After six years of abuse, Allah Rakhi was walking out of her marriage when her husband struck again. Snatching a knife, he sliced off her nose. “You’re no longer beautiful!” he said.
He then slashed at her foot - brutal punishment for leaving the house without his permission. “A woman is only a woman inside the home, outside she’s a whore!” he yelled at Rakhi as she lay bleeding on the dusty street just outside her home. That was 32 years ago.
All that time, Rakhi hid her disfigured face under a veil. Then in March, a surgeon took up her case. He cut flesh from her ribs and fashioned it into a new nose, transforming her life.
The nose is considered the symbol of family honour in Pakistan. Rakhi’s husband served just 10 months in jail before in exchange for a commitment to pay her medical bills. He never did.
Efforts to introduce stronger laws to increase punishments for violence against women have been blocked by an Islamist political party Jamiat Ulema Islam, a member of the ruling coalition.
The lower houses of parliament passed the bill, but the JUI is preventing its passage in the upper house. “We will never let it happen,” said JUI senator Maulana Ghafoor Haideri, who said the bill was a move to “Westernise” Pakistan.
Rakhi was attacked when she was 19, after being married at 13. Following the attack, she worked to support herself and her daughter, painting flowers on pots and buying and selling clothes, all the time hidden behind a veil. “I died every moment,” Rakhi said.
Rakhi’s husband divorced her soon after he was released, she said. In a bizarre twist, the 51-year-old woman now lives again under the same roof as him.
She said she never stopped hoping for a new nose. Her daughter intruduced her to Dr Hamid Hasan of the Acid Survivors Foundation who took her case for free. At a follow up appointment last month, Hasan touched the scars where the stitches once were on her nose and forehead. Rakhi winced slightly, and smiled as the surgeon took his hands away.