The Enduring Human Spirit (Part 1/5)

Published10 June 2019

Reading Time 3 mins

Author Stories of Nepal

Location Nepal

"I do not remember my life that much. It was a series of traumatic events. My first memories are of the daily fights at home. My dad used to get beaten up by my mom. This night, I woke up and I saw that my dad was in a pool of blood. My mom had hit him with a Khukuri. The reason for the fights at home was alcohol, mostly father coming home drunk. Also, my mom can be a violent person. Her mother was abusive to her and she had gone through a lot in her life. At the age of 13, her brother forced to marry a crippled guy. For money. When she tried to escape the relationship, her father-in-law put her inside a sack, hung her in a tree and flogged her. He was planning on killing her that night. Around midnight a villager found her and helped her escape. Bloodied, she crawled for 3 hours. People found her lying on the side of the road unconscious. They took her to the hospital and she recovered. She found work at the local carpet factory. She was only 14. Then a childless family adopted her. But she was used as a servant. Mother tells me she felt very disrespected and eventually ran away. She then got married again. It was only after having two kids with her husband, she found out that this man was already married and had children. She felt deceived and she made a choice to run away. She returned to the village she had once fled. After all, her family was also in the area. She started a little shop. That was when my father entered her life. A young, handsome, educated fella who had completed his B.Sc. He was a government officer, very reputed and also the son of a landlord. He pursued her for months. But my mom did not want to get into a relationship as she felt she had seen enough in life. But my father wouldn’t stop. So my mother called the cops on him. When the cops came they argued that my father was a good and an able man with social status of a Bahun and that it was in the good interest of my mother to accept his proposal and marry him. Mom must have thought about what the cops had said. Not long after that, they got married."

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