Ruhani Kaur
A VISUAL STORYTELLER
Her Life
A Dancer’s Search for Her Face
Eight years after an acid attack, a woman finds a reason to live
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By Chinki Sinha, Photos: Ruhani Kaur / Open Magazine
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In the church of Transfiguration, which is across the road from where she lives, the bells ring and prayers begin. Jesus, as the believers report, underwent transfiguration upon a mountain, which made him radiant. The faceless woman is seeking her own transfiguration.
When they assemble for their evening prayers she sits in a dark room with an ice box and a bottle of whisky, to forget that the road to her transformation is fraught with many uncertainties. Sometimes she wishes she dies. Four times after an acid attack melted away her face, and the corrosive liquid destroyed her eyes, she tried to kill herself, only to be rescued.
She survives her days patting her dog, listening to Hindi film songs about unrequited love, cooking and cleaning. It is only in the evening that she begins to panic. That’s when she downs those numerous pegs. Helps her sleep through the long nights, she says.
It has been eight years since the acid attack one December evening.
She still dances. Because dance is also a state of trance. She forgets the itch on her face, the burning sensation she sometimes feels, and the fact that she needs money for all her surgeries that are pending. She forgets that hope is such a sly little firefly, the bitter truth that she may not be able to see again, and that behind those dark glasses of hers, there are no eyes, only flesh.
Sometimes, she sings and smiles through a song: “Hoshwaalon ko khabar kya, bekhudi kya cheez hain…” (What do conscious people know, what it’s like to be enraptured.) And in the same vein, another song: “Dil mera tod diya usne, bura kyun manoo…” (He has broken my heart, why should I take it badly?) And another: “Usko haq voh mujhe pyaar kare y ana kare …” (It’s his right whether to love me or not.)
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Anu Mukherjee, now 33, was beautiful once. She cannot see what the acid has done. She can only run her fingers over her face and feel the damage in its scars, and a half-reconstructed nose, and above what were once her eyes, she can now feel little hair sprouting in the shape of eyebrows. She can feel her stiched-up skin. Her eyes were so badly destroyed in the attack that she could not even shed tears for next few months.
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She hopes to get multiple surgeries, but she may never reclaim her lost face. Perhaps she could get what’s close to a human face, with features in place, but not what she owned and was proud of. Her face, and her two magical feet that danced to film music. The magic of her feet is still there.
On Sunday, she joins a congregation in an open field in Faridabad…
A man in a wheelchair leans forward.
“Fear not, I am with you.”
“Hallelujah.”
Hands go up in the air invoking the messiah. Anu’s hands sway faster than anyone else’s. Everyone is chanting in unison, and at first it is like a murmur of bees, and then like the drone of planes….
Anu is joyous. She has been coming here for years. She was once in hospital after having jumped from her fourth floor apartment in Garhi. Ended up with a broken leg. A nurse advised her to go to the Faridabad congregation. The hospital staff even took her there, though she had said she would believe only if God made her walk again.
It happened. “You know, I just stood up and I walked,” she says, “Since then, I have come here regularly. When all doors are closed, God opens his arms. Doctors can say anything. I know I will be fine.”
After the songs and prayers are done, Anu walks up to the woman for whose blessings everyone has queued up. She falls at her feet.
On 12 June, she threw a birthday party. She says she is 30. She isn’t. What she wants is timelessness; she wants to be 30 when she gets her face back, the right age to begin afresh. She had been waiting to celebrate her birthday. She undertook many trips to find the right sari, the right sandals, the right bag. Her bag is a deep shade of blue. Net, with sequins all over: “I felt the embroidery and liked this.” Her blouse, with strings at the back, is inspired by Bollywood. Her bangles were bought in a market near Hanuman Mandir, in Connaught Place. “That’s where you get the best ones.”
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She had sat on the edge of the bed at her party, her legs dangling, holding her glass of whisky. Her lover hadn’t come. And he hadn’t brought her the promised gold chain. She had just begun falling in love with him. After her first lover abandoned her, she had vowed to keep her distance from men. But you can’t keep running away from love, she says. “You run after them and they ruin you,” she says, trying to wipe away her tears.
