Where Help Finds You: Saathi, IACS’s Companion in Crisis
In “Feminism and the Abomination of Violence,” Jacqueline Rose writes that slavery is not only the loss of freedom, but “being subject to man-made violence.” For many immigrant women, this violence is not always visible. It unfolds slowly through marriage, isolation, and the normalization of harm. Meghna’s story is not one of spectacle or sudden rupture. It is about how violence settles into ordinary life, how it becomes routine, how it is mistaken for a woman’s duty.
In many South Asian households, girls are raised inside inherited scripts. Be agreeable. Be grateful. Give without asking. Consequently, desire, autonomy, and the ask for a safe space are treated as excesses on the part of the woman. Meghna grew up inside these instructions. She followed them carefully. In her words, “I had all the qualities a girl is supposed to have. My husband had understood from day one that I was too simple and family oriented. I accepted him as my own since the day of our marriage, saved every cent of his money. I washed his dirty plates, even his shoes. But I never got anything in return despite being the ideal wife.”
Meghna’s marriage was arranged. She agreed because the man showed interest in her. The abuse began three days after the wedding.
For thirteen years, intimacy did not exist as closeness. It existed only as obligation. She says, “In thirteen years of marriage, we have possibly had sex six or seven times, solely to conceive, and only after I repeatedly begged for a child. We had no intimacy on our honeymoon either, but it never struck me as something odd because I did not know what to expect. I did not grow up with a mother or sister, and I was introverted, so there was no one to tell me what to expect.”
By the time Meghna reached the United States, isolation had become complete. Despite living in Redmond for years, she had no sense of the world outside her home. “I didn’t even know where Redmond Town Center was,” she says. “I thought this house was my world.”
During the pandemic, the violence intensified. Confined to a one-bedroom apartment, Meghna fed her infant daughter in the bathroom to avoid provoking her husband’s anger at the wailing child. “If there was the slightest sound from my daughter, he would start hitting me.” Meghna had undergone two caesarean sections. Still, she cooked, cleaned, moved heavy furniture, and remained silent. Her husband mocked her English, laughed at her confidence, blocked her from learning to drive, and refused to stand up for her when his family humiliated her. Once, he told her plainly, “I am not going to divorce you. I will destroy you gradually every day.”
In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman contends that, "Traumatic memories ... are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story." When Meghna speaks, her memories arrive in fragments. One incident interrupts another. This is not confusion. It is trauma. Abuse lived over years does not organize itself neatly. It leaves a mosaic.
This is how trauma speaks. What follows is how help enters. The turning point did not arrive dramatically, but quietly. Afraid and unsure, Meghna made an anonymous Facebook post asking for help. A stranger pointed her to the women’s crisis support wing of the India Association of Western Washington (IACS). That message mattered. “I can proudly say that the fact that I am sitting here and talking about my experience is due to IACS,” she says.
No one told her to leave overnight. Instead, they helped her take one step. Then another. After twelve years in the US, they connected her with a driving instructor. Meghna confesses, “Now at least I can drive. This has changed everything.”
While Meghna’s ability to drive did not end her abuse, it shifted something fundamental. Independence entered the room. So did witnesses. When police were called, and when her husband made threats, IACS stayed present. Knowing she had support reduced the violence because her husband knew she was no longer alone.
Today, Meghna has not fully separated from her husband. Like many immigrant women, she faces immigration constraints, financial dependence, and the absence of family support. Survival, for her, is not a clean exit. It is endurance with dignity.
Through IACS, her children have found community through early childhood and summer programs. Meghna has also discovered hope that she had never been allowed to cultivate.
This is why organizations like IACS matter. Not only because they rescue but because they meet women where they are at in life, not where systems demand they be.
When you donate, you are not funding a success story. You are funding survival in real time.
You are helping a woman learn to drive.
You are helping a child feel safe.
You are helping someone who has been silenced begin to speak.
Meghna did not find freedom at all at once. But someone answered her call. Your support ensures the next woman will not be alone when she whispers for help.
