"Your husband is said to be in hospital. Get ready. We should leave right away on the 2:00 bus,” I had told her hurriedly.“My husband loves me so much. I love him too, so passionately as though life itself comes with it. Since our marriage we didn’t even have time to talk fully,” she said. “He should have stayed at home to farm. We shouldn’t have let him take such a life-consuming job,” Rita’s mother said with great pain.

She was a woman like any other in the village, who would talk with anyone and sing around the fields and forests.

The house of her is not more than a 15 or 16-minute walk from mine. Though she was the third-born daughter among seven sisters, she was more like the eldest in terms of household work, and in addition she was the most beautiful girl in the city, so all the boys liked her. Of course, there were some rumors about her marriage when I was in the village. A number of people would come daily to her house to persuade her to marry, and her mother would harass others telling their number, counting on her fingers.

“Your husband has come back.” After returning from the training, he had come straight to see me. He was smartened up with nice clothes and talked with my father of big things about the nation and the world. After training, he had become well-learned, my father had commented. Then we went to the market for the whole day and had tea and talked about the people, about his wife.

Really I had no fear of the world. I was thoughtless and free in the world. I was in a passionate hurry to exchange my feelings with him and wished to tell him, you are the best.

The red nose pin in a case which he gave me, I have kept very carefully in a small box on the floor. Cream powder, hair oil and scent I have kept in the same place. Even to remember those things brings tears to my eyes.

Then, after he started sending letters twice a day, I would wait for the postman every day. I would give him two rupees as a tip to make him happy so he would come first to my house. I used to be greatly pained If I didn’t see the postman even for a day, and I used to go and sit under the shade of a tree that leaned over my house, facing south.

“Did he send any message? ” said my sister. My sister knew him from her childhood so I sensed that she wanted to help me. “Nothing would happen to her husband.” I told her with a trembling voice.

I could hardly speak. “OK, now I will hand up the phone. I can’t pay the bill any more.” He hung up.

“At least we should have four children, got it? If one cannot help, there will be another. There is a saying, the brave have twelve.” Only last month, he had written that in a long letter to his wife.

“Kamala sister I always see only your face in front of me. I have been so restless to meet you. At all times, I have been living with your love.” I repeat his last letter again.

With no other source of income, my friend is dependent on the pension she receives for her survival. “Kamala, my husband has been died. I am homeless, loveless,” said the teary-eyed Rita. She is not alone. The overwhelming majority of women victimized by poverty are hovering between life and death, due to lack of timely financial support.

When there is lawlessness in society, women’s lives are torn apart.

Copyright mediaforfreedom.com