'Never seen a happy home': 11 women see a ray of hope

Peehu, a 19-year-old girl who got married on Friday at a mass wedding ceremony at the Nari Niketan in Sanganer, Jaipur, said she never saw a happy home in her life, but now hopes to spend a joyous life with her husband and in-laws.

- Senjuti Sengupta

"I have never seen a happy home in my life. But now I will have a family and I want nothing but to spend the rest of my life happily with my in-laws," said Peehu (name changed) who fled her home in Bihar's Rohtas when she was just 15-year-old and took shelter at the Nari Niketan in Jaipur.

Peehu got married to a Kota based shopkeeper who applied at the Social Justice and Empowerment Department along with over 1,900 men who had applied to marry the women from the institution.

Peehu can't recall her mother who left home when she was just a toddler. "My father used to return home drunk every night and beat me and my mother. My mom left but I had to stay with him. Few years later, he got married to another woman. But my stepmother never loved me either," she said.

When she was 15, Peehu's father got her married to a man forcibly. After spending only 10 days with her in-laws, Peehu fled her home and reached Patna station to lodge a police complaint against her father and in-laws. "But no one helped me. Meanwhile, I met a person who told me that I might get a job to survive in Rajasthan. He took me to Jaipur station from where the railway police staff rescued me and sent me to Nari Niketan which became my new home," Peehu said.