree with these  women on the streets but these women on the streets are people , independent persons , who don't need your agreement just like you don't need theirs when you shout words of abuses at each other involving the women and find it hilarious. When you make sexist jokes and the women on the dinner table look up slyly , when you basically...just exist and do things which are demeaning to them, without knowing it.

Yes, amidst the cries of the burnt women, it is hard to remember how many times i was judged only on the basis of my skin color, how i wasn't given the same credit for the same work as was done by a male colleague , how i was chided into doing the 'appropriate' things, how the responsibility of my family's honour was unfairly thrusted on me too, how my brother returned home late and no one questioned him while i stood in a witness box, how i am always supposed to bring the plates to table still. Yes it is hard to remember these things, this internalized discrimination in people's behavior i have felt with varying intensity at different points in my life..  but these are still problems. A heart attack kills , a snubbed toe hurts. And for goodness sake, women have the right to speak about both. If some zealots among you were on a lookout to fish the stuff they could find controversial so that they can poke fun, ignoring the hundreds of women in all kinds of dresses from hijaab to tops displaying diverse messages , it is YOUR problem.  It is your entertainment. Kiunke aadmi ko ya aurat mujra karte achi lagti hai ya ji huzoori. It is hard to stand a woman who can put you in your place.
(Notallmen)

You don't like what you see ? Back off. Thats all that was always wanted of you in the first place.