THE FULL STORY

In his short story, writer Razan, deftly compares the experience of domestic violence to that of living in an occupied territory. Watch out for the plot twist at the end!

In a neighbourhood near yours, a woman let a desperate-looking man into her house, where she lived alone. Little did she realise who she had just given shelter to.

7th April, 2019 – In a neighbourhood near yours, a woman let a desperate-looking man into her house, where she lived alone. Little did she realise that she had just given shelter to a rapist, who had since long set his eyes on her house, and was not planning on leaving.

8th April, 2019 – The man suddenly and viciously beat and bruised the woman. He took over the house, locking the doors and windows, and keeping the keys with himself. The woman screamed and cried desperately and shouted for help. The neighbours were very troubled at the publicly audible commotion, but the rapist had paid off some of the richest and most influential neighbours, so all that anyone did was stand at their own porch and condemn the violence.

Over the next few days, the man assaulted the woman regularly. He had her do the cooking and the cleaning around the house. A prisoner inside her own house now, she was starving as the man had taken control of her pantry and whatever came into the house or went out of it. He would regularly humiliate and beat her in passing, and have her sleep in the corridor.

Soon the man set up an electric fence around the house and the backyard. He announced publicly that this was “his house” and that the woman living with him was “his wife”. The neighbours were horrified and some even whispered about actually intervening and doing something, but no one spoke out loudly in front of the elders of the neighbourhood – whose jobs, it turned out, were in the hands of this astonishingly powerful man. 

The woman would regularly come out into the backyard and call on her immediate neighbours for help. Sometimes they would pity her, and at most, toss a loaf of bread into her backyard, over the fence.

To the east of her house, some of the woman’s own relatives lived as her neighbours. Their husbands and fathers worked for firms where this man had strong influence, so these husbands and fathers would force their wives and children to act as if there was nothing wrong, to not mention this oppression of their own blood relative.

The man would outwardly maintain a cheerful disposition with the neighbours, even with the ones that mumbled about him more loudly. Most of the neighbours, anyways, were employed at firms where this man had uncanny influence over the business funds. It was very convenient for them to smile and accept him as a part of their neighbourhood. And even when a nearby, rich neighbour started speaking more boldly about how long the rest of the neighbours would stand by and just watch this man’s oppression, the man had this rich neighbour quietly murdered by night.

And so the days stretched into weeks and months. The woman did not stop struggling against her captor’s regular assaults against her, and her persistent resistance only annoyed him and made him increasingly aggressive towards her. Bit by bit, over the days and weeks, the man began to make her life increasingly difficult and choked, such as locking the door to the kitchen, and hiding all water bottles from her except for a dirty one. He would keep a close watch on her too, constantly and brazenly. On top of all this, the man even started paying the local shopkeepers, who heavily influenced the neighbourhood’s gossip, to spread rumours about the woman’s evil-doing, her episodes of hysteria, and her cold-hearted cruelty towards her “husband”.

Even in such a dire situation, the woman did not lose hope and give up. She was a God-fearing woman, and drew strength from her bond with God to help her through this testing time. She knew that in the afterlife, if not in this world, she would receive complete justice. And that belief, in God and His Infinite Power and Absolute Justice, kept her strong and resisting her oppressor.

For a few days (between July 2019 to August 2019), a next-door neighbour of the woman grew very sympathetic towards her and her plight, and decided to take action. This next-door neighbour broke the windows of the woman’s house – the woman’s house, mind you, not the man’s house – and managed to tear down part of the electric fence with the woman’s help. The man was very enraged at this. He very badly beat down this next-door neighbour with the help of other neighbours, and aggressively assaulted the woman in public, too, beating her up badly as he dragged her back into the house. The next-door neighbour also crawled back into his house, which was now regularly vandalised, kept having maintenance problems, and constantly received pamphlets about the evils of hysterical women and nosy neighbours.

And so life went on. The days passed. Sometimes the woman would try to hurl heavy objects at the electric fence to try to break it. Sometimes she would try to catch the man by surprise and hit him – trying to knock him out so she could get out of this bizarre, unreal nightmare. The man – who was much stronger and bigger than her – would violently respond to these attempts to change the new status quo, and would assault the woman harder than ever before. 

“Why are you fighting him?” Some of her extended family neighbours would yell across the street, when they saw her attempts at resistance. “Stop resisting him for the sake of peace! He’s going to retaliate harshly and you know it. What are you achieving?” They had no idea of the woman’s desperation. She knew she was going to be assaulted and abused either way, in addition to the daily humiliations she had to face, and she chose the alternative of not facing them as a docile punching bag with no fight in her.

During such incidents, the other neighbours would do even worse things. “The poor man – how horribly his wife attacks him!” They would stand at their porch and yell words of support for the man, encouraging him to assault the woman more in response. “He has every right to protect his house and tame his hysterical wife,” they would passionately shout out to the relatives of the woman, who would at least frown and mumble at the wife’s pitiable condition. 

The richest of these neighbours would, especially during the episodes of louder commotions, openly deliver baseball bats and other items for the man to attack the woman with. The local shopkeepers would sustain a public narrative of the ongoing oppression that the poor man would suffer at his hysterical wife’s hands. Only a minority of voices could be heard mumbling in support of the woman, especially from the wives and children of the extended family of the woman.

4th January 2020, the man crossed all previous limits and really went all in. He beat and pummelled the woman heavily, dragging her out to his front porch and publicly assaulting her in clear sight of the entire neighbourhood. A few screams and louder than usual cries were heard from the neighbours. Besides these unusually loud condemnations, this incident received the typical response – the shopkeepers and the richest neighbors fully supporting the poor man’s right to protect his house from the innately hysterical woman and her evil plots. It took the woman several days to recover substantially from the beatings of that day – not that the man took it any easier on her following that.

One or two relatives and close neighbours of the woman were found mysteriously injured in the following few days. In any case, people moved on. They forgot, most of them, as usual. Things returned to the norm – the norm that favoured the man, but was never enough for his increasing appetite of exerting his dominance.

1st February 2020 – The man did it again – he viciously, publicly attacked the woman. This time, something unusual happened again with the neighbours’ reaction. The children of the woman’s relatives did not keep quiet, but shouted in unison against the man. The man quickly coordinated with the richest of the neighbours as well as the local shopkeepers, paying them extra to influence the other neighbours, and quelled the increased public discontent. In fact, the man went the extra mile and had one of the relatives of the woman publicly praise him and thaw his relationship with the man.

2nd February 2020 – The man repeated the same public brutality against the woman. The reaction from the neighbors was still louder than several weeks ago, but less intense than it had been the previous day. The man walked back into the house having delivered an unusually severe assault on the woman, dragging her back inside and continuing to harass her for the rest of the day. Another relative of the woman also came out and declared his newfound support of the man, citing the man’s right to protect his house from the woman’s hysteria.

3rd February 2020 – Something unexpected happened. Despite her beatings from the previous two days, the woman pounced on the man. She beat the surprised man viciously, and though the man fought back and caused even more damage to her, it caused a noticeable ripple of changing the narrative throughout the neighbourhood. Suddenly, the man did not seem so utterly powerful and invincible after all. He could in fact be attacked and opposed and weakened. Here was proof. 

The woman knew that the beatings that she had sustained that day – and during all of the previous days – had not been in vain. For one – most importantly – she knew that her reward for her perseverance lay in the afterlife for sure. And secondly, after all the blatant oppression, the truth was slowly but clearly becoming louder than the manufactured lies. The tide was clearly turning in her favour. She was going to be free soon, by God’s help. It was up to the neighbours whether they wanted to be a part of her inevitable liberation or not.