Case No. 1
Azad Khan was 12 years old when he was shot in Manipur, allegedly for being an insurgent. A Commission appointed by the Supreme Court has ruled this was one of six extra judicial killings.
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By Chinki Sinha, Photos: Ruhani Kaur / Open Magazine
At the window stands the father, pleading for his son’s life. Outside, past the tree in the paddy fields, there is a gun planted on the boy’s head.
“Why are you killing my son? He is innocent. We can talk,” Mohammed Wahid Ali shouts.
“We will talk to him,” is the reply.
Ali sees his 12-year-old son Azad Khan being shot. The short summary of a killing four years ago.
Today, the window looks out on the same paddy fields that Azad Khan crisscrossed on his way to school. From this dark room, where Wahid Ali slumps in a chair, you can see where Azad Khan was allegedly dragged by the Assam Rifles’ (AR) personnel and shot. He wants to tell the story but when Ali goes to the window, he just weeps. His wife too.
Case No 1. That’s what Azad is today. But his family will not let go—younger sister Sureiya still carries his schoolbag, mother Garamjan keeps his school uniform among her clothes. It’s not possible to let go, the mother whispers.
Ali and his brothers live in four adjacent houses on family land. Ali is the youngest and poorest among them. His living quarters, which he shares with another brother, are bare except two wooden cupboards where the mother has kept her son’s school uniform among her clothes. She had fainted when the Assam Rifles soldier pushed her as he was dragging Azad away to the field. Her 40-day-old girl was in her arms. Baby Tabassum died three months later; Garamjan confessed she wasn’t upto breastfeeding or taking care of the child at the time.
In his deposition in front of the commission on 3 March, 38-year-old Ali said, “It is true my son was dragged for 70 metres to the place of incident by the Commando personnel… I deny that there are many trees between the window of the house and the place of the incident. I state that there is one tree only. This tree does not obstruct the view from the window to the place of occurrence.”
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They removed the bed in Azad’s room because his mother couldn’t bear to look at it. They have put a worn-out sofa instead. But some things remain. There is the green canvas schoolbag. He had scribbled his name on it. The letters have now faded. Sister Sureiya carries it to school. “Out of love for my brother,” she says.
Khumbongmayum Orsonjit, 19, who was shot in the busy streets of Imphal on 16 March 2010. He had gone to buy chicken bones for his dog. His mother, Tourangbam Ningol Lata Devi, a teacher, was on her way to a school on the Assam border, for examination duty. When she reached, she had messages on her phone asking her to return. When she did, nobody was home. She kept waiting.
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In a corner of their home, father Imo Singh sits quietly. He runs a small grocery shop. It is hard not to miss the son, he says. In the room where there is an altar to their son, there is the bullet-ridden Activa scooter he was riding the day he was shot.
They found his body in the mortuary, and the mother refused to collect the body from the State, saying justice had to be done. After a point, the officials said they would tag the body as ‘unclaimed’ and dispose of it as they saw fit if she did not claim it in three days. So she did.
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She shows the photos she took with her mobile phone. Her hands didn’t shake; the photos are not blurry or hazy.
But it is hard to look at them. The fingers look smashed and the face is bloody.
“I will fight till I get justice. The pain is deep. It is killing us,” she says.
In the January 1986 edition of Target magazine, Dhanabati Devi’s photo is faded but you can make out her blunt haircut and small frame. She was in Class VII. Dhanabati, just 11 years old at the time, died trying to save another girl. The Target article was written by the girl she saved. ‘Didi Dhanabati pulled me to the side of the road, and asked me to bend. She held me tight in her arms. After some time, she fell on the ground as she was hit by a bullet on her head. Thus, while saving me, she was killed,’ she wrote.
