LAVELY Noor is not the demure, mild-mannered daughter her parents
hoped she would be.
Headstrong, streetwise and independent, she was seen as a rebel.
She had boyfriends at 13, wore mini-skirts and revealing tops and left
home at 18.
Still, when a message arrived from a village in Bangladesh that her
granny was dying and wanted to see her one last time, Lavely knew it was
her duty to go.
She kissed her English boyfriend goodbye, promising to call him,
and sat anxiously on the plane with her mum and four younger brothers,
her thoughts on the frail old woman lying on her deathbed.
There was no hint of the cruel betrayal which lay ahead.
Only when the jet landed and she was greeted by her radiant and
very healthy granny did she realise she had been tricked into travelling
to Bangladesh from her Sheffield home for a forced marriage to a man she
had never met.
"When I saw my gran laughing, the penny dropped," Lavely
says in her broad Yorkshire accent. "I had been conned and there
was no escape.
"I felt the blood drain from my face and I thought I was going
to be sick. How could my parents do that to me? Did they hate me that
much?
"The one thing I had always been clear on was I would never,
ever enter into an arranged marriage. Yet here I was, about to be forced
into one.
"How could I have been so stupid and naive? Because they were
my parents and I trusted them.
"I wanted to get to a phone to call my boyfriend and beg him
to get me out of there."
But there was no chance of that. Her scarlet gold-embroidered
wedding outfit and her dowry of 22-carat gold jewellery had been
carefully packed in her mother's case.
Preparations for a massive wedding feast were under way and Lavely
was powerless to stop them. She was stripped of her money, watched over
like a prisoner and not allowed to make a phone call or write a letter.
"After a week, my dad arrived and I knew it was the start of
something terrible," she says shivering at the memory. "Over
several days, he kept hitting me and calling me a slag and worse.
"My mum joined in, swearing at me and saying I was never going
back to England. They said I was a disgrace and had brought great shame
on them.
"My dad said he had made a huge mistake bringing me to England
and now he was putting it right by bringing me back to Bangladesh to
marry me off.
"I was so scared I thought they were going to kill me - but
they had other plans. A dead daughter was worthless, but, alive, I was
worth a lot to them.
"And that's what it was all about - money. I heard a lot
of talk about gold and UK citizenship. It's obvious to me that my
parents sold me down the river for my British passport."
Weary of their "wayward" daughter, with her designer
clothes and western lifestyle, they had decided to take her back to
Sylhet, the Bengali village she had left at the age of one, and marry
her off to a second cousin.
It was a terrible lesson for a girl who had fought for every ounce
of freedom.
As the only daughter and eldest child, her role was more as a
babysitter and servant for her parents and their younger children.
Still Lavely had refused to conform. But it was her a decision to
move into her own flat which, she believes, convinced her parents that
enough was enough.
She wept for days. Her younger brother tried to comfort her and
protect her from the beatings, but this just inflamed their parents.
The memory of the wedding day is painful.
"Weddings aren't supposed to be like that," she
whispers.
Entwining her fingers tightly around her boyfriend's hand, she
continues: "I always imagined getting married to someone I cared
deeply about.
"It should have been the happiest day of my life. They robbed
me of that and I'll never forgive them for it."
She sat in a trance as the women prepared her for the ceremony,
while her parents subjected her to a volley of abuse.
"It was all going on around me but I felt I wasn't
there," she says. "I was like a robot just going through the
motions. I was empty inside.
"The wedding happened in April - that's all I can tell
you. It's something I have blotted out. I have no memories and no
photos.
"When the holy man asked for my consent, someone said Yes for
me.
THEY forced me to sign the marriage certificate and I wrote down
the wrong name, but it made no difference.
"My mother was swearing at me all the time. I felt disgusted.
I hated it and I hated myself.
"I kept thinking: 'This doesn't happen to
intelligent girls brought up in Yorkshire in the 20th
Century.'"
She cannot bring herself to utter the name of the man she was
forced to marry. But he was her mother's cousin, in his late
thirties, spoke no English and had never been outside Bangladesh.
"On the so-called wedding night I was put through the most
horrific rape you can imagine," Lavely whispers.
"My parents encouraged the rape and violence. They told him to
do it and beat me if I didn't. The next day I just thought:
'That's it - I have got nothing to live for any more."
But, amazingly, her spirit refused to be crushed.
Back in England, her boyfriend, friends and workmates grew
increasingly worried at her failure to return.
Her boyfriend, whom we cannot name for fear of reprisals, says:
"She was supposed to be away for two weeks. Then her work got a
call saying she had extended her holiday. Then we heard she was ill.
