Ms Qureshi's Being Reshma sucks you into the trauma, the pain and the hopelessness an acid attack victim suffers day in and day out - and in the end, it makes you want to make a difference
The Extraordinary Story of an Acid Attack Survivor Who Took the World by Storm
Reshma Qureshi (with Tania Singh)
Macmillan, Pages 230; price Rs 599
What is it like when acid is poured on the human body? First, the clothes melt off. Then comes the smell of burning flesh. So hotly does the acid burn that the mind becomes delirious. For 17-year-old Reshma Qureshi the initial sensation was like drowning in ice, rapidly followed by a feeling of burning in hellfire, of being shredded alive as the acid ate through the layers of her skin and seeped towards her bones.
Screaming and slithering on the ground, she clawed at her niqab as it melted off her face, while her attackers — her brother-in-law, his cousin and nephew — fled the scene. “Even if I practised hard, I could never again scream the way I did that day,” she writes in this horribly disturbing account of her life.
Ms Qureshi was on her way to take an exam when she was attacked in August 2014 — 10 months after the Supreme Court of India ordered complete ban of over-the-counter sale of acid to check such attacks on women. The court had also said that anyone buying acid needed to furnish government-approved identity proof and state the reason for the purchase. And, it made it mandatory for the seller to record the name, telephone number and address of the buyer. That Ms Qureshi was attacked — as were several other women before and after her —despite the top court’s order is proof of how callous and casual the system is in matters of women’s safety.
Being Reshma is an extraordinary story of a young woman who was subjected to an evil and inhuman act and who went on to become the first acid attack survivor to walk the runway at the New York Fashion Week. But a fairy tale it is not. This is a horror story and Ms Qureshi tells it as it is. It shocks you; it makes you stop reading to step out for air or reach for a glass of water; it sucks you into the trauma, the pain and the hopelessness an acid attack victim suffers day in and day out — and in the end, it makes you want to make a difference, in whatever little way possible.
Ms Qureshi begins her story with her childhood in a slum in Mumbai where her family — mother, father and older brothers and sisters — live in a one-room tenement. Life isn’t easy but the family is close knit. One gets a sense early in the book that the father is particularly indulgent of his youngest daughter. This is a family that has its problems but stands by its members.
She is still young when Ms Qureshi moves to Mau Aima, a village in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, with her mother and sisters after her mother has been treated for a cancerous tumour. It is here that she starts becoming aware of a woman’s secondary position in Indian society. Ms Qureshi is attacked by her sister’s abusive husband and his relatives who want to teach her family a lesson for standing up to them. And they do so in full public view, on a busy morning, with zero fear of the law.
The book takes the reader through the cruelty and the appalling insensitivity an acid attack victim suffers every step of the way, especially if she is from a poor family. The damage can be controlled if water is thrown on a person within three seconds of exposure to acid. Ms Qureshi doesn’t get any treatment for two hours. The hospital demands a copy of the first information report (FIR) of the crime, even though the law says the victim ought to be treated first; the police dilly-dally on the FIR and wonder what she might have done to bring this on herself; a doctor holds her family responsible for her condition. The filthy hospitals, the rude nurses, the deep-seated biases — Ms Qureshi makes you see them afresh in all their unacceptable ugliness.
She takes you through her state of mind over weeks and months after the attack: the horror she experiences the first time she sees herself in the mirror; the silence that conceals boiling emotions when people tell her it will be all right; her depression and attempts of suicide; her outbursts against her family that refuses to give up on her; the financial burden of her treatment… If, despite all of this, her words don’t shake you, the pictures of her before and after the attack will.
I would perhaps not be holding this book in my hand today had help not come Ms Qureshi’s way in the form of an organisation called Make Love Not Scars, which works with and for acid attack victims. Or, had advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather not decided to do a pro bono campaign around acid attack survivors with her as its face. Through initiatives such as these, Ms Qureshi’s story has travelled to the world. But there are hundreds of similar such stories of horror that make no news.
Being Reshma is a story of all such women. It is a fervent appeal for help — and for change.
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