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“Nobody was punished,” says Soibam Jiten, elder brother of Dhanabati. “My sister was on her way back from school that day.” Soibam Memma Devi, Dhanabati’s mother, has kept the National Bravery Award medal and certificate that Dhanabati got in a little box in her cupboard.“It is a long wait for justice. I am tired,” she says. “Long years have passed, but it is a mother’s heart.”
When her husband was alive, 24-year-old Shweta would only leave her house in Delhi to pick up her daughter from school. That changed after the field worker died during the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020. Now Shweta is always out searching for work opportunities and trying to track down the COVID compensation she believes she should have gotten from the government months ago.
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For a year after her husband's death, she had to send her 8-year-old to live with her father as she could only afford salt and roti (flat bread) and didn't have a phone line necessary for the child's online studies.
"I had forgotten what vegetables and pulses looked like," says Shweta, who says she fainted from hunger several times in 2020.
Shweta, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her privacy, says her six brothers refused to offer any help. She says Indian households treat their daughters as "paraya dhan," which loosely translates as someone else's (the in-laws') property. But her late husband's family isn't supporting her either she says. And one brother-in-law has only made the situation worse — he tore up the COVID death certificate at her husband's funeral, creating additional hassles for Shweta, who needed to provide proof to apply for COVID compensation. Then she says he took the land that was to be her husband's inheritance. "I feel desperately alone," she says.
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Because of financial problems just before her husband's death, the family of three had moved into his aunt's house. In order to stay on after he died, Shweta agree to do all of the housework. She also looked for a job, but with limited time and education, she could only find work sticking branding on products and packing them. The 14-hour days plus her other responsibilities left her feeling weak, she says. In addition, the commute costs cut into her earnings.
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She didn't like leaving her daughter at night, so she quit and continues to look for other options. She is struggling to pay for food as costs are rising with inflation.
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These hardships are common in India for widows like Shweta, who lost not just a loved one to COVID-19 but also the sole breadwinner in the family. In the patriarchal society that is India, only about 20% of the workforce is female, according to a 2020 World Bank report.
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And many families marry their daughters off early rather than invest in their education, limiting their job prospects for life.
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Government support has been tough to get, especially for women who lost a husband in 2020. It wasn't until after the brutal second Delta wave in 2021 that compensation was announced, amid confusion over which documents would be accepted as proof and how much money they would receive. Some families had burned the COVID death certificates of the deceased, mistakenly fearing that the documents could be a source of contagion. Many others had no paperwork at all due to the country's underreporting of COVID fatalities.
Still grieving, feeling guilt​
SHANTI DEVI
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Shanti Devi sits propped up in bed, still numb from the grief of losing her husband to COVID-19 in May 2021. She feels as if she has no strength in her legs, and for months after the death, she says her teenage son would have to carry her to the bathroom.
"Whenever neighbors or relatives come, they say you've taken so long to stand up and take care of your kids," she says, with a tinge of guilt. "Others have done it so quickly!"
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Devi is fortunate that her husband left her a modest house with two small rooms, a kitchen and bathroom. But with the roof leaking and the floor caving in, she asks, "Should we eat bricks?"
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By the time she finally received government compensation for the COVID death of her husband — Rs 50,000 ($650) in two installments and a monthly payment of Rs 5000 ($65) — after five months of no income, debts had piled up for food, school fees and shoes. Sending her three children to get the education that she never had is critical for Devi. But she worries about her 17-year-old son Yash Arya's ambitions. "He wants to pursue his dream to study animation in Mumbai," says Devi, who prefers he work while studying and staying in Delhi. "My mind is unsettled and I'm finding it difficult. I cry like this every day. Kids will settle eventually, get busy with their work. I'll be left sitting at home."
'I don't even know the ways around'
ANITA SHARMA
​On the wall of 35-year-old Anita Sharma's bedroom is a jovial picture of her late husband Dinesh, a 44-year-old electronics marketing professional, wearing an oversized straw vacation hat.
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Sharma, mother to 19-year-old Jhanvi and 14-year-old Yash, has led a sheltered life. She states proudly, "My husband never let me work while he was alive." Nervously she adds, "I don't even know the ways around. Once my daughter manages to get a job, maybe she can guide me."
