JANASENA Posted April 16, 2015 Report Posted April 16, 2015 In a drought-stricken village near Mumbai, men marry a second—sometimes even a third—woman whose only role is to fetch water for the family || A wall inside Sakharam Bhagat's home has a photograph where three identically dressed women of varying ages are seated in a row with him. All of them are his wives, and they live together in the village of Denganmal, 150 km from Mumbai. Bhagat has had all his six children-- three sons and three daughters--with his first wife Tuki. His other wives, Sakhri (second) and Bhaagi (third), are childless, and this is all premeditated. Bhagat, 66 years old, is a farmer by dawn and a fisherman by dusk. He is satisfied with his situation because the wives have different duties that they fulfill with responsibility. Standing beneath a mango tree, cleaning his teeth with a toothpick, his wrinkled face breaks the silence as he narrates his story. "My first wife Tuki got pregnant soon after marriage," says Bhagat, "Therefore it was not possible for her to fetch too much water. She also had to do all the household chores along with helping out on the farm." And so he decided to marry again-- with Tuki's open -heart acceptance. It was then Sakhri, a woman discarded by her husband, came into their lives. As he had to fetch water for the four months of farming that would supply them with grain whole the year, Bhagat married Sakhri after Tuki's approval that she would take care of her eatery needs. Sakhri would fetch up to 100 litres per day, but as she aged and found it difficult to walk such distances, Bhagat married for the third time. Bhaagi, a widow at 26, came into the family about a decade ago, and she was assigned the same duty of getting water for the family. Sakhri is now given in charge of the farmland and works as a farm hand. "If Sakhri and Bhaagi too have children, then who will look after their share of the work?" asks Bhagat. "Tuki's children are their children, too." Though marital arrangement did not face any resistance from the village panchayat because it provided food and shelter to Sakhri and Bhaagi, who would otherwise have had no space which they could call their own. And for instance, this is not only Bhagats story, it is the custom that prevails there since ages. Others in this village also have multiple wives, the second one usually there only to fetch water. They are coined as paaniwaali bais ('water wives') in the region. Denganmal has its own plight of unfeasibility of water because the Basta river that supplies water to Mumbai is barely 8 km away. Three kilometres from the village is also a dam on the river whose reservoir has abundant water. But while pipes take this water all the way to Mumbai, there is no pipeline to the village. More dreadful scenario is, Every time the tanker comes, there are fights that get really scary. Women pull each other's hair, abuse and beat each other up. Anyways, The hardships they undergo is nerve-straining. On any given day, Denganmal's paaniwali bai fetch at least 100 litres of water each, making numerous 3-km treks. Though the proceedings of day to day life of them seems organized, as none of the either three overlaps. From the words of Dasharath Bhalke, an activist of the Shramajeevi Sanghatna, an NGO working in Thane district for the upliftment of the marginalised in villages such as Denganmal: "No one has their daughter marry a man in a drought-hit village. Therefore, it is difficult for the men in Denganmal to get wives from other regions, particularly the irrigated parts of the state. So a man from a drought-hit village will marry a girl from another drought-hit village, or from his own. Such women understand drought and the needs of families in such villages, so there is no shirking of work. Every woman in the family does her equal share of it." Beside the agony they have to face continuously, they have to face serious health complications. "Due to all the water the women fetch, they are now going bald," says Ambu Hema Awali, a resident of the village, "They are stunted and unable to produce children." Worser than this, Another villager, Palu Awali, says that the birth of a daughter is heralded with much happiness here because it means another farmhand or helper is born. As a teenager, Awali says he helped build the Basta dam, a project in which every member of the village participated. But they didn't get any of its water. In 2003, the state government provided huge containers that could hold 5,000 litres of water. But they still had no water connection to the dam. It's astonishing to learn that such type of villages exists in our county. A walk through Denganmal reveals unwashed children in rags, many of them waiting for their mothers to feed them in between their water trips. Malnutrition is high and so is infant mortality. Not only this, A majority of the women here have low haemoglobin levels. Many of them suffer from anaemia, miscarriages, shifted fertility and menstrual cycles, apart from routine back and neck pains. Water scarcity also dictates the household routines for washing clothes in the village; daily wear is washed twice a week, while bedsheets and coverlets go unwashed for months on end. Giving shelter to homeless wives and then rendering them to live a life from hand to mouth shows the spineless custom which these villages are following. Though they had to lead a miserable life, Women in the village hope that at least their daughters would have better lives if the government lays pipelines from the dam to their village. Its high time for it to break the ice and make arrangements for pipelines to end this custom which curbs the progress of one and all over there . Abandoned women could have undergone remarriage and live a proper normal married life. And justifying such customs for the sake of support to fill the belly shows that Bhagat and such people are men of straw as they failed to find any alternatives.
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