New Delhi: Imagine watching others eat your favourite dishes like biryani, chhole bhature and pani puri when you cannot take even a bite. Imagine wanting to travel just two hours to your home town but being unable to sit through the journey. Imagine living with a constant sense of nausea with no relief forthcoming.
For 29-year-old Ruman, all these have been part of her life for the past seven years.
Not that it's much solace but after years of legal struggle, in a rare acknowledgement of her pain and trauma, Ruman has possibly become the first known survivor of forceful ‘acid ingestion' across India to be awarded an enhanced compensation of Rs 5 lakh. In 2024, she had received an initial compensation of just Rs 3 lakh. She married in 2016 and moved from UP's Bulandshahr to Mustafabad in northeast Delhi to live with her husband and his parents. She was excited, hoping that the new chapter would bring fulfilment and stability in her life.
Instead, things started going south. "Right from the beginning, my in-laws started demanding dowry," she says. "On weekends, my husband would come home drunk and beat me up."
When a distressed Ruman called up her parents, they asked her to hold on, hoping the situation would improve with time. To calm things down, they even arranged an additional Rs 1 lakh for her in-laws.
But the violence allegedly did not stop. "I stayed put because I was pregnant," Ruman says. "In 2018, my son Aarav was born. I thought things would change."
But they worsened. In March 2019, during another violent argument, Ruman was beaten up so badly that she nearly passed out. "My throat was parched and I asked for water. Someone handed me a bottle," she tells TOI. "The moment I drank from the bottle, I felt a burning sensation in my mouth and throat. It felt like a river of fire was coursing through my body."
The liquid was acid. The attack she survived is known as ‘acid ingestion', when someone is made or forced to drink the corrosive substance. Unlike acid attacks that scar the face or skin, here, the injuries take place deep inside the body.
Ruman was rushed to hospital even as the corrosive chemical burned through her food pipe. Doctors had to perform a feeding jejunostomy — inserting a tube directly into her small intestine to feed her, along with a partial gastrectomy to remove part of her damaged stomach and keep her alive.
For an entire year, whenever people used to visit her, Ruman couldn't speak and would write her replies on paper. Nearly a year and a half had passed before she could slowly begin sipping liquids again.
Even today, her life depends on a semi-liquid to liquid diet and constant medical care. Much of her intestine had to be removed, leaving her without a large intestine. The attack damaged her food pipe so severely that she has to undergo an endoscopy every three months. Doctors insert a thin tube with a camera and gradually widen the pipe so that she can swallow food.
Ruman cannot stand for long or do physically demanding work, which makes finding employment difficult. Almost all her treatment and legal support have been assisted by Brave Souls Foundation, a Delhi-based organisation run by Shaheen Malik, who works with survivors of acid attacks.
At home, Ruman's days now revolve around her eight-year-old son. As he sits beside her doing his homework, she watches quietly. "He keeps me going," she says.
Malik, who is herself an acid-attack survivor, says the monetary compensation, while important, is not proportionate to the scale of the loss as Ruman cannot work because of her medical condition.
"However, the support shown by the current Chief Justice of India gives us hope that the system will gradually become more responsive to such survivors," Malik says, adding, "Marriage is often treated as an unavoidable reality for women. When a relationship within the institution takes a violent turn, many feel they have no exit. As a society, we must work towards financial independence for women so that they can make choices about their lives."
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