People

I Broke The Chain Of Forced Marriage:
Jasvinder Kaur Sanghera

JOANNA MOORHEAD

Jasvinder Kaur Sanghera still remembers leaving her dad the note 35 years ago. He worked nights, and while he was asleep one day she wrote to him, saying: “I love you, but I’m not the daughter you want me to be. I can’t marry a stranger.”

And then she ran away.

She waited for her best friend’s brother outside the factory where he worked, and when he came out, she says, “I told him ‘I need to run away, you have to help me.’

And he filled his Ford Escort up with petrol and got out the map. I hid in the footwell all the way from Derby to Newcastle because I was so scared we would be intercepted.”

For the next few nights they slept in the car and on park benches.

“My parents reported us missing to the police, and they traced us. I begged the police officer not to make me go back, and he said he wouldn’t, but I had to phone home. So I called up my mum from a phone box; I thought she’d say, ‘Come home now, you’ve made your point.’ Instead, she said: ‘If you don’t marry this man, you’re dead in my eyes.’”

What Jasvinder didn’t realise, on that day in 1981, was how serious that threat was; and also, that although time would make it easier, it would never entirely erase the pain.

“Losing my family was a bereavement; for many years, I grieved, I was bereft. In many ways it would have been easier if they’d died, because at least that is final.

“But I did it because I knew I was entitled to choose my own partner. But I also did it because I knew if I didn’t, my children would one day have to go through arranged marriages. Someone had to opt out, however hard it was; and that someone was me.”

Her parents are now dead, and her sister Robina killed herself after she was told that leaving her husband would be too shameful; but five sisters and a brother still live in the UK – and none of them, or any of her nieces and nephews, are in touch with her.

And while today Jasvinder, 51, fights for the rights of women who, like her, refuse forced marriages, and although she’s told her story many times, the reality of losing those fundamental ties still hits hard.

“Being Asian is all about family: our traditions, our culture, everything is rooted in family life. So to walk out on your family is a very, very tough thing to do – and if I’m honest I probably didn’t realise all those years ago how hard it would be. But I survived – I’m living proof that you can survive.”

Jasvinder was 14 when her mother first sat her down at the family home in Derby and showed her a photograph of a man in his 20s who, she was told, she had been promised to when she was just eight.

“My mother said, ‘You’re going to marry him. You don’t have a choice. I had to do it at your age, and you’re going to have to do it now.’ She said this is our tradition: it’s what we do in our culture.”

Jasvinder was horrified – but she wasn’t surprised. Her three elder sisters had already been married to men chosen for them by their parents.

“It was always the same rigmarole,” she says. “You got to 14, and a picture would come out; the picture of the man it had been decided you would marry. My sister Robina had been married two years before me. I knew my turn was coming.”

Her turn – but she was determined not to take it.

“I said no. My parents took me out of school and locked me in my bedroom. I tried to escape through the bedroom window but I couldn’t – and school didn’t follow my absence up, missing girls happened all the time in Asian families.”

Jasvinder knew she couldn’t go through with the marriage. Eventually she and Jassey, the friend who rescued her and became her boyfriend, got a house together and when Jasvinder was 19 she had a baby daughter, Natasha.

“His family didn’t disown him. They were wonderfully supportive to us. But when we were with them I would miss my family terribly. Sometimes, I’d get him to drive me all the way to Derby in the middle of the night just so I could look at our house; we’d sit there outside and watch my nieces and nephews playing in the morning. It was heartbreaking.”

Robina came to visit when Natasha was born, and managed to persuade their mother to go, too.

“I was in bed with the baby and Robina was like, look, she’s so beautiful. But my mum hurt me so much – she barely looked at the baby.”

Today, says Jasvinder, there are many other young women who are where she was when she was a teenager, wondering whether they have the strength to opt out of a forced marriage, and whether they can survive being cut off from their families. In September alone, 783 people called the helpline Jasvinder’s charity Karma Nirvana runs, and 58% were victims seeking support.

“So many people call us and say, this is happening to me but I know I’ve got to do it, I know I can’t live a life without my family. And sometimes people make the break, but later they go back because they do find it too hard. What I tell them is: you never get over it, but you can keep going.”

Today, Jasvinder, who was awarded a CBE in 2013 for her work helping victims of forced marriage and abuse, lives in Leeds, in a house that couldn’t be more family-focused. It’s full of toys, and two-year-old Narayan, Natasha’s son, is running around having fun. After Natasha, who is now 31, Jasvinder went on to have Anna, 22, and Jordan, 19, with a different partner; they’re a close-knit family and, says Jasvinder, everyone is looking forward to Anna’s forthcoming wedding.

But there’s a sliver of worry in Jasvinder’s mind about how she’s going to cope, just as she had before Natasha’s 2012 wedding to her husband, Anup.

“Anna is getting married in a British ceremony, so that’s going to be easier in a way. But Natasha and Anup had a big fat Asian wedding, with 500 guests in a gurdwara. That terrified me, because in our tradition there was a role for my family at the wedding, and no one to play those parts. My friends filled in, but everyone knew my relatives weren’t there.”

She is sad, too, that her children haven’t had the relationships they should have had, with maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

“There are some things you learn from the wider family, and my children didn’t have that. Everyone wants their children to have what they had and more, and yet I wasn’t able to give mine so many things that I had. Even to this day, I’m sometimes in tears at Diwali … I think of how we celebrated it when I was a child, and how my children have never been able to celebrate it. There were so many events and occasions I couldn’t be part of, and my children could never know.”

But all the same, as Anna walks down the aisle next year, Jasvinder will know in her heart why things had to be as they did.

“The decision I took when I was at 16 has enabled my children not to inherit the legacy of abuse. I broke the chain: I’m proud of that, even if the consequences have been even harder than I’d anticipated.”


[Courtesy: The Guardian. Edited for sikhchic.com]
November 26, 2016
 

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