‘Please don’t sell me off again, father’

Two abusive husbands and a daughter-selling father later, woman fears for her future.

ISLAMABAD: She is known as the runaway bride. Gul, despite having a deformity affecting her fingers and toes, once worked as a housemaid and paid most of her family’s household expenses. She was married twice, and both times she left her husband. Her father, Zamaan, has publicly sworn to kill her for disgracing the family. Villagers who don’t know her side of the story believe she is too much of a ‘city girl’ to submit to discipline.

The first time she ran away was from her father’s house, after he beat her for not handing over all her salary. She went back after he promised not to mistreat her. While Gul looked forward to reuniting with her family, her father had other plans. He interviewed suitors with the caveat that they pay him a bride price. Inevitably, the highest bidder was also the oldest.

To avoid a scene, Zamaan drugged his daughter and the nikah was performed while she was unconscious. She woke up to find herself in a village in Azad Kashmir. Her husband promptly let her know he had her father’s permission to break her legs to prevent her from escaping. Hearing her cry for help, a local councillor called the police. Her in-laws bribed local journalists to dissuade them from breaking the story.

“My marriage and subsequent divorce enriched my father,” Gul said with bitterness in her voice. Worried she might be pregnant, her uncle forced her to overdose on abortion pills, causing her to bleed heavily for several days.

A shadow of her former self, Gul thought her father would leave her alone. However, just two months after he swore he would never force her into marriage again, she was sold to a man from Mianwali. “The nikah was performed verbally without my knowledge,” she said.

Escorted by her brothers, she landed in a sandy village in the middle of the night. “I did not even know who my husband was till he grabbed my arm to stop me from following my brothers onto the bus going back home,” said Gul.

Gul was welcomed by the sound of women wailing and beating their chests when she stepped into her new home. The women were relatives of her husband’s first wife. The next morning, her mother-in-law told her she had better prove her worth considering she had cost a fair sum. Constantly taunted for her deformed hands and feet, she slaved away the entire day toiling in their fields.

Practically starving on a single meal a day, Gul begged her husband, Tanveer, to take her along the next time he came home on leave. “I only managed to get away after I swallowed poison over being denied permission to visit my critically-injured sister,” she confided.

Two years into the marriage, he left Gul and went back to Mianwali. She says she had no interest in going back to her husband because “he tried to strangle me once, and he could do it again”.

Unfortunately, when her father refused to let her return to the house built with her income, she was once again left with nowhere to go.

Later, caught between her father who had sworn to kill her or to sell her if he catches her alive, and her in-laws who wanted to forcibly take her back to Mianwali to save face, suicide became a serious option. Fortunately, she found refuge with her former employers.

Now back in Bani Gala, Gul raised chickens to make ends meet. While she is in no hurry to find husband number three, she fears that as long as her father lives, it is bound to happen sooner or later.

“I can’t believe there is no law to protect women like me who are auctioned by their fathers in the guise of marriage,” said Gul while talking to The Express Tribune. “Now that I’m separated from my second husband, I’m officially up for sale again,” she added.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 10^th, 2012.