A fictitious account dedicated to my violated sisters in Kashmir.

A fictitious account dedicated to my violated sisters in Kashmir.

As she limped home, the nausea re-emerged and had her retching and vomiting. After a full five minutes, the dizziness receded and she was able to continue the long journey home. Some old men walked past; she pulled her burqah further down to cover her face. Despite years of her father's gentle admonitions, she had only recently abided by the Shari’ah injunction of veiling. She used to feel modest enough wearing the traditional transparent duppata over her head, but things were different now. Now she clung to her burqah as though it would offer protection from further violations.


She started gasping for breath; the memories were resurfacing after all these
weeks of self-imposed amnesia. Against her will she once again heard the raucous laughter and felt the searing pain. "Ya Allah, Ya Allah" she had cried. It was the first time she could recall ever praying to Him. "Allah?" they had mocked. "Which Allah? Your religion is a lie; there is no Allah. There is only us, and you, and we can do what we want to you."


As yet another Hindu soldier moved forward to take his turn, she had curled herself up in a protective ball, trying to make herself invisible. Never in her life had she felt such pain, not even when as a child, she had fallen whilst running and broken her ankle. Her mouth was wide open and the screams were deafeningly silent. She was blind to everything except her private terror. The thought of possible consequences had not occurred to her then. Perhaps had she envisaged then, what she suspected now, she would have lost her mind completely. Perhaps she was just ill from the stress, and was jumping to conclusions.


As twilight approached, she finally reached home. Ever since the incident, she had had one thought on her mind: home. She had felt that once there, things would somehow be all right again. Looking at the door with its hinges broken off, she blinked back the tears. It was a strong door and had protected them in the winter from the icy winds, but eight soldiers with heavy boots and a determination to enter had defeated it.


Would her family read the shame on her face? She had planned to pretend that they had merely beaten her. As she entered, she saw her father with his head bent, silently murmuring a du'a. He had not noticed her enter, but her sisters had. They screamed with fright and relief, and the old man jumped. As she unwillingly met his eyes, she broke down and fell into his lap.


For what seemed like an eternity, he cried with his daughter, his youngest child. He had immediately guessed what she had endured. For six weeks he had been ill with worry. He had envisaged her dead, and now here she was, broken and humiliated. The world stood up for animal rights, he thought angrily, yet his daughter was only a Muslim girl. The Indian army was free to violate her honour as they pleased in his absence, and the world looked the other way. He noticed how she was clinging to her burqah, but said nothing.


As the months went by, the whispered sympathies of the women at the well receded. She took little comfort in this fact: it would start up again, once her condition was apparent.


How vigorously it thrashed inside her! Sometimes it terrified her, despite its small size. At the back of her mind was the dread that it would resemble whichever soldier had fathered it. That thought did not surface to her conscious mind, but at night she had vivid nightmares about it. She would awaken, and seek refuge in Allah from them coming true.


For the first time in her life, she was praying regularly, and fully veiling. This veil that the West so despised made her feel protected and chaste. It helped her forget her shame when she rarely ventured outside. Fasting helped her attain a serenity that she had never before experienced. Without her eemaan, she would probably have had an abortion, or been one of the many unreported suicides that such cases result in.


Her father had taken her sisters to the market, so she was all alone the day the contractions started. How she wished her mother had not passed away so many years ago; she needed her so much at this moment. As the pains grew longer and closer together, her screams intensified. That horrific night, they had been silent screams, audible only in her mind. This time, she felt as though the entire Valley might hear her.


The child was somehow delivered, but she had only the vaguest of memories of that moment. She was verging on unconsciousness. Against her will, she drowsily looked at her son for the first time. She exhaled a sigh of relief, the first in nine long months. She saw no features to remind her of his violent conception.
Growing up, the boy witnessed the atrocities carried out against the villagers whenever the army passed through. His small fists would clench, and he would dread those nights when his mother, as if reliving the past, would begin to scream hysterically. He had long ago guessed what whispered conversations overheard at the well had confirmed. His eyes would burn with a desire for revenge, a yearning that he knew his mother understood - only too well.


The years passed, and now her father had also departed from this world. She often wept, as she recalled him playing with his grandson, whom he favoured, as if to make up for his lack of a father. He never pressurized her to give the child away, unlike so many others. “For the believer, there is benefit in every test from Allah”, he had always reminded her. She understood the wisdom behind those words now. Looking at her son, a young man now, she felt immensely proud. She could hold her head up now; she had raised him well. Every day she prayed for his Shahaadah. With each expedition he partook in, every soldier he killed, her pain was slowly diminished.


How amazing it was she thought, that this same young man - borne from the rape of a young Muslim girl – was now inflicting so much damage upon the very army that had fathered him.

Source: Islamicawakening.com