Fighting Back with Style

“I JUST TURNED 19 that April, the age a girl blossoms. I was attractive. I was a fashion student in Delhi. Two months later, driving my car in Lucknow, just like that, I was cooked, finished!”

Now 30, Monica Singh, throws back her head, with its reconstructed face, the product of 46 painful operations, and laughs with real gusto at this unseemly cosmic joke. I find myself, uneasily, laughing with her.

We are sitting in Gregory’s Coffee near Times Square in New York City. It is a January evening. The café is nearly empty, and the overhead lighting seems to be struggling to push back the darkness pressing in against the window. Singh is unfazed by this Hopperesque tableau.

In the weeks after her spurned suitor hired men to pour a bucket of acid over her, she was confined to a cage-like cubicle to protect her from infectious contact. “It was like being in a coffin,” she said. “People were looking at me from a distance. I felt like an animal in the zoo. But in my mind, I was already walking, going back to school, imagining that I didn’t open my car door to the men on the bicycle, that I didn’t leave the house that day.”

Sixty-five percent of her body was burned. It was a year before she could walk again (even being able to move her little finger was a big adventure), eight or nine years before her final operation.

Before meeting me, Singh was busy doing her night job, her activist job, running the Mahendra Singh Foundation to aid women victimized by gender violence. By day, she is a Manhattan fashion designer.

I have heard her say, “What happened to me taught me that beauty doesn’t last long. Don’t drool over it. One way or the other, it will go.” So I ask, “Why fashion?”

“Fashion is the oxygen I inhale every day,” she says with a rush of joy.

She is perfectly at home with contradiction. Even what is ephemeral needs its poetic definition, its veil of imagination.

The same story, multiplied

Singh would clearly prefer being asked about fashion than interrogated about her ordeal. “People are always asking me about what happened that day, and how and why, but I am not the only one who suffered like this.” There are around 1,500 attacks reported worldwide each year; since many attacks aren’t reported for fear of reprisals, the real number is likely much higher. Singh pegs the annual figure in India alone as between 1,000 and 1,500.

“Everyone has more or less the same story,” Singh says. “The guys were stalking. They got rejected. They took revenge. I was luckier than the other girls. They were mainly from lower class or lower middle-class families. My father [for whom her foundation is named] went through his savings and had to sell many of his possessions to have my medical expenses taken care of.”

Recalling my many visits to India, my many conversations with Indians about suffering and survival, and how even the moderately religious spoke of turning in extremis to God, I ask Singh about her own spiritual scaffolding during recovery.

The question seems to surprise her. She’s already told me that Indian millennials like herself do not fall into the traditional Indian box. They are busy building their own, yet unnamed box.

“I believe there is a positive energy in the universe that listens to your thoughts, that hears your words. I read the Gita, the Bible, the Quran. As for God, you know who was my God then? My father was my God. My doctors were my God.”

I float the lead balloon of forgiveness. Singh makes a face.

“I am not Mother Teresa! I am not concerned with forgiving my attackers, but I do want them to live, I don’t want them to die. I want them to understand what they did, to regret what they did. The man who organized the attack went to my father and asked if he could marry me. That’s how delusional he was.”

Fighting back with comic books

After losing the face she was born with, Singh became one of India’s best-known faces of gender violence. (She has been named a U.N. Women Global Youth Champion dealing with gender violence.) In Delhi, she says, people recognize her in the street, greet her, stop to chat with her.

In the land of Bollywood celebrities, a celebrity survivor. “What do they say?” I ask.

“They usually say how much they admire my strength, how much they would like to have my strength. Especially the girls I speak to. They feel trapped in a box, in a box I opened for myself because I refuse to see myself as a victim. No one ever dared say to me, ‘You have no life left.’ I wouldn’t tolerate that. Many girls in India feel they need permission to live their lives freely. I tell them, ‘The hell with permission!’ Everyone has it in them to free themselves. Some realize that earlier than others. Some realize that through others.”

A great many attack victims are abandoned by their families as financial, social, unmarriageable liabilities. Singh says adamantly, “If your family doesn’t need you, you don’t need such a family.” I recoil. Other survivors, I say, would not necessarily see it that way. She mulls that over. “Yes, my family experience is very different from theirs. My family accepted me. Okay, maybe I am the wrong person to talk for those whose families rejected them.”

But she is the right person to talk about the increasing resistance to India’s old oppressive attitudes toward women. Her generation, she says, wants change in gender relations; the unprecedented numbers that turned out to protest the notorious bus rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in 2012 give a glimpse of what that might mean for India. (It is worth noting that India’s 2011 census concluded that 701 million out of 1.2 billion Indians were under the age of 30; young people will help swell the work force to 64 percent of the total population by 2021.)

The Delhi bus atrocity led Indian-American filmmaker and writer Ram Devineni to enlist Singh’s help in the series of breakthrough comic books he created. In the first book, Priya’s Shakti, the protagonist, Priya, is gang raped. She is subsequently incarnated by the Hindu goddess Parvati and with her newly minted energy empowers other rape victims to demand justice and change, marching with them from village to village, Gandhian style, to make their voices heard.

Priya’s Shakti and its successor, Priya’s Mirror, about acid attack survivors, were publishing sensations, read by hundreds of thousands of people in India and the West, mainly in downloads but also in print editions.

“That was a good way of getting the message out,” Singh says. “The comic books reached young schoolgirls who were starting to be victimized by bullying, by rape. It reached young schoolboys too.”

The power of survivors

Activist acid attack survivors occupy a wretchedly special place in the struggle against gender violence in India. Singh, though now a New Yorker, still manages to collaborate with groups such as Make Love Not Scars. The organization was founded by Ria Sharma, a young Indian woman. Like Singh, she studied fashion, at the Leeds College of Art in England. She decided to shoot a documentary on acid-attack victims in India and found herself becoming an activist. In 2014, Sharma established MLNS, which has raised money for medical and rehabilitation assistance, as well as vocational training, for survivors.

Singh’s foundation, begun in 2015, is similar in its focus on medical and rehabilitation assistance. But its differences in scope and universality does not surprise me. Singh is a woman who pushes boundaries. When she saw gender violence in the homes of relatives, prior to the attack, she confronted uncles who abused aunts with hard questions and moral considerations. Some, she recalled, stunned and shamed by the intimate invader’s effrontery, changed their ways. Others, of course, did not.

“We hope to register our foundation in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India. Right now, we provide counseling for acid attack survivors, but we plan to expand our services to include women who are survivors of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We hear from women as far away as Russia and Germany. I see the entire world as being full of survivors.”