SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan - The kerosene, she remembers, felt cool on her neck, and it quickly soaked through her cotton sundress, the blue one with the periwinkles on it. When she struck the match, she remembers, the flames flared into her hair and raced down the left side of her body, but somehow, oddly, she felt chilled. She heard someone screaming, then realized it was her voice. By the time she passed out, her left arm had melted across her breasts.

Madina, in many ways, is typical of the unhappy, overworked and degraded young women who try to burn themselves to death each year in Central and South Asia. The practice stretches back centuries and persists today in the "modern" world.

"Many people think of these burnings as normal, as a fact of life that's rooted in our past," said Bibisara Oripova, a burn specialist and surgeon who runs the Umid (Hope) Center, a shelter for abused and suicidal women in Samarkand, the ancient Silk Road city. "Our people used to worship fire as something holy. When a child was born, a candle was held close to it, or the baby was carried around a bonfire.

"Now women burn themselves when they can't see any escape from the violence in their families. Deprivations, humiliations and poverty pile up, and our young women lose themselves."

Madina, 25, had lost herself.

She fell in love with her husband, a carpenter, when they were in grade school. Everybody in their little farming village turned out for the wedding on a clear, hot day in August 2001. Madina wore a white dress with a veil.

"That was a happy day," she whispered as she sat on a bed in the shelter, using her good hand, the right one, to smooth her red velour robe over her knees. She didn't want to give her real name, she said, out of shame over her suicide attempt.

After the wedding, following local custom, Madina and her husband moved into his parents' house. At first, Madina got along well with her extended family. Even after she gave birth to a daughter, named Freckle, she worked in the family's wheat field. She also did most of the household chores. She considered it her "duty."

She and her husband were happy together, she said, and their sex life was thrilling. And unlike many husbands in the region, especially those who can't find work or drink too much, Madina's husband never beat her.

But things began to sour with her mother-in-law, whose relentless petty criticisms led to increasingly angry arguments. Madina never told her husband of the fights and her growing sadness. She said she didn't want to strain their own good relationship.

"In surveys, when we ask women to list their best qualities, they say they obey their elders, or they're quiet, or they love to work," said Marfua Tuhtahujaeva, the founder of the Women's Resource Center in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. "Young women are seen as laborers, and they just disappear in the household.

"Most of our women are unhappy. One young wife told me, `The plow horse gets more attention than I do.'"

Doctors, government officials and social workers in the region believe more than a thousand women try to kill themselves through self-immolation each year. Two-thirds of them succeed.

Statistics on suicide, when available, are considered unreliable because most attempts go unreported or get categorized as "household accidents."

The motives for self-immolation are better known. In Uzbekistan, for example, women typically cite domestic violence, conflicts with in-laws or a husband's infidelity. In Afghanistan, a growing number of young women are burning themselves to escape arranged marriages with much older men. Muslim women who've been raped also resort to self-immolation.

Wrist-cutting among women is infrequent, social workers say. Urban women most often try to commit suicide by drinking acid or drain cleaner. It's rural women who burn themselves, and in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, India and Pakistan they're typically between the ages of 19 and 30.

"Exactly the time," Oripova said, "when a woman should be most alive."

Tuhtahujaeva, the social worker in Tashkent, said women in remote or rural communities feel fulfilled only after they've gotten married and raised children. Likewise, she said, single women are viewed suspiciously.

"Condoleezza Rice, at the age of 49, single, with no children? This is nonsense," she said. "In our society, this is impossible. This is a bad woman. Single women can only be prostitutes."

One morning last July, a month before her second wedding anniversary, Madina came home from cutting wheat to find her daughter crying. Freckle was only 8 months old, but Madina's brother-in-law said he was going to slap the baby if Madina couldn't keep her quiet. A nasty argument broke out, and Madina grabbed Freckle and ran down to the fast-flowing river near the house.

"I was going to jump in," she said. "Both of us."

Despite her anguish, Madina didn't jump, but went back to the house. But when her mother-in-law immediately accused her of trying to shirk her afternoon chores, Madina lost control. She grabbed a lantern, poured the kerosene on herself and lit the match.

Her sister-in-law smothered the flames and a neighbor with a telephone dialed 0-2, the emergency number. Madina's husband eventually arrived at the burn clinic - as did the Uzbek police, who now investigate women's suicide attempts as possible crimes.

If an Uzbek woman says her husband or his family drove her to suicide, the man is likely to be arrested on the spot. Prison sentences in Uzbekistan can range up to six years, although policies in other countries are far more lenient.

Under pressure from her family, Madina told the police she had suffered an accident with her gas stove, so they closed their inquiry. But later, when she finally told her husband about his mother's cruelty, he exploded in anger.

"What do you expect me to do?" he shouted. "Do you expect me to find another mother?"

Madina spent a month in the hospital with burns covering 25 percent of her body, mostly on her neck, left arm and chest. Since her release, she has been staying in Oripova's small, discreet shelter, which subsists on a budget of $15,000 a year. (U.S. troops stationed at the Khanabad air base in southern Uzbekistan quietly send weekly food donations to the shelter.)

Madina gets physical therapy and counseling at the shelter, and she hopes to reconcile with her husband if they can get their own house. Her eyes brightened a bit when she told about regaining custody of Freckle, who's now 17 months.

And last week, more good news: Oripova performed an operation to separate Madina's arm from her chest. Several cosmetic surgeries will follow, mostly to treat the webs of angry scars that lace Madina's left side.

Madina was a skilled seamstress before the burning - she has the long, delicate fingers of a pianist, not a wheat-cutter - and Oripova says she'll eventually be able to sew again.

"Her soul is being lifted," the doctor said. Then she looked at Madina and said, "You're healing, inside and outside. I can see it. You're going to be fine."

Madina began to cry softly, wiping at her tears with her right hand.

"You're going to be fine," Oripova said again. This time, Madina managed a thin smile.

"There's still no laughter in me," she said quietly. "But I'm stretching forward."

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