We ate the food we had brought with us and slept outside on the veranda. In the morning, that elderly woman came to wake us up, carrying a pot in her hand. She asked me, “Do you have any flour for flatbread (bhakri)?” Half-asleep, I said “Yes” and sat up in bed.
She was staring at me with wide eyes. Then she turned to my husband and said, “How did you manage to get such a wife? She’s so beautiful — doesn’t look like she’s from a poor background at all. And you brought her to live in a place like this?”
Then she looked at me and asked, “Can you do farm work?”
With my head bowed, I quietly said, “No,” and got up to give her the pot filled with flour.
There was no facility for a toilet, bathroom, or even water. A little distance away, there was a water tank, and we had to fetch water from there. Bathing was done in the open, and for the toilet, we had to go out into the fields. Every time the door was opened, the smell of pesticides would hit us, so we kept everything organized outside on the veranda.
The house was right by the roadside, with one door facing the road. There was a big babhul (acacia) tree nearby, and we placed a cot under it to sit.
After a while, people started coming and going. Every passerby would look at us. Whenever I heard the sound of a vehicle, I’d turn to look toward the road. Since my husband had already lived there for eight years, the entire village knew him well. But I was new to everyone — and also a bit of a curiosity.
Everyone seemed to have the same question on their mind:
“How is his wife so beautiful? How did a farm laborer get such a beautiful wife?”
I was twenty years old when we went there. Fair-skinned, pure and glowing, weighed just forty kilos — I looked truly beautiful back then. I was only twelve when I got married. I was in the seventh grade at the time. Just four days were left for my final exams — and then my wedding happened. I felt terrible that I couldn’t appear for the exams. But who could I tell?
Just then, one of my husband’s friends came by. Both of them were happy to see each other. My husband asked me to make some tea. As they reminisced about old times, his friend looked at me and said, “Where did you find such a wife? Or did you run away with her?”
Whenever someone said such things to my husband, he used to feel very happy. But he never told anyone that he had tricked me into marrying him. He hadn’t told me that he drove a tractor for ninety rupees a day at a fiber company. Instead, he lied and said he worked in the forest department when he married me.