"The Bride Burning" is an autobiographical novel about my arranged marriage in India,  and the subsequent psychic abuse and terror of a young girl, raised and educated in the West,  who escaped death by fighting back.  Although my case was rooted in a marriage to a Muslim, the cultural discrimination of women is a universal issue on which this book focuses.  I quote from my introduction to "The Bride Burning":  "It is about the dualism triggered within the geopolitical framework of our shrinking globe as old-world tranditionalism interacts with the struggle for individual rights and the consciousness-raising of current feminism ...  "The Bride Burning" is a book of anger:  The anger of a girl involuntarily subjected to becoming the scapegoat of dualism:  The currents of change and regression, the stagnation of rigidly inflexible traditionalism and the absence of family suport- structures in modern self-determinism. The irrational impulses at work in this power struggle trigger an
odyssey into the mind's insanity and hell.  As the individual is stripped of power in favor of Group-Think, the collective self-deception of a system steeped in parochial patriarchies,  a form of cultural abuse and conditioning occurs:  The woman becomes a victim of submission, easily losing her sense of self-esteem and personhood. The manipulators opportunistically exploit the veil of religion and tradition (distorting the true essence of spirituality,) to suit their own selfish and greedy interests and motivations of power.  Religion
thus becomes a pretense masking narcissism, egoism,  and hubris.  The weak and oppressed, primarily women and children,  are scapegoated in this power-lust.

Continued introduction:  "We are the construct of our outer and inner environments, our cultural myths and iconogaphy which color our childhood. For Hindu women in India,  the rite of Suttee was abolished first by the Muslim emperor, Akber,  then the British in 1829.  Suttee was the ritual suicide or murder of women on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands, an act of immolation reserved for the eilite, for queens.  Nonetheless,  in the last few decades, there has been throughout India a resurgence and revival of 'dowry-deaths' or bride-burnings, in which young women are driven to suicide by greedy
and rapacious in-laws disappointed in their dowries.  Fear edges the silver lining to the Indian mystique:  A fear of death and social castration, tales of horror tattooed into the DNA of an Indian woman from birth ... The Bride Burning is the true account of one Indian girl who fought the forces of heredity, and got away.  But my story is an ancient one, written in blood on Suttee Gats:  Those who walked voicelessly to a burning hell, never living to tell the tale.  The futility of their snuffed lives is scarred into my flesh, branded on me like a curse:  That legacy of blood, and vices in the wind of
unmourned, forgotten women.  I, Fatima Shahnaz,  shall not be able to live with myself under this blood-soaked heritage,  these memories of death. India,  a necropolis of tombs and epic myths, of maharajahs and fairytales ... Like the queens of our mythology,  I am but foam on the ocean:  Our story is ash on the wind,  water and air.  For women, living and dead,  I write this story.  For Suttee,  the Chaste Wife, I see redemption.  We place ourselves on the pyres of human conscience; If not this life,  the next brings release from our trial by fire... When our bodies are snatched from us,  tortured, our minds bent and
mutilated,  we find release from suffering within.  We shall reach the place beyond the fire and burning places.  We touch the first threshold, the plateau of human understanding at the Great peaceful aboe in the Himalayas of the soul where no flames touch, and glacial waters cleanse. Chastened,  purified,  mellowed,  tempered, we reach the immortal state that transcends boundaries and confinements defined by men:  We seek the silent spaces, within.  Our eyes, mirrors of truth painted in the lamp-black of centuries;  our voices in the wind
combing the tombs of kings.  We speak with the breath of antiquity, the undying soul of centuries.  That death is a purifying rite,  the transcendenc of ego, t he acceptance of our own indeterminacy and tolerance for the diversity of others.  Then,  the Suttee Bride is the Chaste Wife,  the woman redeemed, relieved of her earthbound husk, the impurities of Self and selfishness,  a world fighting fo greed, domination and killing for power.  We hold a torch in the dark before rebirth. Mankind will not stand by and witness our burning:  Mankind will not immolate truth.  Looking up to the stars through preordained
doom and millennial tears, we seek the hand that touches,  the heart that reaches.  Then, we know there is healing. Then,  the burnings will stop.  And there is deliverence from death, the immolation of woman."