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But now she is facing a bleak future. As her husband's COVID treatment costs piled up to Rs 16 lakhs (over $20,000) before he passed in August 2020, she is ridden with debt, especially to her brother, who paid some of the medical bills and continues to give her money to meet the family's daily financial needs. She is considering selling her house.
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As is common in India, when Sharma's father died, his government job went to her brother, and he lives with their mother in the family home. Still, she feels guilty turning to him for assistance, especially because she's one of four sisters. "If we sisters start asking for help, our brother will get upset with us. In my case, he is already doing so much for us," she says gratefully. But her brother is thinking about getting married, and Sharma worries that will mean no more money for her.
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Because of the family's financial woes, Jhanvi couldn't afford the nursing course that had been her father's wish. She isn't even preparing for the upcoming entrance exams. But Sharma is counting on her to get a job soon while they continue to struggle with the trauma of the past two years.
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Yash — haunted by the image of his father's eyes shut with cotton, as is the Hindu tradition when last rites are conducted — suffers from bouts of anxiety. When a stomach infection recently sent Sharma to the hospital, he got scared that like his father, his mother wouldn't come back.
'I knew I had to stand up'
RADHA DEVI
Pictures of Late Anand Singh with his wife Radha and her three kids in their house in Vikas nagar
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​While Radha Devi raised their three children, her husband worked as a chef in Japan. He earned good money — until five years ago, when he returned home in need of a kidney transplant. She donated her kidney; the operation went well but left them deeply in debt, compelling her to start working as an aide in a private educational institute during the first wave of the pandemic.
During the second wave, at the end of April 2021, the entire family caught COVID-19. Devi and the children recovered.
"He didn't," says Devi, who recounts taking him to a government hospital an hour and half away in the outskirts of the city. Nobody else would take the chance of getting infected, so they had to wait for four hours for a government vehicle to take them. "I had COVID too then, and pleaded that if they didn't take him in, we both could die," Devi says.
After her husband was hospitalized, Devi was not allowed to be with him. The medical staff put him on a ventilator he shared with other patients in the ward, who took turns getting oxygen. But there simply wasn't enough to go around and the situation continued to deteriorate. "So many people died in front of me," she says, describing the long line of people coming into the emergency ward and the bodies being carted out. "It looked like people were going into the hospital to die. They were going but not coming back."
Their eldest daughter was married during his hospital stay, as often happens in India when a parent is on their death bed, so they can know they've completed their responsibilities. "That last day, he just wanted to come home," Devi says, breaking down again.
She's angry at the central government, which she blames for not marshalling adequate oxygen supplies for patients and not doing enough to help families get back on their feet. "They shouldn't have given us these small amounts. Instead, they should have given us a job," Devi says.
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After a desperate six-month search, Devi was employed again as an aide. She now works seven days a week for a private educational institute, Target, accompanying students to and from their homes, cooking meals and cleaning. She earns enough to cover daily expenses and is happy to be busy.
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"I knew I had to stand up," she says. "I had to change myself for the kids, or they too would get left behind."
'No safety nets': Debts weigh on grieving Indian families
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BY Roli Srivastava and Anuradha Nagraj; Photos: Ruhani Kaur/ Thomas Reuters Foundation
Renu Singhal was rushing her husband in an autorickshaw through the streets of Agra, the city in northern India that is home to the famed monument to love, the Taj Mahal.
The 45-year-old's husband died in her arms, up-ending her "happy family life" and leaving her with unpaid bills, rent and meagre savings.
“It was all over in 24 hours - his fever spiked, I rushed him to hospitals and he died in an autorickshaw waiting to be admitted," Singhal said in a matter-of-fact tone from her Agra home.
"Just like that, I became in charge of my school-going daughter's and my own future."
Singhal, a housewife, has not had a chance to mourn her husband's death. She is spending every waking moment trying to figure out how to pay rent and where the next meal will come from once the "charity of strangers" stops.
"Whatever savings we had was spent on his treatment, the funeral, paying last month's rent and running around," she said.
