| Leaving the room, I see Shakur racing through the courtyard in such a panic that without realising it, he heads straight for the Mastoi farmhouse! My father runs after him, just as frightened as my brother. I'm the one who must calm them down and persuade them to return to our house. |
| "Papa, come back! Don't be afraid! Shakur! Come home!" |
| When my father hears the voice of his daughter ""whom he hasn't seen for several days "" he stops, and the two of them return prudently to our courtyard, where the police are waiting. |
| Strangely enough, I am no longer afraid of anything and the police don't scare me at all. |
| "Which one is Mukhtaran Bibi?" |
| "I am." |
| "Come here! You must accompany us to the police station right away. Shakur and your father have to come too. Where is your uncle?" |
| We leave in the officers' car, pick up my uncle along the way and drive to Jatoi, where we must wait at the police headquarters until the police chief arrives.There are chairs, but no one tells us that we may sit down. The chief, it seems, is asleep. |
| "You will be called!" |
| Reporters are there. They ask me questions, wanting to know about everything that happened to me, and suddenly, I'm talking. I tell them my story, without going into intimate details that are no one's business but my own. |
| I tell them the rapists' names, describe the circumstances, explain how it all began with the false accusation against my brother. Ignorant though I may be of the law and our judicial system, which is never accessible to women, I sense instinctively that I must take advantage of the presence of these journalists. |
| And then someone from our family arrives at the police station in a lather of anxiety: the Mastois have heard that I am at the station, and they are threatening to punish us. |
| "Don't say anything! You must drop this whole thing. If you do the Mastois will leave us alone, but if you continue..." |
| I have decided to fight. I still don't know why the police came to get us. Only later do I learn that our story has spread quickly through the nation's newspapers, thanks to that first local article. |
| People have heard of us in the capital, Islamabad, and even elsewhere in the world! Worried about this unusual publicity, the provincial government of Punjab province has asked the local police to prepare a report on the subject as quickly as possible. |
| A full jirga, rejecting the advice of the local mullah, has condemned a woman to be gang-raped. There is public outcry. This makes the Mastois even angrier. |
| Like many illiterate women, I knew nothing about the law "" and so little about my rights that I didn't even know I had any! Now, though, I'm beginning to understand that my revenge can take another path besides suicide. What do I care about threats or danger? What could be worse than what I went through? My father, to my surprise, supports my decision to fight back. |
| If I were educated, if I could read and write, everything would be so much easier! I set out anyway, with my family behind me, in an entirely new direction. |
| The long road ahead of us is completely unfamiliar, because in our province the police are directly controlled by the upper castes. Policemen act as the fierce guardians of tradition, allied with the tribal authorities. |
| Whatever decision a jirga makes will be accepted and backed up by the police. It's impossible to charge an influential family with a crime if the police consider the matter a village affair, especially if the victim is a woman. |
| A woman is nothing more than an object of exchange, from birth to marriage. According to custom, she has no rights. That is how I was raised, and no one ever told me that Pakistan has a constitution, laws and rights written down in a book. I have never seen a lawyer or a judge. I know absolutely nothing about the official justice reserved for wealthy and educated people. |
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