Word: sanghera
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...What saves Shame from becoming another BBC documentary on the horrors of forced marriage (the network has interviewed Sanghera on that topic) is the author's own story, recounted deftly and without apology. Like all good heroes, she is deeply flawed and strongly conflicted. "By day I fought for the rights of Asian women," she writes, "and by night I craved acceptance from the very community I rejected...
...South Asian story: boy meets girl just before the wedding. Boy marries girl whether she wants to or not. Girl loses her identity, her sanity and, sometimes, her life. At age 15, Jasvinder Sanghera was hurtling toward just such a fate. Born of Indian immigrants in the gritty English East Midlands city of Derby, she was about to be wed to a man she had never seen in a place, Punjab, she had never been...
...Sanghera's story took a detour. She ran away from home, married someone of her choosing, raised three children, earned a university degree and braved death threats to launch an organization that helps women in Britain's South Asian community escape forced marriages. That's a success story to inspire anyone. But, as Sanghera writes in Shame, her affecting new memoir, she has never quite escaped the penumbra of her family. She has never fully recovered from their response when, shortly after running away, she phoned home offering to return. "Don't bother," her mother said. "In our eyes...
...weight of family and community hangs over Shame like a doting parent. As Sanghera notes, nobody really knows how many young people in Britain are pressured into matches they don't want. The British government's Forced Marriage Unit deals with more than 250 cases a year, but Sanghera's group, Derby-based Karma Nirvana, alone takes on seven new ones a week. Police in Britain are investigating scores of suspected "honor killings" of women resisting arranged marriages. Tellingly, the suicide rate among young South Asian females is three times the national average...
...Sanghera is certainly no angel. Though underage, she flees Derby with her older, lower-caste boyfriend Jassey, to her family's shame. The young couple settles in nearby Leeds, where Jassey, a trained engineer, sells cheap watches in a market stall to support them. Sanghera rewards his good-humored steadiness with an adulterous affair and a divorce. Then she ditches her lover, finds another husband and leaves him as well, temporarily losing custody of a child...