By Sandeep Verma 
Hyderabad, April 24: A young woman is dead. Her name was Rehana. She was 26 years old, she had a master’s degree, and she was four months away from her wedding. Before she died, she sat down and wrote twelve pages. Twelve. Then she hanged herself in her home in Kadapa.
The man she was engaged to is nowhere to be found.
She Thought He Was Joking
Shahjahan is from Proddatur. He works at a software company in Bengaluru. On February 15, he got engaged to Rehana. Their families had arranged it. The wedding was set for August. They talked on the phone every day after that. Messages back and forth, the normal stuff couples do when they are building something together.
Then he started saying things.
“I don’t feel anything when I look at you.” “I have four girlfriends.” “They are better than you.” “I don’t want to see your face.”
The first time he said it, Rehana thought he was having a bad day. Maybe testing her. Maybe being stupid the way people sometimes are when they are nervous about commitment. She let it go. Most people would.
He said it again. And again after that.
At some point, a horrible thing happened inside her head. She stopped being able to tell herself it was a joke. She started believing him. And once you start believing something like that about yourself, from someone who was supposed to love you, it is very hard to find your way back out.
She did not find her way back out.
Twelve Pages
Before she died, Rehana wrote everything down. Not a paragraph, not a page. Twelve full pages, by hand. Everything he said to her. Every time he made her feel like she was nothing. Every moment she tried to dismiss it and could not anymore.
Police found the note when they arrived at her home. They have taken it as evidence. Her father had already filed a complaint by then.
That note is going to be important in court. But right now, what it really tells you is how long this had been going on. You do not fill twelve pages in an afternoon. She had been carrying this for months.
What Her Family Is Saying
The family has admitted something painful. Rehana had not been fully on board with this engagement from the start. She agreed because her father wanted the match. She did not fight it hard enough, or maybe she did not feel like she could.
And the things they are finding out now, after her death, are the kinds of things that make you want to scream.
Shahjahan, it turns out, had a serious drinking problem. He had been in multiple relationships before and apparently during the engagement. None of this had come out during the family’s discussions before February 15. “We did not know all this before,” a family member told reporters, barely able to get the words out. “Now everything is coming to light.”
But Rehana is not here to see it come to light. That is the unbearable part.
He Ran
The moment the police case was registered at Chinna Chowk Police Station in YSR Kadapa district, Shahjahan vanished. Gone. His phone, his contacts, wherever he was staying, all of it now being traced by investigators.
Running like that is not what someone does when they have nothing to hide.
Police are expected to charge him with abetment of suicide under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the law that holds a person responsible when their actions or words push someone to take their own life. The twelve-page note is sitting in an evidence bag. If it says what the family says it says, there is a real case here. Whether the courts move fast enough, whether Shahjahan is found in time, whether justice actually lands the way it should, all of that is still uncertain.
What is not uncertain is what happened to Rehana.
This Happens More Than We Admit
Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Rehana’s story is not rare. The specific details are hers, but the shape of it, a woman trapped in an engagement she cannot easily leave, being quietly destroyed by someone she is supposed to trust, having nowhere to turn because the wedding is fixed and the family has committed and breaking it off would mean shame and questions and gossip, that shape is familiar.
In India, once an engagement is done, it is treated almost like a marriage already. The girl’s family is invested. The boy’s family is invested. Everyone has told everyone. Walking away, especially for the woman, carries a cost that the man rarely has to pay at the same level.
So women stay. They absorb. They tell themselves it will get better after the wedding, or they tell themselves they are overreacting, or they just go quiet because there is no good option available.
Rehana went quiet for months. Then she wrote twelve pages and died.
There is no law in India specifically designed to protect a woman from emotional abuse during an engagement. The Domestic Violence Act applies once you are married or living together. Dowry laws apply to specific financial harassment. A woman whose fiancé is just, in plain language, being cruel to her, calling her worthless, telling her she is replaceable, doing it over and over, she has very little legal ground to stand on. She mostly has to hope her family believes her and acts. Or that someone intervenes.
Nobody intervened for Rehana.
The August Wedding
Four months. That is all that was left. August was four months away when she died.
She had studied hard. Got her M.Sc. Had her whole life sitting in front of her, the way it does when you are 26. And she spent the last stretch of that life being told, by the person her family had chosen for her, that she was not worth looking at.
She wrote twelve pages about it. She could not say it to anyone out loud, apparently. Or she tried and was not heard. We do not know that part yet. What we know is that the note exists, that it is detailed, that it covers months of pain, and that at the end of all that writing she still felt like there was no way forward.
That is a failure. Not just his failure, though his failure is enormous and criminal. It is a failure of every system around her that did not catch this before she ran out of time.
Where Things Stand
Shahjahan is still missing as of today. Police in Kadapa are actively searching. The post-mortem on Rehana’s body is underway. The case is registered. The note is with the investigators.
The father who pushed his daughter toward this match is now the same father sitting with her twelve-page letter trying to understand what he missed.
There are no clean endings here. Just a family in pieces, a man on the run, and a young woman who deserved so much better than what she got.
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- Sandeep Verma
- Sandeep Verma
- Sandeep Verma
- Sandeep Verma
Arun Upadhayay