Dewan Rai

Kathmandu:

My parents told me that I was three months old when the biggest earthquake had hit the country in 1933,” is how Dhan Aryal replies, if one asks her age. Born in a well off family, daughter of the then Anchaladhis (district administrative heads) of Kathmandu, Dhan had only the comforts of an old age home as last resort, literally. Dhan, now 71, lives with nine others in Tapasthali Briddashram, Chapali for more than seven years. Dhan was left with no other options than to join an old age home. A strict, rude and ruthless man’s face, her father’s, recurs in her mind. She cannot quite remember her mother’s face, for she was only eight when she passed away. The prevalent belief then was that a woman has to tolerate whatever their elders do to her or make her do. “People had a common belief that if a woman goes to school she becomes a witch,” Dhan narrates. But her brother went to school. She did not demand that she also should be allowed to go to school. “We did not have our own free will but had to submit to others’ will,” she says. It was the plight of every woman then but she had more in store as her fate.

Dhan was married at the age of 13. Marriage, for her, is “sacred”. She has been putting on vermilion and pote as marriage symbols. She does not like to call her husband by his name. All despite the fact that her husband ditched her without apparent reason the very day of her marriage. “How could I find him?” she queried, “when my parents did not try to find him out?” She was not welcome in her parents’ house anymore. Being a brahmin was a privilege, however. She could find a job of nanny in a Rana’s palace where she served for 27 years. She was already quite an old woman when she went to live at Budhanilkantha.

Three months after Dhan was born, Maiya Subedi was born at Boudha, Kathmandu. She, too, was doomed to live a lonely life. How does it feel living life in an old age home when the rest of the family lives happily in their own home? “Chhoriko jaat, ke garne ta? (it’s a woman’s life, she is always helpless)” is how Subedi always replies. She does not have any grudges against anybody for she does not know what is responsible for her situation. Her husband had gone to India to work the following year of their marriage. She was 13. He used to write to the family. Then he stopped writing. Later, news came that he married another woman the very next year he was in pardesh (foreign land). “My sashu-shasura (in-laws) were kind to me,” she says. “I wanted to leave but they told me to stay.” She stayed, unconditionally serving her in-laws for more than four decades. Subedi’s husband returned after 42 years. He brought with him his second wife and three children. “They misbehaved with me from the very beginning,” she recalls. Subedi stayed in the same house till her husband passed away. She has been living here ever since she left the house she looked after for more than five decades.