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Brutal: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Little Girl’s Stolen Innocence
Nabila Sharma
He was my religious teacher. I should have been able to trust him. But he made me do unspeakable things…At seven years old, Nabila Sharma began her lessons at the mosque as every good Muslim girl does. But from the minute she looked up at her Imam, the man who held her spiritual future in his hands, she knew something was wrong.Over the next five years Nabila’s life became unbearable. While she was behind the doors of the mosque, the most sacred of places, the Imam brutally molested her on the slightest whim. Each day he would make her perform unspeakable acts, physically and mentally torturing her into compliance, to fulfil his perverse desires.Nothing would stop him; no plea would make him relent. But he was a respected member of the community, trusted by everyone; if Nabila cried for help she would risk the honour of her family, an unthinkable act. There was nowhere she could turn, no one she could talk to. As a young Muslim girl, Nabila was powerless.Brutal is the shocking, revelatory and heart-rending account of one girl’s plight in a society where honour and shame are a matter of life and death. It is a tale of innocence lost and a life shattered, but above all it is a tale of survival, of a young girl who found love and hope in the darkest of places.
Nabila Sharma
Brutal
The Heartbreaking True Story of a Little Girl’s Stolen Innocence
Contents
Cover (#ue103a8d8-1860-50f8-8cf9-9012bfdb8ad2)
Title Page
Prologue
1 The Girl with Ribbons in Her Hair
2 Living on Sikh Street
3 The Wolf, the Witch and the Wallpaper
4 The Mosque
5 Arrival of the New Imam
6 The Imam’s Secret Handshake
7 The Chosen One
8 Secret Lessons
9 The Imam’s Bite
10 Treasure under the Carpet
11 The Trip to the Petrol Station
12 A Lost Innocence
13 The Trip to London
14 The Sickly Boy
15 Washing Away My Shame
16 The Protector
17 Self-harm and Scourers
18 Saying ‘No’
19 The Special Dinner
20 The Card in the Kitchen
21 Being Found Out
22 An Arranged Future
23 Rebellion
24 My Sikh Boyfriend
25 New Beginnings
26 Starting Again
Acknowledgements
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
I’m running around the garden in the sunshine. My brother turns to throw a red rubber ball towards me and I watch as it sails high up into the air. I stretch up my hands to try and catch it and, as I do, the sunshine blinks between my fingertips. It’s a hot day and I can feel the sun baking my skin.
My dolls are sitting in a neat line in their pram. I’ve brushed their long glossy hair and dressed them in nice clothes and they look beautiful. Their hair isn’t as long as mine, though. Mine stretches below my bottom and attracts comment wherever I go. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ they say. ‘What a beauty!’
Maybe that’s why the new imam at the mosque singles me out from the start. ‘You’re a pretty one,’ he says, and asks me to help with the cleaning. I feel very proud. He’s a strange-looking man, with his freckles and protruding belly and the funny sarong he wears, but he’s the imam, the leader of our community, the one all the parents want to impress. The other girls are jealous of the attention he pays me.
Every evening after school I go to the mosque for lessons with seventy other children. We all line up to shake the imam’s hand and say ‘Salaam alaikum’, to which he replies ‘Alaikum salaam’. But one night as he holds my hand, he does something odd. He strokes the inside of my palm with his index finger, wiggling it around, tickling me. I’m confused. Should I do the same thing back? Then he jabs his finger hard into my hand, as if to make a point.
I watch carefully as he shakes hands with the other children and I don’t think he does the funny handshake with them.
It’s on my mind as I play in the garden. Why me? There are times when I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m only seven. I feel like I’ve been chosen for something. But I don’t know what.
Chapter 1
The Girl with Ribbons in Her Hair
I slipped on my shoes without stopping to fasten them, opened the back door and shot straight out into the back garden. My brother Asif was holding my favourite doll by the hair, swinging her round like a helicopter.
‘I’ll get you!’ I shouted crossly, waving my tiny fist in the air.
The shoes slopped off my heels with every step I took, slowing me down.
‘Give me my doll!’ I demanded as I tried to catch him.
‘Nope,’ Asif teased.
‘Give her back now or … or …’ I couldn’t think of a strong-enough threat.
‘Or what?’ he challenged.
‘I’ll tell Mum.’
‘Oooh, I’m really scared,’ Asif laughed. The doll spun faster and faster around his head, her arms and legs splayed out. She was already naked and muddy from being kicked around the garden.
With all my might I stretched up on tiptoes to try and grab her, but it was no good. Asif was much taller than me. I hated my brothers. They were mean to me. Why didn’t I have a sister instead?
I rubbed my eyes and began to sob.
‘Anyway, it’s only a stupid doll,’ Asif teased, knotting her hair between his fingers. He was eight years old to my five, and an expert at winding me up.
The sky had clouded over and it began to rain. I felt utterly miserable as the drizzle fell on my upturned face.
‘Nabila!’ Mum’s voice called suddenly from the back door.
Asif froze. Had Mum spotted him tormenting me from the back window? He dropped the doll guiltily on the ground and took a giant step away.
I seized the moment and, scooping her into the safety of my arms, surveyed the damage. Her ice-blonde hair was knotted and ratty and her face was caked in mud. With the sleeve of my dress I wiped a big dollop of mud from her forehead.
‘There, that’s better, isn’t it?’ I soothed, rocking her in my arms.
Asif was still watching the back door to see if Mum was about to come storming out, so I grabbed my chance and gave him a swift kick on the leg.
‘Oww,’ he groaned, rubbing his shin bone.
‘Nabila!’ Mum called again, her voice impatient. ‘Come in now. I need to do your hair!’
