Rahar Maya Biswokarma, now 50, was married at 10 – well before she realized what marriage really means to a girl. By the age of just 15, she had already had her first baby. A few months later, probably as a result of having to deliver the baby at a very early age, she suffered from uterine prolapse, which subjected her to a combination of pain, humiliation and frustration for more than three decades.[break]
"I was turned into someone´s wife before I knew what it meant to me," says Rahar Maya, now a mother of four grownup children, all of them married. "Perhaps, I’ll regret getting married early throughout my life, until my death."
A resident of Bhaluwa VDC-6 of Sunsari District, Rahar Maya was married off to Hari Narayan Biswokarma who is five years older than her. "At that time, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do after getting married," says Rahar Maya, adding, "Today, I wish my parents hadn’t married me off so early."
Photo: Om Astha Rai
She still remembers – albeit not vividly – the day she was married off. In the wee hours of that fateful day, she was asked to take a bath and put on a new set of clothes, which her father had brought from a nearby town. "After taking bath and wearing new clothes, I felt like being an angel," she says. "At that time, I had absolutely no inkling of what was going to happen in the near future."
Her house was swarmed with relatives, neighbors and villagers. "Everyone was pretty happy; so was I," says she. "But in the afternoon, I somehow noticed that my mother´s eyes were filled with tears. I didn’t understand why she was crying."
When she knew that she would have to leave her home and parents for once and all after marriage, she could not stop crying. "I felt I was discarded and my parents no longer loved me," says she, adding, "All my joy was gone at once."
Rahar Maya did not have to leave her house soon, though. "I don’t know why I wasn’t sent to my husband´s home right away," says she. "Maybe my tears touched my parents´ hearts. Or maybe it was part of our family´s tradition to get the daughter married off early but send her to the husband´s house only after a few years. I’m yet to figure out why I was allowed to live longer with my parents."
A couple of weeks later, when she was grazing her cattle, Rahar Maya saw a tall and skinny boy, who her friends said was her husband. "I didn’t dare look into his eyes," says she. "I always avoided getting near him." Whenever she ran into the boy (Hari Narayan), she just blushed, standing still and speechless.
Four years later, Rahar Maya was sent to Hari Narayan´s house. "I was yet to come to terms with my marriage even then," says she. "My mother-in-law expected me to be like a perfect daughter-in-law. She wanted me to do all the work in the kitchen, which I wasn’t capable of. When I couldn’t perform my duty as a daughter-in-law, she scolded me. I was fearful of her shadow."
Rahar Mays says her husband, too, was not mature enough to stand by her when she needed his support and sympathy. "Whenever my mother-in-law berated me, I would seek his emotional support," says she. "But he would always fail me." She says she often felt lonely – already discarded by her parents and yet not fully accepted by her husband as well as the parents-in-law.
After giving birth to her first baby, Rahar Maya went to her maternal home where she suffered from uterine prolapse. "My mother was washing clothes in a nearby canal, leaving my youngest brother with me," recalls she. "When my brother started crying, I got up to take him to my mother. But as soon as I lifted him, I felt pain in my womb. I also felt something falling from my womb."
Rahar Maya shared her problem with her mother who asked her not to worry about it. She said to her: "It happens to every woman. There’s nothing to worry about." Rahar Maya tried not to think of her problem. But the problem, instead of dying down, became more intense, causing pain and embarrassment to her. "My husband was, of course, fully aware of the problem," says she. "But he was indifferent to my suffering. I lived on with this problem until recently."
Three years ago, Bhagawato Chaudhary, an Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (ANM) at the Bhaluwa sub health post, took Rahar Maya to a health camp organized in Itahari of Sunsari district. She underwent a surgery and finally got rid of the problem. "It felt like being born again," says she. "I no longer feel pain and embarrassment."
