Dumped Muslim Wives Dump 'Instant' Divorces
Aug. 31, 2004 -- It was the postman who saved her from a dreaded "instant divorce."
Haseena B. still remembers the day the postman arrived at her hut in a sprawling slum in the Indian city of Bombay — also known as Mumbai — shortly after her husband deserted her for another woman.
Like most of the slum's residents, the postman was aware of Haseena's marital problems. He also knew that as a letter carrier in an impoverished Indian neighborhood, he would not only have to deliver the mail, but also read it to his illiterate customers.
So when a registered letter arrived for the 30-year-old mother of two, the postman's suspicions were immediately roused.
He worried it might contain an "instant divorce" — a controversial marital separation-by-remote that has left millions of Muslim women spouseless and abandoned, with their families often ripped apart.
As an experienced postman, he offered Haseena — who asked that her name be changed for this article — two choices. She could accept the letter, put a thumb imprint on his receipt and he would read it to her. But, he warned, the unmarked envelope might well contain an "instant divorce" notice from her absconding husband. Did she want to receive the mail?
Haseena glanced at the envelope, decided no news was indeed good news, and declined to even touch the offending mail. The letter would be returned to the sender with a notice of delivery failure.
In a world where the rules of the game are often arbitrary and unfathomable, Haseena says she is grateful for the human intervention in the mail delivery system.
"He [the postman] was a very nice man, very nice," she told ABCNEWS.com in a phone interview from Bombay. "He tried to save me from a triple talaq [divorce]."
A centuries-old custom, the triple talaq — literally "I divorce you," in Arabic — is a controversial procedure whereby a Muslim husband can divorce his wife by merely repeating the word talaq three times.
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