We all love fairy tales, don’t we? Like a prince charming would come and you will last with him happily ever after. However, sometimes life does not go as planned and sometimes even a fairytale turns into our nightmare. Something similar has had happened to Zaaria Patni.
Life was such a fairytale for Zaaria Patni and beautifully so.
In some strange crossroad, she met her prince charming- a handsome boy who along with his family lived in the same building as hers.
One day he came to her college, waited
for her classes to end and asked her out for a coffee. The boy she knew that was decent and so she agreed. Eventually, they spent a wonderful evening by the Choupati in Mumbai. And after several outings with that man, she thought that she had finally met the man of her dreams. She was only 19 and the guy was seven years elder to her.
Soon it was mutually decided that they should get married as early as possible and so it was done.
But she was just nineteen and life had not-so-good plans for this young girl’s post-martial life.
As the man she thought was the fond love of her life turned out to be a devil in disguise.
And it was their honeymoon, where things started turning south for her.
The guy she admired for so long was now a possessive jerk. She was suddenly not allowed to look anywhere but towards him, wasn’t
allowed to enter shops which he didn’t like and was supposed to wear only what he wanted her to.
More so, where on one side he stopped her from wearing a hot pant in public, he forced her to wear a designer lingerie in which she was much uncomfortable during the night.
Yet she submitted to his whims considering it to be a minor insecurity issue.
But that did not stop anytime soon. One day when they were to visit some relatives in London, he asked her to wear a salwar but no
jacket and it was freezing outside.
When they went back to Dubai, he didn’t allow her to turn on the AC and if she did in the middle of the night because it was obviously so hot – he would
smash her perfumes, candles and upturn her entire wardrobe.
Things even escalated when one day after a debate he forced Zaaria to get inside his convertible car and drove the vehicle at an insane velocity, only to threaten to throw her out if she ever disobeyed him.
And there is still more- in between abusing and screaming at Zaaria, he suddenly pinned her down,
forced himself upon her and just six months after the wedding she was made pregnant.
Given, that it happened without her consent, it was a clear case of marital rape!
He then gave her medicines saying she doesn’t need to reproduce now despite seeing that she was throwing up to 30 times a day and all the minerals in her body had drained to the point that she could barely stand and that’s when he agreed to take her to the hospital.
The nurse looked at her and said-
Had you come a day later you would have returned to Bombay in a coffin.
After spending three painful days in the emergency room she was back home.
Her treacherous husband was again hard and didn’t wait for long. He smacked her on the bed and she started bleeding profusely.
That scared the freak out and he stood by for next 24 hours. Seeing her bleed continuously for the first three hours. Then he again took her to the hospital only the next day.
On the hospital slip, it read-
Patient bled yesterday and brought to the hospital today.
But that was it. Zaaria ran away from him and when she returned to India she continued receiving threat messages from him:
If you ever return to Dubai now, I will rip your hip apart.
That’s when she called it a day and after a month of her escape, she filed for divorce.
But she was again pregnant and her husband wanted the custody of their child and Zaaria
had to move to courts just a month after her delivery when her stitches hadn’t completely healed.
For the next six years, she went from one courtroom to other with her infant son. Meanwhile, her husband bribed people and prolonged the case.
Her once fairy-tale love story was now a devil’s lament until 2012 when she won the custody of her son and decided to completely block this man (if anyone can mean that) out from her life.
To earn her living and for her child, she began working in her family business of logistics and also started taking her passion for photography seriously.
With practice and dedication she started getting extremely good with the camera and freelance projects started pouring in for her.
She shot for brands like Vero Moda, ONLY,
Gap, Gaurav Gupta and Madison Puerto and now work were calling her abroad for projects.
However, being a late mother, it was very difficult for her to leave her son behind so she
applied for the visa for her son Muhammad only to realize that this is going to be another
a battle where she would have to take on the entire system.
The officials rejected her VISA application saying that the papers required signatures for Muhammad’s father as well– a person whom Zaaria would never intend to get in touch again.
After visiting the passport office for more than 50 times she decided to tweet about her state of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.
Moreover, she also approached Change.org where her petition drew support from more than 96,000 people which made the government realize the problem in the existing system.
Till now the laws were insensitive and completely ignored the case of marital rape and single parents.
It was actually funny that she had to went through the ordeal in spite of Supreme Court guidelines clearly defines that a single mother can be the legal guardian of her child and that no authority can forcefully seek the child’s father’s information if there is/are any formal breakage of relation.
And it was Zaaria and her desperate efforts to bring this case in proper light, that now the online passport application form requires the applicant to
provide the name of father/ mother / legal guardian, i.e. only one parent and not both.
Zaaria with her has enabled thousands of single parents to apply for passports for their children and to issue passports where the name of either the father or the mother is not required to be
printed.
As they say, charity begins at home; Zaaria Patni’s darker fairy tale has been a living example of this largely accepted quote. And we can only slaute her tremendous courage to be a rebel even in the darkest times of her life!
