Women Are Defaced by Acid and Bengali Society Is Torn

June 24, 2000, Saturday

The village elders met under the litchi tree, applying their collective wisdom to put a value on Peyara Begum’s grotesquely ruined face. The crime was hideous, they soberly agreed. A young man had become obsessed with her, but she was married and he was turned away. He took his revenge with sulfuric acid, to erase the beauty that had once enchanted him and to empty her life of happiness. Her cheeks melted. Her right eye was blinded and hollowed like a crater. But what is done cannot be undone, the elders said. The attacker had been arrested. And his uncle, a respected religious man, had long pressed them to hold a shaleesh—or informal court—to mediate between the parties as is the tradition. He was willing to pay the victim’s family a reasonable sum to atone for the wrong and buy his nephew’s freedom. So when the seven elders met in April, taking an unusually long time, they tried hard to be fair. Some who had seen the horrible disfigurement thought $10,000 a proper settlement. But others wondered aloud: his had been a crime of wild passion. Do a man’s emotions go so wild unless a woman has done something improper? To them, $1,000 seemed enough. And so the arguing went on for three hours. In Bangladesh, such stories have become plentiful. In the 12 months through March 1999, 174 acid attacks were reported. Most often, the culprit is a spurned suitor. No one is sure why this crime occurs here at such a high pace, for this nation is not so different from many others in its poverty or its treatment of women. Inexplicably, some aberrant ripple is moving through the countryside. Nariphokko, a woman’s rights group, has kept statistics: 80 attacks in 1996, 117 in 1997, 130 in 1998. The horror for the victim is overwhelming. “It felt like someone had poured boiling water on me,” said Bilkis Khatun, a 13-year-old girl attacked as she slept. Her right ear is now only a nub. “My mother and father rushed in. They thought I was having a bad dream, but when they saw my face burning, they shrieked.” Some victims die, but that seems unintended. The purpose of the attackers is to manufacture a living hell, and in that there is most often fulfillment. Survivors are left not only with their deformities but also with the peculiarities of village reckoning. One young woman was forced by her parents to marry her attacker, solving the urgent matter of who would support a woman unwanted as a bride. Another was forbidden to come home until she allowed her husband to take a second wife. “The man who did this to me is in jail,” said Peyara Begum, her eyes behind dark glasses that conceal her worst scars. “But I am in jail too, and for me there is no door, no escape, nothing.” Early in April, she worried that there would be no justice as well. The crime has a maximum penalty of death, but policemen and prosecutors are often corrupt. Most attackers are never arrested; most of the arrested are never tried. No one has ever been executed. Fifteen months had passed since the attack. A 20-year-old man, Rakimuddin, who like many here uses only one name, is the accused. Peyara Begum’s husband, Afsaruddin, 38, had been forced to bribe prosecutors before they would pursue the case. Medical bills had already left the family destitute. He and his brothers had to sell off their legacy, a parcel of land. And now, to Peyara Begum’s disbelief, the elders were agreeing to a shaleesh, suggesting a bargain could be struck. This was unthinkable, she said. It would seem like forgiveness. Peyara Begum’s village is Gosarigaon, 40 miles north of Dhaka. Her home is made of tin and mud, in a clearing surrounded by mangoes, banyans and mahogany. Rice paddies reach to the horizon. The most respected man in the area is Moti Master, 74, a former school principal whose stringy white beard goes well with his reputation for wisdom. He had reluctantly decided to intercede; usually, a shaleesh settles property disputes and petty grievances. Brutal assault is not on its agenda. But Moti Master knew both families and suggested that each could benefit from a compromise. He said it surprised him when Mr. Afsaruddin—a quiet, well-liked man who sells cooked rice along the roadside—responded with uncharacteristic boldness. “Haven’t you seen my wife’s face?” he said with anger. “My family has been destroyed. This is not a matter about money.” But one of Mr. Afsaruddin’s brothers was more open to settling. He signed a paper for the family, and Moti Master said this was enough to convene the elders. No outcome could be imposed on Mr. Afsaruddin, but Moti Master felt confident that Mr. Afsaruddin would respect the decision of his betters. “My husband loves me very much,” Peyara Begum said during these fretful days. “But he is not a strong man, and I am afraid the influential people can make him agree to a deal.” Since the attack, she had returned to the village only once. Her 8-year-old son, Awlad, had been struck with errant splashes of the acid. His burns were on his arm, chest and stomach. The two were living in a house for acid victims recovering from surgery, the rent paid by a charity. There, secreted away, 20 women and the boy shared their common grief, safe from insults and pity. Anger sometimes rose in a chorus. Just once, they said, they would like to ask some man to marry them and then throw acid in his face when he said no. Maybe then the world would understand. Most often, though, melancholy and guilt held sway. Bangladesh is an Islamic country, and the victims asked themselves what they had done to offend