Thy Kingdom Come
I came across these stories when I was traveling in some of our project locations in North Bihar recently. P was a young teenage girl growing up in one of the MD tola of a North Bihar village. She, like any girl of her age had her aspirations of a life with her “ideal man” and spent time dreaming about the same. But little did she realize that life would turn out different for her soon. A man in his mid-thirties introduced to parents by her chacha, was proposed for marriage to her, which was agreed upon for a bride price of 50,000/-. She had not much choice in the matter. Money was the deciding factor. What they were getting was more than what some others had received. And this was not unusual, others from their village had gone through these kinds of alliances earlier. The man was from nearby state of UP, and the chacha was close to the village Pradhan from a higher caste, (AC) who had connections with Netas. Chacha was respected as one of the few from their caste who had studied...