Inviting Others to Continue Her Actions in Fighting Forced Marriage

43 Her voice cracked and I heard her gulping in air, struggling to regain control. „Don‟t let them take me home, Jasvinder. You said they‟d help me. My stepdad will kill me if he sees me, I know he will. He said if I tried to run away he‟d kill me and dump my body somewhere no one ever find it. They won‟t fucking believe me. You‟ve got to help me, Jasvinder. Please.‟ Sanghera 47 Jasvinder helped to protect Shabana from her father. Shabana‟s father liked to punch her face, tried to strangle her, scratched her, kicked her and pulled her hair. She was forced to marry a white man named John Henderson, but she did not want to. Shabana could escape and meet Jasvinder. But, she still needed a refuge. She was afraid of her father. Her father cut out a newspaper article describing an honour killing and left in on her bed. Imagine living with those threats, getting up each day to face such hostility; I wasn‟t surprised when, in her emails, she started talking about suicide. I suddenly felt choked by worry her. I sent a text, asking when I could ring; I needed to reassure myself that she was still there, still safe Sanghera 107 Jasvinder also helped Surjit by listening to Surjit‟s painful story. When Surjit was seven, she was taken to India to learn what she called Indian system. She was chaperoned to and from school by her father and brother. It was her father‟s, brother‟s and male cousins‟ duty to watch and check how she was behaving all the time. Her father told her that everything she did at the time would determine her marriage prospects. Surjit‟s mother also lived under the male domination and she had no choice for not torturing her daughter. The day of Surjit‟s first menstrual period arrived when she was thirteen and she ran to her mother asking her what was happening. The response changed her life forever. Her mother threw a sanitary towel at her and shouted, „Now you‟re a woman not a girl, behave like one and don‟t shame us.‟ Sanghera 190 44 The next client was Maya. Before she became a survivor in Karma Nirvana, she was also the victim of forced marriage. She had a miscarriage but her family did not help her. Miscarriage was considered as an unimportant thing. The life of a woman was less important than honour and gender. Within a week she miscarriaged, crouched on all fours on the bed, rocking herself to and fro against the griping pains tearing at her lower belly, stifling her sobs as the blood, thick and sticky, trickled down her legs. It was night-time and in the hostile darkness she sensed her parents behind her at the doorway, silently watching. Sanghera 212 b. Fighting against Domestic Abuse Niaz 2003 stated women are generally treated as second class citizens and wives are battered for misconduct or minor mistakes. In India and Pakistan, nearly 25 of women had suffered from physical abuse. In January 2001, about 130 cases of physical abuse occured a result of which 68 women were brutally killed. Jasvinder had supported the survivors by providing safe houses, refuges and people to support them. There were a lot of domestic abuse revealed in this novel and Jasvinder had helped all of them. The first was Mariam. Mariam opened up to her about the marriage, the beatings – everything. The man she‟d been forced to marry was her cousin and he and his brothers used to take her to a shed – a sort of weapon chamber full of guns and knives – to beat her. They threatened to kill her if she said a word about it to anyone outside the family. Sanghera 172 The next was Surjit who got pregnant three times after being forced into marriage. Unfortunately, her pregnancy could not grow because she was raped everyday. The babies did not grow. It made each of her pregancies end in