It was a chilly winter morning and the sun had been hiding behind the mists. Barsha Rai jumped out of bed, threw her night gown aside and opened the door before her mother-in-law shouted, “It’s already morning.” [break]
“Uh…” Barsha cleared her throat to break the ice. Both stared at each other for a second. Still dazed, she sleepwalked to the bathroom.
“It is not that I hate her,” Barsha explained later. “If only out of a sheer sense of duty, I do love her.” Her voice was laced with sarcasm.
“Perhaps I just wasn’t prepared to marry so early”, she acknowledged.
Barsha, 19, married Manoj Rai, a British Gurkha serviceman, last year. She is just one of many young, highschool girls in Dharan who marry in their teens. Although there are notable cases of elopement, many of them marry with their parents’ consent. And most, as in Barsha’s case, have the parental decision forced on them.
“I knew she was too young to marry,” her mother Ishmanta Rai said, her eyes gazing out of her grocery shop. “In the beginning, I wanted Barsha to be independent. So, I groomed her so that she hardly had to do any household chores and rarely woke up before seven.” Such a level of comfort is rare in this neighborhood for a daughter in a non-British Gurkha family.
But the prospect of destitution made her yield to a marriage proposal for Barsha from a British Gurkha family.“I married a Chaure (slang for someone who is not British Gurkha or Laure) and suffered much hardship. I didn’t want my daughter to suffer the same fate.”
Barsha dropped out of her first year of college to fly to the UK with her husband. Although financial security was the lure of the British Gurkhas, she felt odd depending on Manoj, the modern girl she was.
“But never mind,” she volunteered all of a sudden, her eyes gleaming with hope and a carefree teen air.
“I like Manoj,” she said, trying on the new emerald earrings she just bought. After admiring herself in the mirror, she turned to say, “But during his army training, he had to be all obedience and nothing but. He expects me to be the same, and I’m not.”
One house further down, her cousin Kabita Rai, 20, already has a three-year-old. She discontinued her college education to be married off four years back to Ramesh Rai of the Singapore police.
But unlike Barsha, Kabita is quite happy in her marriage.
“Everyone needs to marry someday. So, what’s the difference if you marry early, especially if your husband takes good care of you?” she said.
Her mother Bhim Kumari Subba said Kabita marriage was the ultimate relief.
“I always worried how she would earn her living. So when Ramesh sought her hand, I didn’t think twice,” the mother said with pride.
Kabita doesn’t have to live with her in-laws, which is really cool. “I am free to do things my way”, she said. “And I’m happier than ever.”
But not everyone is as lucky. There are plenty of cases of broken homes. The young wives who cannot live with their husbands during their first three years of service find it difficult to live with their in-laws and their many dos and don’ts. However, not many of them speak out as Ruby (name changed) did in the beginning.
Ruby, a beautiful 17-year old, feels the worst decision of her life was to marry at 15, and things got still worse when her husband Roshan decided to join the British Gurkhas.
“A year after we married and he was leaving to join the army. I did not want that. I wanted to have at least three good years together,” she said.
Talking to her, you feel she is not a teen, or is perhaps a teen forced to act older than her years.
Playing with the fringe partly hiding her eyes, she said she was not sure if she wanted to give an interview. “After all, it’s not a happy story.”
Ruby was married two years back to her classmate Roshan Rai, now in the British Gurkhas. It was love at first sight. Or perhaps myopia, she suggested after thinking for a while.
“I was just 15 when we married,” she said, ordering her favorite chicken fried-rice at Orioles Cafe. Sporting a grey pullover and jeans she looked slim, with her hair tied down. Appearing like a Geisha-like married lady the other day; she had now turned into the typical teen next door.
“I did not decide to marry, it just happened.”
It was months since they began dating before they planned a night out in Itahari, a town nearby. And when she didn’t return home that night, her father spent the whole night calling all her friends, deeply worried about his daughter.“I realized only later how painful a night it must have been for my father,” she said. Her sister-in-law eloped last year. “When I saw my mother-in-law literally drenched in tears, I cried too. My in-laws had family to share the pain with. My father had none.”
When they were spotted together in Itahari, their family tried their best to part them. A classic love story, their love prevailed.
So, partly loathed by their quiet meetings and largely by the fear of social stigma, her father allowed his daughter to marry her beau.
“Marriage kills love to the greatest extent you could ever imagine,” she said munching the chicken steak.
She realized her love was dying when Roshan beat her for the first time. She broke her hand. Most of the time, the arguments were ignited and fuelled by the sour comments of her in-laws, mostly his mother and sister, that enraged her husband.
“I knew nothing of the household chores. In fact, when my mother-in-law first asked me to keep chaulani in lentils, I asked Roshan what on the earth was chaulani?”
Her in-laws, typical of Nepali traditional households, passed bitter remarks and bullied her for not getting enough gold in dowry. But that did not hurt Ruby as much as her husband’s indifference to the whole situation. As things got worse, Roshan got into the British Gurkha army.
“When Roshan was with me, at least I had reason to tolerate my in-laws. Now that he is gone, I feel meaningless,” she said after pausing for a while.
“I don’t know why I’m taking all this. Sometimes I seriously think of eloping,” she looked at the wind-chime as if trying to find meaning in its sounds.
“Dying love expires with distance.”
After her marriage, she flunked out of school. But when Roshan went to the UK, she realized that if she did not take care of herself, no one would take care for her. So, she resumed her studies again from grade nine.
“Lahure is just in the name. The fact of the matter is that I have absolutely no expectations from him,” she said, before finishing the last piece of meat from her plate.
“Sometimes when I try hard to be optimistic, I see a different point of view. Had I not married Roshan, I would have flunked out of school anyway and ended up marrying someone else. But since I went through all this mess at a young age, I learned to stand on my own feet before it was too late.”
Now that the British Government has decided to give equal pensions and other facilities to the British Gurkha Army too, Lahure fascination is only going to rise. Thanks to it, Lahure culture is redefining the concept of marriage, which is neither child marriage nor adult, but the time a girl is still unsure about what is the right choice for her life.
(All Photos: Tapas Thapa)
bhushita@myrepublica.com
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