Sonali Mukherjee (Indian acid attack victim) had everything going for her. At 17, she was a beautiful, intelligent and ambitious young woman, dedicated to excelling in her studies, Mukherjee's life changed after three male students from her college started harassing her. She didn't respond to their advances, so they threatened to destroy her.
On a hot summer day when Mukherjee was fast asleep on the roof of her house, the three men threw a jug of acid on her. For the first few seconds she was in shock and didn't know what had happened.
"All I could feel was this tremendous amount of pain, it was burning, like someone had thrown me into a fire," she tells CNN 10 years after the 2003 attack. In the fraction of a second it took for the acid to melt her face and part of her upper chest, Mukherjee lost her ability to see, hear, eat, walk and talk.
Mukherjee, now 27, said she looked and felt like a corpse.
"I had hardly even lived my life, but that one incident changed the entire meaning of my life. It felt like the light had gone out all of a sudden, and darkness had surrounded me on all sides. I had no hope, I didn't know what to do," she says. "I decided I don't want to die like this, or live like this. I decided I can't give up, I have to get better, I have to punish those guys and I have to support my family. I held my father's hand and crawled back to life."
Her father sold their family's ancestral land, gold and spent every penny of savings on her treatment. Ten years and 27 surgeries later she is still fighting for justice. The men who scarred her for life were freed after just two years in jail.
Mukherjee as she looked before being attacked with acid.
No comments:
Post a Comment