PART III
NADIA
Day 8. The room was getting murkier. The single window, our only sense of day or night or the fact that we were not cramped in each other’s nightmares failed to perform its duty as the thick rain clouds created an atmosphere of actually living in an endless expanse of time and space with no hope of an end. An end, no matter how brutal, an end is all we hoped for.
Two days back even Rita and Ayum, nicknamed as the cry-babies, stopped crying; we had kind of gotten used to their background score of loud wails interspersed with heavy sobs, breathlessness, calling out to Nina’s agent’s best friend God. So we were bound to notice when this background tune stopped, they had either all together given up or had dropped dead. We really couldn’t make out as, thanks to the window, it looked like we were living in the universe’s black hole and if they did die, I was 100% sure that all of us were cursing those lucky bitches, they had it easy.
Bathroom break. We got two in a day. One in the morning and one in the evening. It was the only time we were able to see the outside world and I always looked forward to those times. It gave me a sense of forbearing. There were those who didn’t have the energy or the inclination to get out and so when the bathroom breaks that could easily have lasted an hour or so, thanks to those lazy twerps, lasted only for about half hour and then we were sent back to our hole. Talk about selfish and lack of team spirit.
As they took us out, chained to one another, made to walk in a single-file line like cattle, a jeep with about six men and 20 girls approached us as they stopped next to their toilet-duty brothers and screamed ‘slave market day’. They laughed, hi-fived each other, discussed the high-priced designer ones and the low priced daily-wear ones as they hugged and sang praises to the Almighty for creating the "gurls", and in turn them and sped in the direction of another hold up cell.
Seeing this, I remembered August 3rd, 2014, the day of my own selling. Our small town of Poli was attacked by the extremists. Talk about their evil plans to plunder our small town and destroy whatever came in their way and hence to stay out of said way was doing the rounds for some days, but it all happened so fast that it caught us by complete surprise.
Men in jeeps, some in black skin suits, some in military uniforms, entered our markets, our homes, schools, hospitals, brandishing guns with the threat to shoot, they captured every woman and child they could, captured men who surrendered, didn’t think twice before putting a bullet through many and put their collected spoils in lorries as they took us to another place that looked like the one they had just destroyed. I saw my neighbors Hussain Bhai and Joseph Bhai shot in front of my eyes and even saw my own husband being captured. Honestly, I had preferred if he had been shot and dead rather than whore himself out to these men. The only thing that seemed to calm me and not put me in a state of shock, was knowing that my two sons were safe at boarding school.
As they pushed us out of the lorry, I immediately knew what this was. This was the slave girl market as I slowly started wrapping my mind around the reality that was soon going to become my life, my end. As soon as it had started, it had ended.
A place massively dominated by laughing, ugly men, I could hear these men and feel their glances on me and cringed at the very thought of what followed.
At the entrance, a massive board stating the price list of slaves, the price of our misery, as we were reduced to nothing more than sheep and cows, met us.
A woman aged 40 to 50 | 50,000 dinars (£27) |
A woman aged 30 to 40 | 75,000 dinars (£40) |
A woman aged 20 to 30 | 100,000 dinars (£53) |
A girl, aged 10 to 20 | 150,000 dinars (£80) |
A child under 9 | 200,000 dinars (£106) |
There was also an unwritten price mark-up of women in terms of skin, eyes, teeth, hair, over-all looks as I stood overhearing the laughing men’s conversations.
As they laughed and discussed how all of them would also have liked to give her a go and stick it to her, better than the aging Chief of course with their studier weapons, before handing her over to the Chief; Wasab, or as I called him obsequious Wasab, the local errand boy came screaming towards them mouthing what could only be understood as dead.
Day 8 and my world had become quiet. Day 8 and we had lost one more. Day 8 and nothing had changed.