Dignity has been a recurring loss during the pandemic in a country with no social safety net. Those who survived the second wave said fear and frustration had stripped their loved ones of a dignified farewell.
Singhal in Agra had not had a proper conversation with her husband for almost a week when he was isolating at home. Her last moments with him were outside a hospital as she tried in vain to resuscitate him.
Renu Agarwal and her 16 year old daughter in their two room rented house in Agra.
Mizoram's Wild Flower
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Text by Lhendup G Bhutia, Photos by Ruhani Kaur/ Open Magazine
At the age of four, Chhaidy disappeared in a nearby forest, along with a cousin of the same age, Beirakhu. Beirakhu was found five days later, beside a stream. He was in a disturbed state, but alive. Chhaidy could never be traced. But last month, at age 42, she was rediscovered.
Locals say Chhaidy was taken away by a spirit in the forest. Ng Chhaidy, however, was still missing. News of her first sighting emerged nine days after Beirakhu was found. Two Nepali woodcutters of a nearby village claimed to have seen a young girl with shoulder-length hair walking next to a tiger. The duo, however, were so shocked by the sight, they left the village. When news spread, Chhaidy’s father, Ng Khaila, visited the spot but couldn’t find her. “I kept hearing such stories for a while, that a young girl was spotted in some part of the forest,” says the 62-year-old Khaila, “But when I would go there, she would never be around.”
On one occasion, as residents of Aru village in Myanmar told Khaila, two woodcutters caught sight of a ‘wild-looking’ woman, naked, long-haired and with long fingernails. When they tried to catch her, she attacked them with her nails and teeth. She had to be caged in a wooden box, in which the woodcutters took her around to nearby villages in Myanmar, asking if she belonged to any of them. But no one knew her, and before long, she escaped into the wild again. Some years later, she started reappearing in those villages. “Perhaps she stopped being afraid of humans,” Khaila wonders, “Perhaps she wanted to return.” Over the next few years, Khaila met a number of villagers from Aru who were travelling through Theiva. Almost all of them remarked on how he bore a sharp resemblance to the ‘jungle girl’ they had adopted.
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Along with six other villagers, he walked on foot for three days to the other side of the border. By the end of the third night, they reached Aru. “She did not seem to recognise me at first. But I had that strange feeling that this was my long-lost daughter. When I was alone in the kitchen, I suddenly felt two strong arms around me. It was her. She was hugging me and calling me ‘Ippa’ (father in the Mara dialect),” remembers Khaila. The woman also bore two moles—on her left cheek and right thigh—that Khaila remembered his daughter had.
When Chhaidy went missing, she spoke fluent Mara. When she returned, she had a vocabulary of only two recognisable words: ‘banana’ and ‘open’. As people in Aru discovered, she refers to urine as ‘banana’ and faeces as ‘open’. She would utter them whenever she needed to use the lavatory. On trying to communicate further with her, they learnt the meanings of three other words she’d often use, none of which means the same in any known dialect or language. She refers to water as ‘nam’, anything that flies as ‘jackey’, and soup as ‘appozee’. Over the four years she lived in Aru, she picked up another two words: ‘Inna’ (mother in the Mara dialect) apart from ‘Ippa’.
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Apart from her vocabulary of five words (and the terms ‘Ippa’ and ‘Inna’), she has picked up a few other words as well. One recent morning, in response to a young Mara girl’s ‘Hallelujah’ whispered into her ear, Chhaidy sought out the girls’ ear to say a soft ‘Amen’. She also responds to ‘Parri’, her new nickname. In the Mara dialect, it means ‘wild flower’.
She may be 42, but in many ways, she has only just begun to experience childhood and adolescence. She keeps her new possessions by a window. A bottle of metallic green nail polish, a plastic comb, tubes of moisturisers and fairness cream, and a maroon lipstick—all gifted by women in the village. When she wakes up every morning, she scrubs her face with cream, paints her nails—regardless of any grime underneath—and combs her long hair, which she has taken to tying with a hair band. It is only the lipstick that requires the assistance of others.
