CURSE OF HYDERABAD HYDERABAD, INDIA—Tasleem Begum didn’t - TopicsExpress

CURSE OF HYDERABAD HYDERABAD, INDIA—Tasleem Begum didn’t get a new dress for her wedding day. Instead, she put on her usual worn-out outfit, a white and blue shirt with pants and a long scarf, her dark hair tightly braided, and picked up the small tattered brown satchel filled with half-a-dozen Grade 8 textbooks. But it would be a day like no other. Her mother said she would walk Tasleem to school. Instead, Shahnaz Begum took her to a two-storey house with tall gates, where she exchanged a few words with two men and two women in the living room. Then her mother took Tasleem to a small room for a quiet moment. There, Shahnaz told her daughter, 14 years old with almond eyes and dimples, that she was getting married. Her husband was to be a 61-year-old from Oman. April 15, 2014, is the day Tasleem got married and divorced. Though, she didn’t know about the divorce until much later. Her mother, Tasleem found out later, had been paid about $700 — the price of the 14-year-old’s virginity. “I hadn’t even showered that day,” she says. “I was running late for school.” She is sitting on the floor of a friend’s house, sipping tea. Her voice cracks every time she talks about her wedding, the man from Oman and how he repeatedly raped her during the two nights she was forced to spend with him. In Hyderabad, in southern India, Tasleem’s story isn’t uncommon. Since the 1990s, the city has been the hunting ground for men from oil-rich Arab countries seeking young, virgin brides — some as young as 11 or 12. The connection between the city’s poor Muslims and wealthy, older men from the Gulf countries was forged in the ’70s and the ’80s by expats from Hyderabad. The situation has worsened in the past couple of years, becoming a de facto child prostitution supermarket. But a group of women has taken justice into its own hands: they pose as desperate child-sellers while wearing burkas with hidden cameras in unorthodox “sting operations.” In two years, they have done more than police have in two decades