Once child brides, now fighters: Documentary tells inspiring stories of four Hyd women

Waseem Fathima was only 12 years old when she was married off to a 60-year-old sheik from Dubai. Her parents thought the proposal was a way out of poverty, but were heartbroken almost a year later when they realised the sheik abandoned a three-months pregnant Fathima.

“I always wanted to fly high. I used to beat my brothers during kite flying, and sometimes they used to let me win because they knew how much I was fond of flying kites. Even a day before I was married, I was a happy kid playing around with my friends on the streets,” Fathima recalls.

20-year-old Tasleem is now a driving instructor. But six years ago, she was almost married off to a 72-year-old sheik from Oman who was in the city in search of young brides. Tasleem says she took the extreme step to help her mother who was toiling hard as a domestic worker. But soon, she realised that the sheik was already married to nine another women, including one from the same city. Tasleem fought a legal case against the sheik, only to find out years later that the case would be quashed, with the cops eating away a large chunk of the money which had been offered to her at the time of marriage.

The stories of young girls in Hyderabad’s Old City, who are forcefully married to elderly men, are heart-wrenching. Though many of them have today found an abode at Jameela Nishat’s Shaheen, an NGO for the rehabilitation and empowerment of women, their stories are a reminder of the many unscrupulous men around us. Like Fathima and Tasleem, there are hundreds of other women at Shaheen, some who survived violent domestic abuse and others who were given off as child-brides.

Sujith Kumar KV, a native of Kerala, has put together their stories in his 85-minute long documentary Pinjaron Ki Udaan. The documentary doesn’t dwell on the tragedies but narrates the lives of four young, bold women who rebuilt their lives surviving abuse and torture for long years. Produced by Shaheen, the documentary was screened at two occasions for women and school children in the city.

Pinjaron Ki Udaan was shot over a time period of six months, during which the four women- Fathima, Pooja, Tasleem and Sultana- had a tough time convincing their parents about the need for shooting the documentary. Jameela Nishat, the founder of Shaheen, recalls how director Sujith, who had come to shoot a film on the Muslim women in the city, was moved by listening to the stories of the women at the NGO.

“It was mere faith which made us open doors to the young filmmaker. We thought it was necessary that the world knows what women go through every day to meet ends and how marriages are used to exploit women and their families, luring them in with the promise of a better tomorrow,” Jameela says.

Fathima, Sultana, Pooja and Tasleem tell their stories with absolute grit, with the kind of confidence that cannot be pulled down again. There is a particular scene where Sultana narrates how her husband hit her with a stone on her head when she was eight months pregnant - the mere thought of which can send shivers down the spine of the viewers.

However, the documentary isn't interested in creating pity but instead educates the audience on how a helping hand can aid women find hope in their lives.

Fathima, who bore a child at the age of 13, aspires to educate her son the best she can.

“I wanted to study a lot. But unfortunately, god had something else in store for me. Today, I realise how important education is. I could have landed a better job if I had a degree. But it was not to be!” Fathima says ruefully. She completed her Class X after joining Shaheen and is working as a zardozi artisan in the city.

For all four women, it has been a feat to muster up courage to talk about their lives in front of the camera. “We don’t want sympathy but we are adamant that no other woman should undergo anything similar in their lives,” Sultana opines.

Tasleem, the youngest among the four, narrates her ordeal with a child-like innocence on her face. Speaking to TNM, she even laughs at herself, speaking about how her naive self thought marriage could pull her family out of trouble. But nothing can hide the disgust in the voices of the women who were forced to spent days with abusive men as old as 70 years, in a situation when they couldn't even understand the language in which they were being shouted at. 

If the women faced abuse at the hands of men in their marital home, Pooja, who belongs to a family of conservancy workers, was sexually abused as a child in the hands of her kin. Sultana says she was disfigured and her head crushed with a stone because her husband’s ego couldn’t handle the fact that she was running a tailor shop of her own in the city. She was left bleeding on the cold floors of her house until a neighbour rushed in to help.

If Sultana today works at a company in the city, the documentary ends with Pooja becoming the lead singer in a qawwali performance. However, not all women have support from their families. Sultana hopes that someday, her father would watch the documentary and realise it wasn’t her hubris that broke the marriage.

Pinjaron ki Udaan is true to its title- it tells you about the flight of four women who were caged. Caged not just by the men in their lives, but also by society which considers a woman to be a mere machine that produce babies. The four women are now part of classes that spread awareness among female students that marriage isn’t the solution to problems in life.

With indomitable spirit, all four women have big dreams for the future. Sultana hopes to open her own tailoring shop one day while Tasleema says out loud that she will become an IPS officer.