The first drops feel like cold water. Then they hiss through the first layer of the dermis, the acid combining with the skin on your face and arms and chest, sizzling their way onto tissues underneath. Tissues with nerve endings and blood. Less than a second since it started, your brain registers your screaming nerves.
Depending on how much acid your attacker had thought of shopping for, the acid continues its binge, gurgling its way downwards into softer tissues that hold your body in shape, carry your blood, regulate your perception of the world.
You melt.
Your assailant speeds away.
I sit in a small room in east Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar, across a table from a 26-year-old woman. We talk of mundane things: rising rents, the wonderful chaos that characterises this city, the unseasonable warmth in the November air.
Scars line her arms, blooming upwards, disappearing under her sleeves and then climbing up to her neck. The skin on her face is taut but smooth. A product of several surgeries, she tells me. “This elbow here had to be re-attached,” she shows her…
