Based on a true incident…
~ Prologue ~
Freedom.
I feel a lot of it, as I lie down on the floor, staring endlessly into the dullness of the fluorescent light that dangles from the ceiling. My eyes follow the swing of the light and then stop somewhere in between when I realize this is my last night in prison. And the more I try to avoid the thoughts that pour in, I feel as if I’m losing myself amidst a labyrinth of memories that have distorted my sense of reality for the past seven years.
~ 07/07/2007 (Seven Years Back) ~
God created the heavens and the Earth in seven days. It is said that there are seven layers to the skies, and it is rumoured that when the day matches the month, and month matches the year, a positive energy is released. They say that the number seven resonates with the vibrations and energies of good fortune. Perhaps that’s why Dr Shaheed has scheduled our first meeting for today. Dr Shaheed is a plastic surgeon, and also the first client in my career as an interior designer. I practice it during my college holidays, and he wanted me to take up the job of transforming the interior of his old office into a doctor’s one.
I wait for him at the café, sipping from my cup of coffee, when a honeyed voice calls out my name, “Radeyah? If I’m not wrong?”. With a towering height and brawny build, he certainly stands out. Somewhere amidst his forties, he carries a sheen on the patch of baldness that sweeps wide across his head, emphasizing his bushy eyebrows that shelter his crinkly eyes. The bristles of beard on the suburbs of his chin fade away into his squarely sculpted jaw bones. We exchange smiles and handshakes before we are in his car, heading straight to his office.
We park outside an apartment that looks like a government building. He orders the guard to look after his car, and we take the lift to his office. Dr. Shaheed opens the door to the place that somehow doesn’t look like an office to me. I follow him inside, leaving the door open behind me.
It is a rundown residential flat smothered in dirt and dust, devoid of signs of life and smell of domestic cooking or the brightness of a home. A few chairs surround a worn out wooden table and I sit on the one nearest to the door. He asks me to take my headscarf off and make myself at home, extending a glass of fruit juice, as he gulps down from the glass in his other hand. My eyes explore the room, trying to draw everything in, near and far; ranging from the entrance, to the sofa, the walls bereft of paint, the television, the wash basin, the mirror and then back to the ice cubes dancing in my glass. I try to shove away inklings of negative thoughts that start creeping in, only to realize that I had been holding my breath since when I had walked in.
“Let’s get on with work, shall we?” I ask, and start walking around the dingy apartment, scribbling in my notepad all along. I enter the kitchen that leads to the balcony, discovering that it’s pretty high. I wonder if I can gather the courage to do it. What a useless thought! I move on to inspect the other rooms, and then return to the drawing room. The sofa has been covered with a white bed sheet. Bubbles of fear burst in my nerves, leaving my mind blank as I struggle to swallow the dryness in my mouth.
He comes closer, takes a small packet out of his pocket and hovers it around the corner of my eyes. “Do you know what this is?” he asks. My knees begin to give away, as I stand motionless and watch myself getting smaller and weaker in front of him. I look at the door. It is closed.
“You have no way of escaping” he says, tearing the packet. I hammer by body against the door and try to scream, only to drown in my own silence.
“Where are you going? You can leave only when I want you to.” he says, mocking me with his eyes.
My back is against the door, and I’m facing him. How badly I wish it was winter so I would have a thick coat on, and be spared of the heat from his hands when he touches me. He pulls at my collar, I hit his hand. He puts his arms around my waist, and his movements begin to gross me out.
“You are stuck now. Aren’t you? I’m going to take care of you. No one is here, Radeyah…no one can hear you.” he breathes into my ears, rubbing his cheeks against mine. I try to move, realizing I’m left with no strength to do so. He has me pinned down; I have surrendered like a small lamb. You see, if you grasp a bird in your hands it will fight. But when you press your palms around it, all you’ll feel is a heartbeat against your skin, because it has surrendered to its fate.
I notice a knife stand on the table. “What are you going to do? Kill me?” he asks, moving away.
“Please, just let me go. I promise I won’t breathe out a word.” I whimper.
“Come stab me with the knife… Let’s see how you do it!” he scoffs.
I beg him to let me go, and he tells me not to play games. I start crying, which I hate to do, he says I am depressing him, and he takes a step towards me, I step back, he gets closer, and then I move back some more.
“STOP it! Or I’ll STAB you!” I scream at the top of my quivering voice, positioning the knife in my hand.