Two years after her first child, Rahar Maya gave birth to yet another baby who could not survive a measles outbreak. "I was unable to look after two children at the same time," says she. "In retrospect, I think I could’ve saved my second child, too, if I was mature by then." Barring her dead baby, she gave birth to four more chirldren. "I was too shy to consult my husband about using contraceptives," says she. "I used Norplant only after giving birth to five children."
The tale of Rahar Maya shows how child marriage wrecks the lives of girls. Like her, thousands of girls are married off before they reach 18 years – the age which girls must reach to get legally married in Nepal. Worse, many of them get married as early as in their preteen phases, thereby exposing themselves to the risk of early pregnancy that leads to health complications, including deaths.
Explaining the rationale behind imposing a certain marriage age for girls, Prof Dr Pushpa Chaudhary, Chief Consultant Gynecologist at Paropkar Maternity and Women´s Hospital in Thapathali of Kathmandu, says, "If a girl becomes mother before reaching 18 years of age, she would be like a child carrying a baby inside her well before completing her own growth and becoming an adult."
According to Dr Chaudhary, who is also President of Nepal Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (NESCOG), girls married before 18 would be at high risk of the consequences of adolescent pregnancy, which includes increased risk of malnutrition, anemia, miscarriages, pre-eclampsia (a disease of pregnancy that carries high maternal and neonatal mortality), poor growth of baby, difficult labor, operative delivery, including cesarean section, post-natal depression, among many other ills. "As a whole, girls who get married early carry an increased risk of maternal death and morbidity," says she. "Also, they are vulnerable to reproductive morbidity such as cervical cancer, uterine prolapse, reproductive tract infection, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS."
Several research reports suggest that Nepal has one of the worst prevalence rates of child marriage not only in South Asia but also in the world. As per the National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS)-2011, nearly one third of girls – 28.8 per cent to be precise – get married before reaching 19. In contrast, only 6.9 per cent of boys are married before 19. Women who get married early, on average, are more likely to have their first child at a younger age and give birth to more children, contributing to higher fertility, says the NDHS report.
Sonali Regmi, Regional Manager for Asia of Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), a global legal advocacy organization, says child marriage does not constitute just a single human rights violation. "In fact, it triggers a continuum of violence and impediments for young girls, which has a detrimental impact on their whole life," says Regmi. "The broad and crippling impact of child marriage on girls´ education, income generation as well as participation in public life perpetuates sex and gender inequality, making this a very profound human rights issue and development challenges for societies where child marriage exists."
In modern legal history of Nepal, child marriage has always been dealt with as an illegal activity. However, the definition of marriage age for girls was not set, as it is today, in the past. Until just five decades ago, it was legal to get a 14-year-old girl married to a 34-year-old man. The Muluki Ain (Civil Code) of Nepal – 2020 BS (1960/61 AD) had clearly set marriage ages of 14 and 18 for girls and boys respectively. It also stipulated that age difference between husbands and wives should not exceed 20 years. As the country increasingly embraced modern and more progressive values, Nepal reformed its marriage laws, elevating the marriage age for girls to 18 with guardians´ consent and to 20 without guardians´ consent.
Purna Shrestha, Legal Advisor for Asia of the CRR, says marriage of an underage girl – even with the full consent of her family and acknowledgement from her society – is tantamount to a form of forced marriage. "Freedom and full consent, which are the essential elements of a legal and healthy marriage, are not found in an event of child marriage," says Shrestha.
But owing to several factors – most of them economic – child marriage continues to impede Nepal’s social and economic growth, depriving underage girls of their rights to choose life partners and leaving them vulnerable to serious consequences of early pregnancy. The legal age of marriage has meant virtually nothing. Four decades ago, when the legal age of marriage was 14 as per the abovementioned Muluki Ain, Rahar Maya was married off at just 10. Today, when the marriage age is 18, one in almost three girls still get married before they reach the legal marriage age.
oasura@gmail.com
Related story
SAFE-Girls project launched to empower adolescent girls in Nepa...
