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In pre-Partition Punjab, Rashid abducts Puro, a young Hindu woman engaged to Ramchand, because her family had once abducted a woman of his family. When she escapes home, her parents turn her away as defiled and fearful of reprisal, so she lives as Rashid's wife under the name Hamida, tattooed on her arm. In 1947 she rescues her abducted sister-in-law Lajo and returns her to her family, but she herself chooses to stay behind with Rashid in Pakistan.
In honor-based communal conflict, men settle scores between families and religions by seizing women. A woman's body stands in for her kin's honor, so violating her counts as damaging them. The woman herself becomes collateral in a transaction between men and has no standing as a party to it.
The abductor takes the woman, but her own family's refusal to take her back as 'defiled' is what makes the loss irreversible. Purity norms turn a victim into an outcast, which leaves her with no option except to live inside the perpetrator's world. Her own community therefore completes the violence that the enemy began.
When others overwrite a person's name, religion, and belonging by force, the person does not simply convert from one identity to another. They become a 'skeleton' (pinjar) that belongs fully to neither side, going through a role's outward motions without inner possession of it. Seeing displaced people this way shows how hollow any clean identity category is, whether 'Hindu' or 'Muslim', 'Puro' or 'Hamida', when it has been imposed by violence.