When she is in a happy mood, she turns especially sociable. Her new possessions play an active role in this too. She goes over to the houses of neighbours with her comb, for example, asking the women there to comb her hair. In return, she paints their nails.
A few weeks ago, on a sunny Wednesday evening, a few villagers took Chhaidy to the old village cemetery, hoping she might remember her childhood. She had gone missing from the forest close to this cemetery, after all. Today, save for the graves and stone mounds erected by villagers as memorials, there is no indication that any hamlet ever existed here. Overrun by trees and large plants, and ridden with snakes and leeches, the former village has been reclaimed by the forest. Thickets of vegetation have to be cleared with a machete—done expertly by the team leader—for the troupe to make their way around the place. Everyone else just trails the man with the machete. Chhaidy, however, seems confident of herself. She breaks into runs, her legs hurdling over the largest of plants with striking strength and dexterity
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On a gloomy evening in Theiva village, the melody of collective singing escapes the windows of a church. But the song is accompanied by loud unrhythmic drumbeats. A middle-aged woman, dressed in a cardigan and wraparound skirt, is seated in the front row of the church, banging a drum. After a few minutes, when those assembled find it impossible to continue singing their hymns, she is asked to stop. She mutters something under her breath, and keeps quiet for the rest of the service.
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The prayers end. The worshippers now read out passages from the Bible. The woman chooses to maintain her silence. She just sits there, aloof, with closed eyes and clasped hands. This continues till the end of the service, when the bespectacled woman leading the sermon finally says ‘Amen’. The clasped hands drop, and her eyes open in excitement at the prospect of saying what she now must. Everyone speaks in unison, but Ng Chhaidy’s voice rises above the gathering’s. “Amen,” she shouts. At last, a word she knows.
Ordinary leaves are made into whistles, sounds that echo deep in the forest, and berries employed as bullets to shoot at others. It is as though the jungle is one big playfield for her. It suddenly starts pouring, and, along with everyone else, Chhaidy rushes home. By the time they return to the spot, the rain has stopped and a warm amber sun is sinking into a nearby hill. Chhaidy runs towards it, waving her hands in glee.
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From a distance, all one sees is the silhouette of an overjoyed woman. And all one hears are gentle grunts in a language no one understands.
Afghan Wedding At Drug Rehabilitation Camp
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by Ruhani Kaur/ Open Magazine
When we reach Tank-e-Tel, the Dasht-e-Barchi shopping market, a woman in a black and white headscarf (the hijab) stands out from the rest. She is negotiating hard with five men, at the successful outcome of which currency exchanges hands. Laila Haideri has taken Susan to buy her wedding dress. Susan, the bride-to-be, looks a bit lost but is clearly entranced by the lineup of mannequins in bridal gowns.
Laila was just twelve when she got married for the first time. As if to compensate for this, she seems intent on making this a really memorable day for Susan and Ali, two drug addicts who are being rehabilitated. When Laila decided to set up a camp to help addicts like her brother, her second husband deserted her.
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Susan was brought to the camp with two of her children by a police officer. She didn’t know where her third child was. Her face showed scars of a terrible car accident. It was here that she met Ali. He is a handsome quiet man who is as committed to looking after Susan’s kids as being her partner. In Afghanistan, female drug addicts need to be invisible, and often live in denial.
Susan and Ali whisper to each other in the backseat when we cross the Pul-e-Sukhta. “It is the bridge under which the city’s drug addicts gather,” says Laila. “And what I saw was that ordinary people are even more sick than the drug users. They were throwing stones under the bridge to make fun of them. This affected me a lot. I had to do something.”
Susan and Ali’s wedding will be held at the Taj Begum. Fittingly, it is the restaurant in which inmates from the camp work as part of a gradual re-initiation into society. The customers are mostly friends of Laila’s from the art world. The money they earn goes into the care of the new addicts that turn up at the camp. As the light begins to fade and a musician starts to play the damboura, the evening comes alive. It is a warm safe haven that Laila has created, right in the middle of a harsh city.
