Ala kachuu
Kidnapping for "love" in Kyrgyzstan
THE BRIDE THEFT NO ONE STOPS
She’s walking home from class. A car pulls alongside. Two, three, sometimes four young men get out, and before she understands what’s happening, she’s screaming into the upholstery of a stranger’s back seat while the streets of her own town slide past the window. Nobody intervenes. Passersby have seen this before. Some of them will assume, correctly or not, that she agreed to it in advance - that this is romance, not abduction. She will spend the next several hours finding out which one it actually was.