Allah. Learned women from the rights groups of Dhaka are inclined to talk of “frustrated gender relations,” reproaching a male-dominated, conservative society where boys and girls are not free to meet and get acquainted. But the disfigured women are more likely to reach quite a different conclusion, saying their nation has grown too permissive and they would have been better off veiled, with their flesh out of sight. “Now I believe in strict purdah,” Peyara Begum said. “If I had been kept under the veil, Rakim would not have seen me or been able to talk to me. My life would not be ruined.” She told her story. Mr. Rakimuddin, who lived on the other side of the litchi grove, had been hired to tutor her two sons in their house while Peyara Begum worked outside in the open kitchen, cooking the curry that was used by her husband to flavor the rice at their modest stall. After several weeks, his interest seemed to shift from his pupils to her. “He said my husband was a bad match for me, that I was too beautiful for him,” she said. She complained to her husband. The tutor was fired, but he continued to come around. He professed love, Peyara Begum said. In exasperation, she sent word to the young man’s uncle, who is a moulvi—a religious scholar—asking him to intervene. Mr. Rakimuddin received a thrashing by an older brother, say some of his family members. Soon after, he attempted suicide. Finally, near sundown on a cool winter night, Mr. Rakimuddin pushed open the door of Peyara Begum’s house. He held a cup in his hand, she said. She was sitting at the table with her two sons and a niece. She had begun to stand up when the acid hit her face. Suddenly, her skin was searing. She ran outside. She howled for help. By the time Mr. Afsaruddin was summoned, there was a small crowd. He could make no sense of what he saw, he said, with his wife’s face “dripping down her head.” The nearest clinic was 10 miles away. They climbed into a bicycle rickshaw and commanded the man who was pedaling to go fast. When they reached the clinic, the doctor was dumbfounded. He had never seen such an injury. He did not know what to do. He advised them to go to Dhaka. Peyara Begum did not get treatment for two days. There are only eight beds for burn patients in all of Bangladesh, a nation of 128 million, said Dr. S.L. Sen of the Dhaka Medical College Hospital. There are but six plastic surgeons in the country. She has since had six operations: skin grafts, reconstruction of her eyelids. Her sight is gone in one eye and dimmed in the other. Aching is constant. She can tolerate only the slightest heat. “Rakim must be punished for what he has done to my life,” she said firmly. But the young man’s uncle, the moulvi Motiullah, had suggested another path to the village elders. His nephew’s imprisonment would not remake the woman’s face, he said. And even if it could, Mr. Rakimuddin was going to plead not guilty. His conviction was no certainty. “A just compensation is best for everyone,” he argued. A shaleesh is not bound by legalisms. There is no set membership. Any interested men can observe it, though decisions are usually left to a smaller group of elders. Moti Master presided. The meeting was very odd, he recalled. Neither the jailed man nor the distraught husband was there. “Afsaruddin’s absence was very much felt,” Moti Master said. “But I know him very well. He can be talked to. He can be reasoned with.” So the shaleesh was assembled, and after an hour the old man asked seven elders to go sit under the litchi tree and decide about the money. He worried, he said. The judgment might be an unrealistic sum. Mr. Rakimuddin’s family was poor. How much could they pay? Indeed, the appointed jury was concerned about the same thing. When some of them suggested that 500,000 taka—about $10,000—was a fit penalty, others scoffed. Few people around Gosarigaon could raise that much cash. Those on the other extreme, who thought $1,000 a fair payment, also raised the question of improprieties: maybe Peyara Begum had flirted with the young tutor? “We thought there might have been some kind of relationship between the two,” said Khander Abdul Mannan, who led the meeting of the seven. “We didn’t know, but we assumed: perhaps this, perhaps that. We thought Peyara might be partly responsible.” Haggling ensued. The high end dropped to $4,000, the low moved up to $2,000. The lesser amount seemed about to prevail when someone mentioned the couple’s son, Awlad. His face had escaped injury, but his body had been scarred. “Why had this little child been made to suffer?” Mr. Mannan said. “Peyara Begum may have shared in the blame but not this boy. We were shocked and angry at this.” They finally agreed on appropriate reparations: $3,000. The process had taken up an entire afternoon, and the members of the shaleesh were satisfied that they had done the right thing. But Mr. Afsaruddin – that bony and meek seller of cooked rice – would not consent. He would not turn against his wife. Anwar Ali is president of the market where Mr. Afsaruddin has his food stall. Mr. Ali is a prominent man. He attended Afsaruddin and Peyara’s wedding and considers himself their friend. But unlike them, he had thought that deferring to the shaleesh was a smart choice. “I urged him very hard to take the money,” Mr. Ali recalled later, sitting on a bench in the ramshackle market. “Afsaruddin acted like I was crazy. ‘What are you talking?’ he said. ‘Have you seen my wife’s face? Have you seen my son?’” Mr. Ali paused a few seconds as he reflected on that conversation. “I was a little ashamed of myself,” he said.