By: Mishal Rehan
TW: ACID ATTACK
My parents used to tell me that I was the most beautiful girl in the village. As I ran around huts made of mud, my friends would chase after me desperate to touch my luscious locks, feel my feather-soft skin. As I grew older, the village elders would instruct my parents to cover me up, hide my face from the eyes of the world. Do not let them see her, they would say, protect your dignity, and do not let them see her. Afraid of angering her elders, my mother would force me to veil myself, yet I was as wild as a raven. My soul sang songs of freedom, my mind not willing to do what I did not desire and so I refused to obey, not understanding what was so wrong in letting my face be seen by people I had known my whole life.
Little did I know that the people I was so familiar with were, in truth, savages. These thoughts plagued my mind as I sat upon a bed covered with plain sheets, the whitewashed walls of the room surrounding me, smelling of disinfectant, and disease. Breathing in the smell of sickness, I lifted my fingers to feel the skin on my face, but instead met with coarse, unfamiliar bandages. I had known they were there, had known since the moment they rolled me into an ice-cold room of the hospital, and had known as that room became my home for the coming days. Tears welled up in my eyes as my heartbeat quickened, drenching the roughly sewn cloth.
Soaked, my hands shook as I readied myself for what I was about to do, wondering if my heart was strong enough to bear what I would look upon. Who I would look upon. As I began to unroll the dirty white stripes around my head, I revisited the day my mind believed to be a dream. Every roll brought back to me the screams as I had tried to crawl away, my father’s foot like a mountain upon my chest. I had screamed and yelled, thrashing as he threw a stinging liquid on me, a liquid that soon had begun to burn like the fires of Hell. I remembered how my mother stood right next to him, pleading him to stop, reprimanding me for not listening to what I had been told to do. I had refused to veil myself up, and so my father made sure that my face became a veil upon itself.
My father was supposed to be my protector, yet he became the one to brutalize me. My mother was meant to be my defender, yet she failed to save me. As the last of the bandages fell around me, I lifted my head up to look upon myself in the broken mirror of my hospital room. A survivor, never a victim; I had been the most beautiful girl everyone had known but now, I was a warrior. The beautiful warrior of my cursed village.
(Photo from here.)
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