As Long As I Live

Guilty at Heart

I raise a torch to every woman who has faced injustice and pain at the hands of a man who thinks he can hurt her as is his right.

Too long have women sat in the  shadows, silent and afraid.

To every woman, to every beautiful creation of God who has the heart of gold and an endless sea of courage - the world is yours and mine. We need no man to give it to us.

Let us take back what is ours!!

*****

"And one more thing, just review the papers of that land deal before sending them to me, Zaheer, I need you to tell me if the changes I asked for in the third clause are there. Ok then, bye."

Aamir cut the call and leaned back against the wall watching Mayra as she read a book. Or tried to read the book. Her eyes were vacant, she was staring at the pages, not registering a single word. He knew that she was trying to behave like everything was normal, yet her heart that was shattered into a million pieces was, in all likelihood, never going to be normal again.

How could one go back to being whole again when they have slowly and painfully been stripped of their self-worth and self-esteem? How could you wake up one day and and the days of torture be magically erased from memory? How can inhumanity be forgotten and injustice go unpunished? How brutally was this world going to favour the man with power to hurt and look down upon the woman who bore the pain?

He knew he deserved to be punished, and until his beloved punished him, he knew his guilt would eat him up. He wanted to go to Mayra and beg her to retract the statement that she had given the police. She had every right to have him thrown behind bars, and as his woman, proud and strong, he wanted her to do it.

How hypocritical were men in the society, he thought. The daughters and sisters of others didn't matter even if the most heinous of crimes were being perpetrated against them, but when one's own daughter or sister was hurt or violated, then the perpetrator deserved nothing short of a painful death.

"Mayra?" He whispered.

She turned her head in his direction, yet did not look at him as she whispered, "yes?"

"Shouldn't those who do wrong deserve to be punished?" Aamir asked, his voice choking up with unshed tears.

Mayra looked away. She knew to what and to whom he was referring, but she couldn't answer. Her heart wanted justice, she needed it, but she had learned the hard way that wanting something wasn't necessarily enough for one to get it. She had wanted to be treated with dignity, if not love, she had wanted her family to give her respect, if not her right. Yet here she was, being treated in the best hospital, in the best possible way, at the mercy of her once abusive husband.

How miserable did that make her?

"I..I don't know." She replied.

A tear ran down Aamir's face, unheeded, as he thought of how low Mayra's self-confidence had sunk, or how low her opinion of him had sunk, that she couldn't truthfully reply. The silence in the room was screaming the untold truth that lay between them like an unbridged cliff, separating them both, tearing them apart.

He was an abusive husband, and she was a victim of physical, mental and emotional brutality.

You think it will be easy. You think you will develop self-control and restraint in the blink of an eye. You are mistaken, gravely mistaken, for you are about to undertake the most difficult challenge of your life. And the hardest thing to do would be to try to forgive yourself.

He'd never thought that he would agree with that crazy counsellor, but more than anything else, Aamir started to realize that man had been hitting the bull's eye. He really did think it was going to be easy, or at least not as hard as it turned out to be.