Eventually, word filtered through that she had been married. It was my
worst fear confirmed.
"I contacted every organisation I could think of, from the Red
Cross to the Foreign Office, but they needed something to go on. I had
nothing to give them."
He tried to blot out her absence, believing she was happy. But the
reality was very different.
Lavely was a city girl, with a wardrobe crammed with trendy clothes
and a busy social life. But now her life had taken a twist, throwing her
back 100 years.
Although she lived in a brick house in Sylhet, many were built of
mud and cow dung. There was no electricity or running water.
"The toilet was a hole in the ground and the stench made me
feel sick," she says. "We cooked in huge pots on open fires
and we got water from a pump outside.
"There was so much iron in it, I had to let it settle for a
day before I could drink it. It was red and tasted foul. We had our own
paddy field for rice and I used to light kerosene lamps at night."
The only memory that makes her smile is of Friday nights - when
everyone gathered around the village's only wedding planner movie cast TV set.
Attached to rusty crocodile clips and powered by a car battery, the
flickering black-and-white screen provided the week's highlight as
villagers crowded to watch a Bollywood movie.
LAVELY says: "It was a huge culture shock. I was wearing
traditional shalwar kameez, which I never wore in Yorkshire, and washing
my clothes in the lake."
She tried getting letters to her boyfriend via a relative - but
they were never sent.
"Six months had gone by and my parents were going back to
England," she says.
"The family I was with kept asking them what they would do
with me. I wasn't the daughter-in-law they were expecting. Even
they could see the pain I was in, but my own mum and dad seemed to have
stones where their hearts should have been.
"My mum removed a gold necklace I had been given for my 16th
birthday, saying: 'This is mine.' She didn't even give me
a backward glance."
Her only money was a few taka (pennies) which she strapped to her
inner thigh. "I hid it there because I knew it was a place no one
would look," she says.
Worried by her deteriorating health, weight loss and refusal to
eat, her new family called for wedding planner book a meeting of village elders. She was
offered safe shelter in a neighbouring village while her future was
decided.
Lavely wrote a desperate letter to her boyfriend, whom she had met
eight months earlier on a blind date. Her seven-month hell and feelings
for him came tumbling out on four sheets of tear-stained paper.
"One of the boys was going to the market," she says.
"I gave him my last few taka for a stamp and pleaded with him to
post the letter. He smiled and said: 'OK, auntie, don't cry -
I will.'"
He was true to his word, and when the letter arrived in South
Yorkshire her boyfriend gazed at it, dumbfounded.
"Just knowing Lavely was alive and OK was great," he
says. "I pushed everything else to the back of my mind.
"My priority was to get her out of there. I had the proof she
was being kept under duress, plus an address and a couple of
names."
He worked closely with the Southall Black Sisters pressure group
and the Foreign Office - which helped 71 British Asian women escape from
forced marriages in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh last year.
He got a message to Lavely, saying a lawyer would contact her. She
says: "I was woken in the middle of the night and taken to the
consulate, where a new passport and ticket back to London were waiting
for me.
"It happened so fast, I didn't have time to think until I
got into Gatwick."
THE girl who had left England bubbly and confident now stood
bewildered in Arrivals, dressed in a shabby smock which swamped her thin
frame.
Her boyfriend says: "I didn't recognise her until she
walked over, smiled and said: ''Ello, I need a fag.'
"That was it. I knew that despite all she had been through she
was going to be all right. She has coped brilliantly. Our relationship
is stronger than ever."
A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed they had helped rescue
Lavely. She is now seeking to have the marriage annulled.
With an estimated 1,000 young British Asians being forced into
marriage in the UK and Indian sub-continent, a Home Office working group
on forced marriages last month recognised the practice as a form of
violence against women. Campaigners such as the Southall Black Sisters
want it to be treated as a criminal offence.
Since her return in October, Lavely has been living at a secret
address and has had no contact with her parents. If anyone asks her
about them, she says simply: "They're dead."
She has a stark message for other single teenage Asian girls.
"I thought I was clever and in control, but look what my
parents did to me," she says. "I had to pay a huge price for
wanting my independence. Yet I was lucky and managed to escape the life
I'd been forced into.
"It's a horrible thing to say, but please be wary of your
family's motives. Be on your guard."
To her parents, she says: "You are the ones who have brought
shame on the family, not me. Family honour was so important to you.
"Well, you have dishonoured me, but I can still hold my head
up high. Can you?"
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Aweddingshouldbehappy..Iwasduped,beatenandraped;ORDEALOF...-a063528708
hoped she would be.