“You are just pretending. You can’t do anything!” he says, pulling my hair. “Go ahead and stab me! You don’t have the guts, do you?” he keeps mocking me, nearing his face to mine. I feel as if I’m breathing in vacuum.
I raise my hand, and with all my hopes and dreams in my mind I stab his back; it sounds much like that of teeth piercing a fresh apple.
Blood gushes out, soaking his shirt red, as he turns around, terrified, and struggles with his steps away from me. Panicked, I start searching for the key on the table. He leans against the wall before collapsing on the floor, leaving a trail of blood on the wall. And then he pulls the knife out of his back. Blood splatters on the wall and the mirror behind him. His breathless gasps send out splashes of blood on the ceiling, as I witness something that I have never seen before.
He tries to get up, as I frantically rummage through the contents on the table, searching for the key, but in vain. He throws the knife at me, and I duck. It misses and pierces the door behind me. He staggers for a while and slumps onto the sofa. The bed sheet turns red even before I realize that he is dead.
I hear a key turning the lock. It’s someone from outside. The door opens. It is Shaheed’s friend, the one he had stopped to meet on our way here. With all my might, I jostle my way out, and rush down the stairs. I don’t choose the lift because I’m already claustrophobic, and running feels safer. I run till I find myself standing by the road, when I put the knife inside my purse and wipe my hands in my black coat. I call the paramedics and tell them there has been an incident. When I hear the ambulance meters away, I run again. I run through the darkness of the evening, till I find myself at the door of my home, hyperventilating in the throes of a panic attack. I am already missing home; the fragrance, the light, the warmth of curtains, and the peaceful silence of the walls.
~ June, 2011~
Once again, I hear my name piping over the speakers in the prison corridors. They handcuff me and take me to the Interrogation Room. The visibility in the room is confined to the fluorescent light that hangs overhead, banishing the darkness around the three legged chair beneath it. I see the walls in the echoes of my own screams, as they drag me by my hair, and I realize how the same hair that creates beauty, can become a rope to pull a woman when wrapped around a man’s hand. How it becomes a cause of pain that twinges your eyes, prickles like needles around your ears, turning into a scream in your mouth.
They chain my hands to the chair that towers high above my body. Hands stretched upward, legs spread around the chair, I sit on the floor, wishing this time I have an answer to their questions. Questions, I’ve been asked for the past four years here. Questions, I’ve never had the answers to. He places a piece of paper on the chair, plugs a pen between my fingers and stomps on my toes with his industrial boots. My toenail splits with the sound of a cracking nutshell.
“Where did you buy the knife from? Write.” the interrogator says, punctuating my screams.
“Believe me. I didn’t.” I say, clenching my teeth and keeping my neck erect to lessen the impact. Because they bash the back of your head, making it land onto the edge of the chair with a thud, leaving a crack wide open on your forehead, spewing out blood all over your eyes. Else, if you miss the edge, your head strikes the centre of the chair, breaking your teeth or splitting your tongue into two.
Instead, I feel a wave of swelling travelling along a line down my back. And like scissors shearing through crisp paper, my skin rips open. It begins to feel ablaze only after I hear the sound of my nerves cracking in the heat. My ears hurt from the sound of my own screams. It’s not a whip; neither a rope, not a cane. I don’t even try to figure out what it is, as I sit there belittled and degraded, with sweat dripping all over, leaving muddy tracks on my face and hair.
“Will you write or not? So far you’ve given us nonsense. Now tell us the truth!” he yells, pulling my hair with a jerk.
“I already told you the truth. I …” I mutter weakly, as he slams his boots on the back of my head and it hits the chair even before I realize I had forgotten to keep my neck erect. I see drops of blood linger onto the tips of my eyelashes before they fall on my face.
“She is going to cooperate. She will tell soon. Put her up there.” he says.
Then they tie my hands and feet, and like a piece of cloth, hang me on a rod. I close my eyes in helpless submission as they begin doing what they normally do on interrogation sessions. They strike heavy blows on your stomach with their knees. They don’t care where in the stomach they hit you. They just do it, until the excruciating pain makes you curl up into a ball. But that’s not the end. The moment you curl up and bring your head down, the knee strike will land on your face, and you can hear your jaw bone shift out of its frame, adding more pain than the word ‘pain’ itself.
