He kept saying, ‘Hello, hello!’ he knew she had not disconnected. For a few seconds, she could not say a word, not even the usual greeting of Assalam-o-alaikum. Zebun Nissa finally mustered up enough courage to pick up the phone. He seemed desperate to find a way through to his former wife, now in iddah, the three-month-long period of waiting, after which the woman can choose to marry again. It had been a little under a month since he snapped his relationship with Zebun Nissa with multiple pronouncements of talaq in a single sitting. Zebun Nissa put the phone on vibration mode. She heaved a sigh of relief that she did not have to decide right at that moment. Should she pick up or ignore the call? As she tried to sort out the confusion in her mind, the phone stopped ringing. For a minute, Zebun Nissa was speechless and confused. She longed to step out of the house.Īlso read: Woman given talaq alleges ‘tantrik’ raped her after husband wanted to remarry her Adding to her lack of professional qualification was her emotional turmoil. Days turned into weeks, and Zebun Nissa tried to pick up the pieces of her life all over again. His family was young and growing and her parents confined themselves to a room on the first floor. The house where she had spent more than twenty years was now virtually taken over by her brother and his family. This was not a long-term solution, she soon realised.

Thrown out of her husband’s house, she went back to her parents in Lucknow. She was a sociology graduate but had never picked up a job not even as a teacher in a local primary school. With the utterance of talaq, Zebun Nissa’s world came crashing down.

One evening, he said the dreaded three words to Zebun Nissa-talaq, talaq, talaq. Keen to be a father, Rafiq Ahmed was advised to remarry. Just as she had resigned herself to a life without the joys of motherhood, her husband dropped a bombshell. She consulted many doctors in Bhopal, even went to Gwalior and Jhansi, and finally to Delhi. What the family of five adults did not have was a little child, a baby to keep everybody busy and happy. She lived with, besides her husband, her parents-in-law and a brother-in-law. A typical middle-class woman with a husband who earned well enough from his truck transport business, and in-laws who did not meddle much in her affairs.

For the first six years of married life, she had only known peace. Much like it was with Zebun Nissa in Bhopal. Many had been sold, bought and resold before they were rescued by police and sent to women rehabilitation centres like Nari Niketan. Most girls have a sob story to relate how they were duped with false promises of work in a big city, better income and so on. Almost every day, in the city pages of newspapers, we find small news stories about girls rescued from brothels by the local police.

Halala episode