She can no longer read, cannot write, so Rumana Monzur
“In Canada, I learned how to dream,” said Ms. Monzur, the University of British Columbia graduate student blinded in a savage attack she alleges her husband committed in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka two weeks ago. Now, “I don’t know how anything will be possible. I’m helpless.”
In a lengthy, often tearful interview, Ms. Monzur, 33, described the attack; her ongoing fears for her safety, and that of her daughter and parents; and her despair at what she feels is the irrevocable loss of her dreams for all of them.
Ms. Monzur enrolled last autumn as a visiting student in the master’s program in international relations at UBC. After nine months in Vancouver, she flew home in mid-May to see her family.
From the moment of her arrival, she said, relations with her husband, Hassan Sayeed, were rocky. He had often been physically and verbally abusive in the early years of their marriage, she said, but after their daughter Anoushe was born five years ago, the violence stopped. “I thought everything was normal again, that it would be okay.”
Ms. Monzur explained that Mr. Sayeed had told her before they married that he had a degree in electrical engineering – but somehow he never found a job. Frustrated by his lack of ambition, Ms. Monzur got a job of her own, teaching international relations at Dhaka University. In secret, though, she applied for graduate work in Canada – and when she was accepted, with a scholarship, she told her husband. “I didn’t ask his permission. He didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes … he knew I would come back because my daughter was in Bangladesh.”
Anoushe stayed behind, in the care of Ms. Monzur’s parents.
She talked to her family almost every day from Vancouver, and nothing seemed amiss with her husband, she said. But a few days after she returned to Dhaka, she said, he physically attacked her once again. Afterward, Ms. Monzur said, she told him she would not live with him any longer: her time in Canada had hardened her resolve about the life she wanted. Mr. Sayeed left her parents’ house.
Two weeks later, on a quiet afternoon when her parents were out, she was in a bedroom working at her laptop while Anoushe was painting on the bed next to her. Her husband burst in, locked the door, and grabbed her from behind with the words, “You don’t want to live with me, so I will kill you,” she recalled, sobbing.
“First he attacked my neck and then he put his fingers in my eyes. He bit my nose. I tried to protect myself. He bit my hands – I have several injuries in hands and face. Then when I couldn’t see and my nose was bleeding, I was slipping in my own blood. I was almost unconscious.”
Anoushe, still next to her on the bed, was shrieking. “She was screaming, ‘Don’t do this to my mom, don’t do this.’ ”
She said the attack ended only when domestic staff used a second set of keys to open the door and then Mr. Sayeed ran out, with these parting words: “I will kill you wherever you are and when ever I find you. I will shoot you or I will throw acid at you. I won’t let you leave.”
Ms. Monzur, by then, was scrabbling on the floor – she could not see the people who came in, but felt them trying to lift her. “I screamed, ‘Save me, save her – don’t let him take my daughter.’ “ She remembers little after that until she was in hospital, with doctors saying the only hope to save her eyes was expert help in India.
The family arranged to fly to her to Chennai, but ophthalmologists there could not help either. Now, Ms. Monzur is awaiting plastic surgery to rebuild her nose, and hoping desperately for word from medical institutions in the United States and in British Columbia about a last-ditch medical procedure that might restore her eyesight.