Headstrong, streetwise and independent, she was seen as a rebel.
She had boyfriends at 13, wore mini-skirts and revealing tops and left
home at 18.
Still, when a message arrived from a village in Bangladesh that her
granny was dying and wanted to see her one last time, Lavely knew it was
her duty to go.
She kissed her English boyfriend goodbye, promising to call him,
and sat anxiously on the plane with her mum and four younger brothers,
her thoughts on the frail old woman lying on her deathbed.
There was no hint of the cruel betrayal which lay ahead.
Only when the jet landed and she was greeted by her radiant and
very healthy granny did she realise she had been tricked into travelling
to Bangladesh from her Sheffield home for a forced marriage to a man she
had never met.
"When I saw my gran laughing, the penny dropped," Lavely
says in her broad Yorkshire accent. "I had been conned and there
was no escape.
"I felt the blood drain from my face and I thought I was going
to be sick. How could my parents do that to me? Did they hate me that
much?
"The one thing I had always been clear on was I would never,
ever enter into an arranged marriage. Yet here I was, about to be forced
into one.
"How could I have been so stupid and naive? Because they were
my parents and I trusted them.
"I wanted to get to a phone to call my boyfriend and beg him
to get me out of there."
But there was no chance of that. Her scarlet gold-embroidered
wedding outfit and her dowry of 22-carat gold jewellery had been
carefully packed in her mother's case.
Preparations for a massive wedding feast were under way and Lavely
was powerless to stop them. She was stripped of her money, watched over
like a prisoner and not allowed to make a phone call or write a letter.
"After a week, my dad arrived and I knew it was the start of
something terrible," she says shivering at the memory. "Over
several days, he kept hitting me and calling me a slag and worse.
"My mum joined in, swearing at me and saying I was never going
back to England. They said I was a disgrace and had brought great shame
on them.
"My dad said he had made a huge mistake bringing me to England
and now he was putting it right by bringing me back to Bangladesh to
marry me off.
"I was so scared I thought they were going to kill me - but
they had other plans. A dead daughter was worthless, but, alive, I was
worth a lot to them.
"And that's what it was all about - money. I heard a lot
of talk about gold and UK citizenship. It's obvious to me that my
parents sold me down the river for my British passport."
Weary of their "wayward" daughter, with her designer
clothes and western lifestyle, they had decided to take her back to
Sylhet, the Bengali village she had left at the age of one, and marry
her off to a second cousin.
It was a terrible lesson for a girl who had fought for every ounce
of freedom.
As the only daughter and eldest child, her role was more as a
babysitter and servant for her parents and their younger children.
Still Lavely had refused to conform. But it was her a decision to
move into her own flat which, she believes, convinced her parents that
enough was enough.
She wept for days. Her younger brother tried to comfort her and
protect her from the beatings, but this just inflamed their parents.
The memory of the wedding day is painful.
"Weddings aren't supposed to be like that," she
whispers.
Entwining her fingers tightly around her boyfriend's hand, she
continues: "I always imagined getting married to someone I cared
deeply about.
"It should have been the happiest day of my life. They robbed
me of that and I'll never forgive them for it."
She sat in a trance as the women prepared her for the ceremony,
while her parents subjected her to a volley of abuse.
"It was all going on around me but I felt I wasn't
there," she says. "I was like a robot just going through the
motions. I was empty inside.
"The wedding happened in April - that's all I can tell
you. It's something I have blotted out. I have no memories and no
photos.
"When the holy man asked for my consent, someone said Yes for
me.
THEY forced me to sign the marriage certificate and I wrote down
the wrong name, but it made no difference.
"My mother was swearing at me all the time. I felt disgusted.
I hated it and I hated myself.
"I kept thinking: 'This doesn't happen to
intelligent girls brought up in Yorkshire in the 20th
Century.'"
She cannot bring herself to utter the name of the man she was
forced to marry. But he was her mother's cousin, in his late
thirties, spoke no English and had never been outside Bangladesh.
"On the so-called wedding night I was put through the most
horrific rape you can imagine," Lavely whispers.
"My parents encouraged the rape and violence. They told him to
do it and beat me if I didn't. The next day I just thought:
'That's it - I have got nothing to live for any more."
But, amazingly, her spirit refused to be crushed.
Back in England, her boyfriend, friends and workmates grew
increasingly worried at her failure to return.
Her boyfriend, whom we cannot name for fear of reprisals, says:
"She was supposed to be away for two weeks. Then her work got a
call saying she had extended her holiday. Then we heard she was ill.
