THE film A Time to Kill (1996), derived from John Grisham’s best-selling novel, was set in the fictional town of Clanton in the southern state of Mississippi in the US. In its closing scenes, a white defence lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) defends his black client (Samuel L. Jackson) against a murder charge against two white rapists of his young, 10-year-old daughter.

The lawyer’s summing up begins: “I want to tell you a story [about] a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. Suddenly, a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip the clothes from her body.” After assaulting and brutalising her, they leave her for dead.

“I want you to picture that little black girl,” he asks the Mississippi jury. “Now imagine she is white.”

Replace Mississippi with Sargodha, and fiction dovetails with reality. Imagine an illiterate 13-year-old girl, Rizwana, employed by a civil judge and his educated wife in Sargodha. The teenager needs the work. She comes from an overcrowded home of impoverished parents and nine other siblings.

She had burn marks on her torso and back, which had filled with pus

A fortnight ago, Rizwana’s father, Manga Khan, called at the judge’s residence to meet his daughter, probably to collect her meagre wages of Rs10,000.

According to the report he filed with the police, “As I stepped in the house of the judge, I heard screams of my daughter coming out from a room. We rushed to the room where we saw she was lying on the floor in an injured condition,” with wounds on Rizwana’s head, face, legs and torso.

Rizwana was admitted for medical care first in Sargodha, but because her condition was deemed too critical, she was shifted to Lahore General Hospital, where she has been fighting for a life that offers only pain and undeserved suffering.

According to the hospital team now caring with commendable zeal for Rizwana, her wounds were horrific. Her skeletal injuries were arms with multiple fractures, consistent with frequent blows from a blunt instrument.

Damage to her soft tissue consisted of unhealed wounds on her scalp, where her hair had been pulled away from its roots. These had festered and become a meal for maggots. She also had burn marks on her torso and back, which had filled with pus.

On discovery, her weight was no more than 30 kilograms. Had she been fed properly and regularly (as Judge Hafeez’s three children aged seven to 12 years were), her weight should have been closer to 46kg.

Because of her precarious condition, an injection called pentaglobin, costing Rs500,000 is being administered to her, free of cost, to help eliminate the infection in her body.

No one will ever be able to assess the psychological trauma Rizwana has suffered, or how long it will take her to recover from it. Probably never in her damaged lifetime.

Meanwhile, while Rizwana was being rushed to the hospital in Sargodha, her employer — the judge’s wife, Ms Somia — rushed to an Islamabad district and sessions court, where a judge, Dr Abida Sajjad, granted her pre-arrest bail against a surety of Rs100,000.

In the film, McConaughey asked his all-white jury to picture that young black victim: “Now imagine she is white.”

Now imagine that Rizwana had been the daughter of Judge Hafeez and his wife Somia, and that she had been systematically tortured by a lowly menial. Would that perpetrator have obtained pre-arrest bail from a judge as quickly?

Politicians from the PML-N have been quick to capitalise on Rizwana’s predicament.

Khawaja Asif (minister of defence, and not health or social welfare) went to ask after her, followed by Maryam Nawaz, the senior vice president of the PML-N.

She asked Rizwana blithely why she had not reported the abuse when it had been going on for six months. Did she expect the injured teenager to escape from a domestic prison and then, with broken arms, sign an FIR?

Had Maryam Nawaz stayed long enough at the hospital beyond her brief social call, she would have learned that Rizwana’s mother had endured 12 pregnancies in 15 years of marriage, and that she had no one to look after her nine other children while she was in the Lahore General Hospital caring for Rizwana.

It took the police 10 days to constitute a joint investigation team to probe the case, and finally, on Aug 7, Somia Hafeez was arrested.

Rizwana’s doctors found fingernail marks around her eyes, indicating that someone with sharp nails had tried to gouge an eyeball out of its socket. Had that heartless person succeeded, Rizwana would have been as blind as justice is in Pakistan.

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2023