Burkha Rapper
Sofie Ashraf is an artiste of her times, a creative force informed by the post 9/11 world, a daring new voice like none other
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by Pallavi Polanki, Photos by Ruhani Kaur/ Open Magazine
When you see me/ Is this all you see?/ Oppressed coz I’m dressed as my creed has decreed/ It’s my choice, my way to voice/ What I believe in and leave an identity/What is Islamic terrorism?/ This is quite an erroneous term/ Gimme back my faith/ Don’t hijack my faith/ Don’t hate me for an idiot’s mistake
Salaatullah/ Here’s my prayer/ All I want is Islam in the clear/ From those who pollute, convolute and misuse/ Their belief’s misconceived/ Spread your love, not your fear. —from Salaatullah, written after the Mumbai attacks and performed for the first time at the Justice Rocks concert organised by Youth For Social Change, in Chennai in December. The proceeds went to victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy.
SOFIE ASHRAF is political theatre. She is a girl in a burkha who raps on Islam in the time of terrorism. She is 21 years old.
The burkha rapper, they call her. Born to a devout, wealthy Malayali Muslim family, Sofie studies graphic design at Chennai’s leading arts college for girls. She calls her latest band Peter Kaapi. (Peter is a mocking term used by locals for those who insist on speaking English. And Kaapi, of course, is coffee, pronounced the Tamil way.)
That’s Sofie. She takes on multiple identities—the burkha, the rapper, Peter, Kaapi—smiles a trust-me smile, and throws them together. Kaboom! She likes the sound of exploding myths.
Sofie insists she is not a feminist. There are boundaries she will not cross with men. Her religion, she says, does not encourage too much physical contact between a man and woman. For starters, she does not shake hands with men. She greets them with a namaste. She prefers not to get “huggy and feely”, she says.
Yet, there is no hint of awkwardness when she jams with her band members, Ajay, Jitin and Parth. What there is, is great chemistry. Only, when the guys say ‘hello’, they do it with folded hands, and, of course, they can’t ask her out. Sofie plans to get married later this year.
Sofie accepts and defends such limits set for her by her religious tradition. “It is not that I don’t trust myself. It is just that I trust God more. I believe in playing within the lines. There is always a way to have fun and still abide by the rules of Islam. When you break rules, you end up hurting a lot of people.”
She won’t be upstaged by terrorists and their propaganda. And she won’t be silenced by the dangerous prejudices that threaten her. What she will do is something that is impossible to ignore. Salaatullah. It was her declaration of solidarity. Her audience was ecstatic. She was a star.
Sofie’s life and art revolve around her religion. Her artistic pursuits live in harmony with her religious inclinations. Which is why a lingerie dispenser for young adults she designed during one of her internships is pinned up next to a poster with a verse from the Quran on it. One does not cancel out the other. They strangely and colourfully coexist on her wall, as they do in her life.
Jus ‘coz I’m little, don’t you play with me/ Got a couple of questions/ What’s with all the tension/ First impressions aside/ Freshen your mind/ It’s an expression of beliefs/ My convictions on my sleeves/ This rendition of tradition/ I just don’t wanna leave/ You look at me and fret/ How I wonder what you are/ What you see is what you get/ This ain’t over yet/ Don’t you dare forget/ I’m gonna be a star
—From T.W.I.N.K.L.E, written during her first year at Justice Basheer Ahmed Sayeed College for Women
That may be why the world somehow seems to always fall in place for Sofie. As she drives frantically to her next destination in her Maruti car adorned with floral patterns, she makes a playful confession. “There is this really cool anime (Japanese animation) called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in which the entire world is made just to amuse her, the main character.” And then, laughing, she adds, “I sometimes feel the world is created just to amuse me. Because things, masha’allah, always go right.”
But the real reason why Sofie gets her way is revealed by another confession. “People tend to think that someone who tries to be different and someone who breaks the rules are the same. I work within the rules, but I find those little loopholes that allow me to do my thing.”