These dark hearted monsters wearing human masks can never comprehend that during the monthly cycles, women feel numb and ache. They don’t know what it means to strike a woman in her breasts during her monthly cycle, and I wonder why when women give birth to boys, they do not tell their sons how they feel, so that when their little son grows up to be an interrogator, he would know how to knee strike a woman in the stomach.
“Take her back. Bring her again; next week. This chick is…” and the voice fades out as I count my breaths, shuddering in mid-air and pass out.
Hours later, I wake up to find myself drowning in my blood, saliva and tears; my arms completely numb and twisted, my neck cramped, and the more I try to open my eyes, the solid blood on it holds it back. I feel a hand softly stroking my split and charred skin, and a voice recites a prayer from the Quran to comfort me. These are prostitutes and drug addicts. These are women who remembered finding a card board box as great luck because it saved their bodies from the rough bridges or railways they slept on. Women, whom I would have frowned upon and looked away from, had I seen them on the streets.
~ July, 2014 ~
I am twenty six now, and I’m learning to live the travails of prison life. However, the toughest struggle I’ve had is the one with myself. Fragmented and disjoined thoughts have become my constant companions, destroying my sanity. If I want to shower, I cannot open the tap first, wash my head, then rinse and finish. There are times when I leave the water running and leave the shower without rinsing. I pick up food, but before the spoon reaches my mouth, I am already suspended between fantasy and reality, and then regain awareness to find the spoon suspended in mid-air.
Crushed under the debris of my fragmented image, I repeatedly scream in silence, and cry without shedding a tear. Like a child, I am learning to redefine the borders of normal behaviour and to realign my expectations. The more I long for flying in the limitless sky, I find myself surrounded by the walls of prison where I practice dying. In my imaginations, I die over and over again.
I realize that when man is struggling with illusion and reality, he does not have any power. Even if you scream from the bottom of your heart an bang yourself against the wall, you are still weak. So weak, that your physical strength may increase due to the lack of communication with the world around you, but you develop a psychosis which makes you weaker and you reduce into nothing. You become nobody, hallowed and devoid of any signs of life.
There are times when I witness the destruction of my soul, as I begin to wish it was I who should have been killed that evening. My body would have been plonked in some corner of the city, and days later my parents would have identified it, learning that I had been raped as well. The murderer would have never been found since we don’t have their wealth and power. Then my parents would have continued their lives of suffering, which in a few years would take their lives too, and that would have been it.
Epilogue
I wake up to find myself blindfolded, my feet tethered to heavy chains, and hands held on either side. They make me walk through the stony floors of the prison, and then I feel soft, wet grass under my feet. Today, I am leaving prison.
They shove me into a car, and as it starts moving, I feel motion sick much like a child riding in a car for the first time. Traffic noises, the whizzing noise of speeding cars, the sound of freedom and life, the smell of fresh morning tea and baked bread at roadside cafes; I soak it all in; after seven long years.
The court made me appear as a cold-blooded murderer and a heartless criminal. Neither did I shed tears, nor did I beg; because I trusted the law. And then I began to realize that I was too optimistic to expect justice.
Today, even when I’m being freed, I had to shed off the last trace of my beauty: my hair. They clipped off my nails too. You see, beauty, in this world, is not looked for. The beauty of looks, beauty of thoughts and wisdom, beauty of a lovely handwriting, beauty in eyes, beauty of a child’s laughter, or the beauty of a nice voice.
They undo the blindfold, and slide a black mask over my face. I don’t want to rot under the soil. I don’t want my eyes or my young heart to wither into dust. So in my will, I have begged that as soon as I am hanged, my heart, kidneys, eyes, bones and anything that can be possibly transplanted, be taken away from my cursed body and given to someone who needs them as a gift. I don’t want the recipient to know my name, buy me flowers or even pray for me. I don’t want Ammi to come to my grave and mourn my death and suffer from it. I don’t want her to wear black for me. I want her to give me to the wind to take away.
Prayers for the Quran float in the air around me.
I feel the crisp of the rope against my skin as they tighten it around my neck, and I secretly count the last few breaths of my life.
Three…
Tww…
Names in the story have been changed. Rayhaneh Jabbari (as Radeyah), an Iranian girl was 16 when a man had attempted to rape her. After serving seven years of prison, Rayhaneh was hanged to death on 25th October, 2014 for allegedly murdering him.
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