A womb from a womb.

So first English short story here.
I read a news about an incident involving acid victim and how she was forced to drink acid, so I put that into a story. Things like these happen and well they dont need to happen, people need to be educated and helped.

Breathing the last breaths on a charpoy, her life flashed back in front of her, five minutes later Shabnam had lost the fight. Like every story, there has to be a beginning and there certainly is one to this. Twenty years ago, she was married off to settle her father’s debt, at barely the age of sixteen. And what was her worth, a mere forty thousand rupee. Six months before the debt was settled, her father, Saleem, had lost the amount to a friend, Iqbal, while on a gambling spree.

In a house where two meals a day was a luxury they could not afford, the gambler had gambled away everything, even the last ounce of his wife’s jewelry was not enough to cover his loss, six months had passed away and Saleem had nothing to settle the debt with. It was an afternoon when there was knocking at their door, Shabnam was kneading the flour and Kashifa, her mother, was peeling the potatoes. There was a knock again, this time Saleem shouted to open the door. Go and open the door, said her mother. Saleem was waiting outside with Iqbal, the gambler had already propositioned the hand of his daughter to settle off his debt and his offer was accepted.

Buried within the crowd of Lahore, Shabnam was far away from her dreams of being a teacher. The shy young girl was now a married woman; twenty years had passed away, from one house to another, the desire for two meals a day was a constant companion. Her father Saleem was on his deathbed while her mother had lost her mind the day her daughter was married to a sixty year old. Some days she would see her mother walking near the park where the two of them would go when she was young, asking people if they had seen her Shabnam.

Carrying the weight of two teenage daughters, Shabnam was working as a maid, she could not become a teacher but she was determined to educate her daughters, for her the challenge was to make their lives better than what she had lived as.

The first time I saw her was in the accidents and emergency, she was brought in by a neighbor, and she had suffered a fall. That is what we were told; she had suffered fracture of her nose.  The second time I saw her was when she was admitted to the orthopedic ward for a fracture of her leg. While examining the leg, I found cigarette burn marks. Clearly these wouldn’t be attributed to a fall. She wouldn’t tell how she had got those; she was scheduled for surgery two days later. The day before her operation was when I had gotten to know about her story, my phone was ringing but I chose to ignore the call of my friend as I put my phone on the flight mode, I asked her to continue with her story.

“I was the first child of my mother; she had suffered two miscarriages before me. I had three younger siblings but all of them died in their childhood, my mother had a very strong bond with me, she was an orphan. My father was her maternal cousin, after she was orphaned her aunt took her in, when she was 17, their marriage was arranged.

My mother had raised me with a lot of hopes, but my father did not respect her wishes. He was a gambler; he would gamble everything away, even his honor. The night I was married, my father raised his hand on my mother for the first time, she had questioned why did he have to sell his honor, couldn’t he have died? A couple of months later, she had lost her mind. My husband, Iqbal, was no different than my father. He too was a gambler; days would go by without having a decent meal, I became a mother to two girls but he would not support me. I worked fourteen hours a day, scrubbing floors, washing dishes and clothes to earn for my children. My husband would regularly torture me to hand over my hard earned money for his gambling needs, I used to cave in to the pressure but this time I refused, I had to buy books for my daughters, he had pushed me down the stairs. My neighbors brought me to the hospital; my husband hasn’t come to see me. Sometimes I worry about my daughters, that they might end up having the same fate as me but I try to give them whatever I can. Both of my daughters want to become doctors, they study with a lot of interest, my only wish is to see them make a name for themselves.”

I felt sorry for her but soon I was busy with my own schedule and I forgot about her. A couple of weeks later, someone had shared a video clip about an acid victim who was forced to drink acid. At first, I did not know who she was but soon it was clear, she was Shabnam.

The reason for this barbaric crime, she had raised voice against her husband for using their daughters as a mean to settle his debt, from a womb to a womb, the mother never stops protecting her children.