Pakistani women's lives destroyed by acid attacks
An Oscar-winning Pakistani documentary has put the crime under the spotlight, but it is estimated that more than 150 women have acid thrown on them every year - usually by husbands or in-laws - and many never get justice, the BBC's Orla Guerin reports.
Her name is Shama, meaning "candle", and she says her husband burnt her flesh as if it was a candlewick.
The young mother of four has just joined the ranks of Pakistani women doused in acid. She is scarred for life, with burns on 15% of her body. Her crime was her beauty.
"My husband and I often had arguments in the house," she said, in her hospital bed. "On that day before going to sleep he said 'you take too much pride in your beauty'. Then in the middle of the night he threw acid on me, and ran away."
When her husband fled, he took her mobile phone with him, so she could not call for help.
Scorched cheeks
Shama shows me a picture taken at a children's party four months ago. It is a snapshot of an attractive young woman, with immaculate make-up, wearing an orange outfit flecked with gold.
Shama had every reason to take pride in her beauty before the attack
Her hair is swept back to reveal dangling earrings. But acid has erased that confident, composed Shama.
"I feel pain at what I was, and what I have become," she said, with tears coursing down her scorched cheeks.
"All the colours have gone from my life. I feel like I'm a living corpse, even worse than a living corpse. I think I have no right to live."
Shama now lies in Ward 10a of the burns unit in Nishtar Hospital in Multan in Pakistan's Punjab province.
It is a monument to neglect. The plaster is peeling off the walls and there is a leaking pipe hanging from the ceiling. When patients need transfusions, their relatives are despatched to buy pints of blood.
But the doctors here are expert at treating women disfigured by acid - they see one or two new victims every week.
At morning rounds they gather at Shama's bed, asking if she is eating, and is keeping her burns covered with cream. They try to relieve her pain, but cannot ease her despair.
"I can't say anything about the future," she says, "maybe I won't be alive. I will try - for my kids - to get back to how I was. I have to work to build a future for them.
"If I can't I'll do what one or two other girls have done.
"They killed themselves."
Details also at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17676542
