Dispatches International
few moments of hesitation, Priya opens up. “I had a dispute over a gold
necklace with two men in my neighborhood named Emon and Rana. One asked me for the neck- lace for his wife to wear to a wed- ding,” Priya explains sadly. “But he didn’t give it back to me for a long time. When I kept asking him to return it, he gave me back a fake necklace.” To determine whether she had been cheated, Priya went to a pawn shop and had the jew- eler examine the necklace. When she found out that she had been cheated, she demanded justice. “I asked him why he cheated
me. I was angry and I said that I would go to the police if he didn’t give the necklace back.” Unfor- tunately, instead of justice, she received horrifying scars. “The next day, at about nine at night, I was alone in our home. Emon and Rana came and knocked on the door. They threw some burning liquid at me and ran away.” What happened after that is not easy for Priya to remember. She says her memory of the incident is fogged with the memory of pain. Priya tries to verbalize for
me the pain and terror she felt. “The liquid fell on my upper part of my body. I didn’t even under- stand what was happening. Sud- denly my body started to burn.” She pauses, recalling the night she keeps trying to forget. “I screamed and screamed. Without even knowing what I was doing, I went and jumped into the water
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tank. I kept screaming, asking to put out the fire on my body. Water didn’t help me. It just increased the pain.”
Eventually, concerned
neighbors came running to her home, alerted by her hellish screams. Upon seeing Priya’s se- verely burnt body, they realized what had caused it, having heard the media reports about acid at- tacks. “I was later told that two or three people from the neighboring home brought me to the DMCH even before an hour passed,” she says, explaining that she has now been at the hospital for sixteen days undergoing various treat- ments.
Every single day, Priya
needs to pay for her medicine, for staying on a bed, and for the doc- tors’ consultations. She gets noth- ing free because she is an “extra patient,” who was admitted to the Burn Unit after the 60 free (that is to say, subsidized) beds were already taken. I look around the room again, recalling that those who are lying on the floor cannot even pay for a bed. “If I was given at least a
single capsule for my pain with- out having to pay huge amounts, I could have consoled myself that my government is taking care of me, that they haven’t forgotten the poor burnt women like me,” says Priya, somewhat bitterly, thinking not only of herself but also the dozens of poorer people in the ward who must sleep on the floor. “From where else we
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