BENGALURU: As the founder of an NGO that helps acid attack survivors raise funds, Ria Sharma was used to getting calls from unknown numbers. Anticipating calls from survivors, she never hesitated to answer her phone, until one day, when instead of a survivor, an anonymous man called to threaten her to abandon her efforts in helping victims unless she would like to be met with the same fate. While she brushed aside the initial call, things took a turn for the worse when the calls became a weekly routine and Sharma realised the man was stalking her. The then 21-year-old had to resort to something most people her age would never even think of – have a bodyguard accompany her everywhere she went.
“I was mentally traumatised. At first, my bodyguard Jitender would take his calls and scare him away. But after a month or two, I finally summoned courage to speak to him and abused him in words that even I didn’t know existed in my vocabulary! I remember how Jitender would display a thumbs-up every time I abused the stalker,” she recalls.
Sharma recently launched a book titled Make Love Not Scars, which chronicles her trials and tribulations in setting up an NGO by the same name that helps survivors of acid attacks. She recalls how despite what she went through with the stalker, she was determined to continue helping the survivors since she had gone on to form a strong bond with them and refused to abandon them now. The 26-year-old admits that since she came from a sheltered background, her family or friends often found it hard to relate to how overwhelmed she was by the suffering the victims faced or how difficult she found it to visit hospital burn wards at times. “Only the survivors understood that. There were times when one of them would just stay on call with me. There would be no talking but I would know I wasn’t alone,” she reveals.
‘My dad wanted me to settle down abroad’
When the activist first told her parents about her plans, she was met with some disbelief. Interestingly, Haseena, a Bengaluru-based survivor, played a role in helping Sharma’s mother come around. “When Haseena first told my mother that I would really make a change, my mother laughed. Somewhere over the course of the 45-minute conversation, however, my mother had tears in her eyes. She was overwhelmed that someone was able to say such things about me after just one meeting with me,” says Sharma.
Sharma’s father, on the other hand, didn’t come around until much later, when he saw how serious his daughter was about pursuing this, threat calls et all. He was initially upset that his daughter had given up a life in the UK to set up the NGO. “One of the reasons he wanted me to settle abroad was to keep me as far away from the violence women in this country face. I chose to pursue the same field he was trying to keep me away from,” Sharma says.
But the activist had made up her mind to gather as much knowledge as she could about the on-ground reality, even if it meant having to witness a live surgery on a recently attacked survivor. She writes about the experience in the book and recalls the time she could see the victim’s skull through the charred skin. “At 21, I was more spontaneous and ready to witness everything from the ground up because I was just starting out and wanted to know more the procedure they have to go through,” she says.
Being actively involved with acid attack survivors also means Sharma has to pay multiple visits to the burns wards of hospitals and the experience rarely gets easier. It wasn’t until last year that Sharma finally got slightly used to the sight and says that over the years, the place has transformed from being a dark place to a place of hope. “It used to be an isolating experience to go alone. But now, I have a team of survivors who work with me and when they visit the ward, they make the patients there laugh too,” she says.