Excerpted with permission from Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World by Snigdha Poonam (Penguin India, October 2025).
Aisha Nasrin wasn’t surprised that her husband gave her a divorce; what unsettled her was that he killed her first.
Sometime in early 2022, I set out to find Aisha, mainly because I had seen her death certificate a few days earlier. According to this official document, issued on the letterhead of the eastern Indian state of Assam, she died of “natural causes” on 21 October 2016 at her husband’s home in Faluguri village, a few kilometres from where the two of us now sat facing each other. We were perched on opposite edges of her bed. There was nothing spectral about the atmosphere. The bedsheet was crumpled, and a mosquito net covered three-quarters of the bed. If I extended my arm, it would touch her shoulder. She was quite definitely alive.
Fatigrah, her village, is tucked away in a remote corner of Assam. The easiest way to reach it was by crossing a river. We chose the longer, winding route, navigating a labyrinth of paddy fields and clusters of thatched-roof houses. She lived, with her two children, in a cluttered room facing a mud courtyard in her parents’ home.