HOWZAT

Her clothes were taken from her and replaced by the traditional salwar kameez. The house was barely furnished and it was cold. The lavatory was outside and she had to share a bed with her sister Mena. Apart from Mena, nobody in the family ever spoke to Sameem unless to bark commands. She was expected to do most of the household chores and, as she grew older, the cooking as well. Then one day she was punched in the back and pushed to the floor in the kitchen. Her assailant was her mother. Slaps became routine. “I never gave up hope that one day I would return from school to be greeted by my mother, asking me how my day had been.” Invariably Mother, as Sameem calls her in the book, would be lying down. “There you are,” she would say. “Get me some tea.” The dirty breakfast dishes were still piled up in the sink for her to do. Mother also tried to cure Sameem of her stutter: she pinned her to the floor and cut the skin under her tongue with a razor blade. “I was a child; I just accepted that was what life was like.”

At the age of 12, Sameem moved with her family to Glasgow where Manz was going into business with a hardware store. The following year she went on holiday to Pakistan with her mother. “My mother hugged me and told me what a good girl I had been. I thought that at last she was beginning to accept me. That all my hard work had not been in vain. It was all I had ever wanted, to be loved by my mother.” Instead Sameem was taken to an isolated village and forced to marry a man in his late twenties called Afzal. From the wedding night on, he raped her. “I couldn’t run anywhere, I didn’t know where I was,” she says. “I felt so trapped I couldn’t breathe. That’s the whole idea with forced marriages: keep the girls in a place from which they cannot escape.” And then, as her mother intended, Sameem fell pregnant. Even better, with a son. Azmier was born in Glasgow in January 1984, away from his father, who remained in Pakistan. “I was too young to bring him over as my husband, and anyway I didn’t want him anywhere near me,” Sameem says.

Like many forced brides, Sameem had cut herself and taken an overdose to escape her “marriage”, but now she was a mother, she knew she had to live for Azmier’s sake. When he was three, she returned from the grocery store where she was working, and which the family owned, to discover the horror repeating itself. “I saw a huge bruise in the middle of Azmier’s back. He was being beaten, as I had been. I didn’t care what they did to me, but when they started hurting my son I knew I had to get out.”

The family was also putting pressure on Sameem to go to Pakistan to bring back Afzal. She refused. “It was then that Manz told me, ‘You are going to Pakistan, even if it is in a bodybag.’ This was the scariest moment of all. So many girls are trapped and like me they just don’t know how to get out. They have no money, few friends outside their family and community. They are isolated from the outside world.”

It was then that a family friend, Osghar Ali, came to stay. She felt she could confide in him. Osghar came from a much more liberal family and was horrified by what she told him. He was to prove her saviour and later her husband. “I find it very difficult to read this book,” says the now 47-year-old Osghar. “What those people did to her makes me very angry.” Then he softens. “I always had a picture in my mind of the woman I would marry and when I saw Sam I knew that I was looking right at her.”

At the end of 1987, Osghar rescued Sameem and Azmier and took them to Manchester. He got a job – working 7am to 8pm in a knitwear factory putting buttons on jumpers – and they found a place to live. “For the first time I was cherished for who I was,” she says, “and not for some service I could provide. I was safe.”

She wasn’t. A few months later three men were arrested after a random police stop on the outskirts of Manchester. In their van were knives, baseball bats and other weapons. Manz had hired them to bring Azmier back, Sameem says, “and if I refused they were to deal with me. After the bodybag threat I knew what that meant.” Amazingly, Sameem, Osghar and Azmier had moved to a new address that very morning; the kidnappers had only their old address. “I do believe in God. I think all through my life I have had somebody looking over me.”

Sameem was called to give evidence against her brother. “I was terrified. I saw my mother’s outline as I walked into court but I did not make eye contact because I did not want her to see how scared I was. I relied on tunnel vision to get me into court, give my evidence and get out again.” Manz was sentenced to four years for attempted kidnapping.

Does she ever think about what would have happened to her if he had been found not guilty? She pauses. “I don’t believe in what-ifs,” she says. “If I had thought about that, just as if I thought, ‘What if Osghar had not rescued us?’, I would have made myself sick and not been strong enough to give evidence.”

So where does her courage to tackle this issue come from? “The children’s home,” she says. “That was my foundation: the sense of right and wrong and standing up for yourself.”

She also draws huge strength from her husband, with whom she had her second son, Asim, 19 years ago. From the beginning of their marriage, when Sameem struggled to come to terms with all that had happened to her, he said: “I will take care of everything.” He was the first person to show her affection and understanding since her days in the children’s home. It was a love that encouraged her to get a qualification in tourism – she had had no formal education since the age of 12 – and a job at Manchester Airport. Then in 2007 she decided to stand for election to Manchester City Council, and won the biggest ever majority in her ward.

She shows me proudly around the high stone and marble corridors of Manchester’s Gothic Victorian Town Hall, and the august council chamber with its benches in horseshoe ranks where she spoke for the first time. “I’m not a great believer in change,” she told her fellow councillors. “I believe in improvement. You can improve anything, whether it be yourself, your home, your area.”

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