Eventually, word filtered through that she had been married. It was my
worst fear confirmed.
"I contacted every organisation I could think of, from the Red
Cross to the Foreign Office, but they needed something to go on. I had
nothing to give them."
He tried to blot out her absence, believing she was happy. But the
reality was very different.
Lavely was a city girl, with a wardrobe crammed with trendy clothes
and a busy social life. But now her life had taken a twist, throwing her
back 100 years.
Although she lived in a brick house in Sylhet, many were built of
mud and cow dung. There was no electricity or running water.
"The toilet was a hole in the ground and the stench made me
feel sick," she says. "We cooked in huge pots on open fires
and we got water from a pump outside.
"There was so much iron in it, I had to let it settle for a
day before I could drink it. It was red and tasted foul. We had our own
paddy field for rice and I used to light kerosene lamps at night."
The only memory that makes her smile is of Friday nights - when
everyone gathered around the village's only wedding planner movie cast TV set.
Attached to rusty crocodile clips and powered by a car battery, the
flickering black-and-white screen provided the week's highlight as
villagers crowded to watch a Bollywood movie.
LAVELY says: "It was a huge culture shock. I was wearing
traditional shalwar kameez, which I never wore in Yorkshire, and washing
my clothes in the lake."
She tried getting letters to her boyfriend via a relative - but
they were never sent.
"Six months had gone by and my parents were going back to
England," she says.
"The family I was with kept asking them what they would do
with me. I wasn't the daughter-in-law they were expecting. Even
they could see the pain I was in, but my own mum and dad seemed to have
stones where their hearts should have been.
"My mum removed a gold necklace I had been given for my 16th
birthday, saying: 'This is mine.' She didn't even give me
a backward glance."
Her only money was a few taka (pennies) which she strapped to her
inner thigh. "I hid it there because I knew it was a place no one
would look," she says.
Worried by her deteriorating health, weight loss and refusal to
eat, her new family called for wedding planner book a meeting of village elders. She was
offered safe shelter in a neighbouring village while her future was
decided.
Lavely wrote a desperate letter to her boyfriend, whom she had met
eight months earlier on a blind date. Her seven-month hell and feelings
for him came tumbling out on four sheets of tear-stained paper.
"One of the boys was going to the market," she says.
"I gave him my last few taka for a stamp and pleaded with him to
post the letter. He smiled and said: 'OK, auntie, don't cry -
I will.'"
He was true to his word, and when the letter arrived in South
Yorkshire her boyfriend gazed at it, dumbfounded.
"Just knowing Lavely was alive and OK was great," he
says. "I pushed everything else to the back of my mind.
"My priority was to get her out of there. I had the proof she
was being kept under duress, plus an address and a couple of
names."
He worked closely with the Southall Black Sisters pressure group
and the Foreign Office - which helped 71 British Asian women escape from
forced marriages in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh last year.
He got a message to Lavely, saying a lawyer would contact her. She
says: "I was woken in the middle of the night and taken to the
consulate, where a new passport and ticket back to London were waiting
for me.
"It happened so fast, I didn't have time to think until I
got into Gatwick."
THE girl who had left England bubbly and confident now stood
bewildered in Arrivals, dressed in a shabby smock which swamped her thin
frame.
Her boyfriend says: "I didn't recognise her until she
walked over, smiled and said: ''Ello, I need a fag.'
"That was it. I knew that despite all she had been through she
was going to be all right. She has coped brilliantly. Our relationship
is stronger than ever."
A Foreign Office spokeswoman confirmed they had helped rescue
Lavely. She is now seeking to have the marriage annulled.
With an estimated 1,000 young British Asians being forced into
marriage in the UK and Indian sub-continent, a Home Office working group
on forced marriages last month recognised the practice as a form of
violence against women. Campaigners such as the Southall Black Sisters
want it to be treated as a criminal offence.
Since her return in October, Lavely has been living at a secret
address and has had no contact with her parents. If anyone asks her
about them, she says simply: "They're dead."
She has a stark message for other single teenage Asian girls.
"I thought I was clever and in control, but look what my
parents did to me," she says. "I had to pay a huge price for
wanting my independence. Yet I was lucky and managed to escape the life
I'd been forced into.
"It's a horrible thing to say, but please be wary of your
family's motives. Be on your guard."
To her parents, she says: "You are the ones who have brought
shame on the family, not me. Family honour was so important to you.
"Well, you have dishonoured me, but I can still hold my head
up high. Can you?"
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Aweddingshouldbehappy..Iwasduped,beatenandraped;ORDEALOF...-a063528708