“Asha Released” is out!

“Asha Released”

Copyright 2014 Tina B

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/436919

My wounds are healing slowly.

A while ago, I was asked to document what had happened to Asha (not her real name), a beautiful Indian woman who was tortured in a foreign land when she was only nineteen.  After some weeks of interviews, I wrote and sent a draft to Asha for review.  Hearing nothing back after several weeks, I drove to her house.  Only to find her gone.  Fearing that my draft had somehow been responsible, I nevertheless published it as “Asha has been Taken” – partly in the hope that someone would let me know that she was alright.

Subsequently, I received an email from a man who claimed to know where she was.  After some negotiation, I went to a foreign city to meet him.  He may well have known where she was, but I didn’t find her.  Because it turned out that he was one Asha’s torturers.  And he did to me some of the same things he did to her.  So that, as he said, I would truly know her story.  And how well I do, I think with a shudder.

When I walk, there is a tightness across my soles where they were seared with the thin wire whip.  And there is still a faint scar across my breasts where the same whip did its work, feeling like someone had cut me open with a dull knife.  My pussy . . . well.  

Bad as those were, they are healing.

The worst part, the hardest to get over, has been the rape.  I no longer really trust anyone, and feel a kind of hardness in me that wasn’t there before.  And I’m angry, deep down, tremendously angry, at the man who did it.  My publisher only says, “I told you not to go.”  As does my partner, to whom I am now cold, yet whom I very much cared about “before”.  I roam the house at loose ends, going over the whole nightmare again and again in my mind, trying to find a way, something I could have done, to make it come out differently.  To no avail.

I got the story, preserved on my recorder, thankfully, because I was in no condition to take notes.  So for a while I buried myself in writing that story, which was published as “Asha was Used.”  Perhaps you’ve read it.

And then the man I think of as my torturer emailed me again.  The bland message was innocuous enough: “When you’re ready, I will take you to her.”

My partner found me at the computer, nauseous and shivering, unable to move or even turn it off.  It was like being raped all over again.  

Several restless days later, there was another email.  “You can save her.”

Save her from what?  Was she in trouble?  If so, it seemed unlikely that I could help, other than to call an embassy.  Still, there was the anger.  I wanted someone to pay for what had happened to me. So I emailed back.  Negotiated terms, and set off again.  Without consulting my publisher.

This time I wasn’t tortured.  Oh no.  Not me.  It was worse.