I rolled my eyes skywards and called, ‘Okay, coming!’
Asif’s face broke into a sarcastic smile. ‘Go on then, pretty little girl,’ he teased in a whiny voice. ‘Hurry up and get some greasy oil in your stupid hair!’
I stuck my tongue out at him, and hurried inside to where Mum was waiting.
The room was too hot. She had the gas fire on full blast and the flames flickered from yellow to blue. I thought how pretty they looked as they danced across the front of the fire.
The room smelled of coconuts. Mum had melted some coconut oil in a little silver bowl balanced on top of the gas fire. She swore by it because she’d heard that it made your hair thick and strong but, more importantly, that it made it grow even faster. Mum was obsessed with my hair.
‘It’s your crowning glory, Nabila,’ she insisted. ‘You must look after it.’
I hadn’t had my hair cut since the day I was born and by the time I was five it hung down below my bottom. When I sat on the floor the ends would flick out along the carpet like black spiders’ legs trying to crawl away from me. Every day Mum would oil and plait my hair in front of the fire. I hated it because it always took ages, and when she pulled too hard it hurt. Sometimes it felt as if she was sticking a thousand pins into my scalp as she tugged and plaited it all with ribbons.
Everyone noticed my hair, and the comments were usually admiring – but not always. One day, I was walking down the street holding Mum’s hand when a lady passed us. As soon as she saw the plaits swishing around my bum, she stopped and did a double-take.
‘It’s cruel letting a child wear her hair so long!’ she exclaimed to Mum. ‘It must be so much work.’
Mum just stuck her nose in the air as if she didn’t care. I don’t know what the woman’s problem was. I loved the fact my hair was so long I could sit on it. It made me feel special, like Rapunzel.
It wasn’t just my hair Mum fussed over; she also made all my clothes herself. She shopped around for different fabrics and ran them up into outfits on her little sewing machine. I had tops and trousers in every colour of the rainbow. My favourite dress was a sunshine yellow one with a zig-zag red trim along the bottom of the hem. It was bright and beautiful.
Whenever she did my hair Mum would be sure to match the colour of the ribbon with the outfit I was wearing. She threaded the ribbons inside my plaits and the colour streaked through, making them look even longer.
Dad said that the reason why Mum dressed me like a doll was because she’d waited so long for a little girl. When I was finally born, she couldn’t believe it. She had almost died during the pregnancy. She’d been working in our family’s shop when she began to feel really ill and collapsed. Dad called for the doctor, who diagnosed tuberculosis – a horrible word that stuck in my head. The GP warned them that even if the baby was born alive, it would be horribly deformed.
In fact, the doctor was so convinced of this that he insisted on being present at my birth, ready to comfort my parents when they saw me. But against all odds I arrived perfectly healthy and with a full head of black hair!
Dad was so delighted that he jumped around the room with joy. Mum just sat and wept quietly.
‘Why was she sad?’ I asked.
Dad shook his head. ‘Not sad, Nabila. She cried because she was so happy. You were all she ever wanted.’
He explained that he’d chosen the name Nabila as soon as the midwife placed me in his arms. ‘We chose it because it means happiness, and after your four brothers your mum was happy to finally have her little girl.’
He told me that I’d had a fifth brother called Aaban, but he’d died when he was only six hours old. His lungs weren’t strong enough to breathe outside Mummy’s tummy. My parents held his tiny hand and cried whilst they watched his life ebb away. Dad said losing Aaban broke Mum’s heart, but that I’d mended it.
‘That’s why you are so precious to us. You mean the world to us,’ he said, kissing me tenderly on my forehead.
My father’s family had rescued Mum from a horrible life as an orphan back in Pakistan. Her mother had died when she was three years old, then her dad died when she was seven. My mother, whose name was Shazia, her brother Sawad, then aged twelve, and her nine-year-old sister were split up and farmed out to different relatives. Mum was taken in by her grandmother but the family were cruel and treated her like a slave. My dad’s mother, who lived close by, realised what was going on and took Shazia in and gave her shelter, then my dad, Mohammed, the eldest son of the family, decided to marry her when he was twenty-eight and she was just thirteen years old. I loved hearing the story of how my parents met. I imagined Dad as a dashing prince, saving Mum from her wicked relatives.
Dad decided to move to England to make a better life for his family. He told me he’d driven all the way to Britain from Pakistan in his car.
‘I did it for me, your mum – all of us.’
He only stopped driving when he needed to sleep, except from time to time he had to stop and do some work so that he could afford another tankful of petrol.
I shut my eyes and tried to imagine my dad driving across the desert in his battered old car, like Lawrence of Arabia. It all seemed very exciting.
It took him almost six months to make the journey but he finally arrived in England at the beginning of the 1960s.
‘Things were very different then,’ he told me, his eyes widening at the memory. ‘Women wore these very short skirts, and men – well, they wore their hair really long, like girls!’
I pulled at my own hair. ‘What, like mine?’
‘No, not as long as yours, but too long for a man. I’d never seen anything like it!’
Eventually, when he’d saved up enough money, Dad bought a shop in the Midlands, a typical grocery store with a butcher’s shop at the back. He could turn his hand to most things, but he was a particularly skilled butcher.
Mum gave birth to my eldest brother Habib in 1968; he was followed by Saeed, Tariq and Asif, then I came along in 1976.
Habib was a typical eldest brother, eight years older than me but it might as well have been twenty. He was bossy and always telling me what to do. I hated Habib. He was moody and mean. He resented being the oldest because it meant he had to help more around the house and, in particular, he was often told to babysit for the rest of us.
