The weight she carries in her heart

It was soon after her wedding in 2012 that Anju Rani’s life began to unravel. “My husband was addicted to alcohol, and we would have arguments every day. I was breaking apart inside,” says the 34-year-old mother of two.

Her husband contributed nothing to household expenses. There was not enough money to raise their daughter. “Our electricity bills were often left unpaid,” she says. “Debts piled up, and moneylenders would visit and harass us. I spent those days in fear.”

Every time she visited her parents’ home in Ayadnagar, a village located 30 kilometres from her marital home in the town of Siyana, in western Uttar Pradesh, neighbours and relatives downplayed the strain her marriage placed on her. They would insist that she return to her husband, and for years, she did, her daughter in tow.

Anju’s mother has lived alone since her father died of cancer 15 years ago. “One day, I left everything and went back to my parental home for good. He never came for me, and I never went back,” says Anju, seated next to her mother on a threadbare charpai (cot).

She began to work as an agricultural labourer, earning Rs. 200 to Rs. 250 in daily wages, depending on the season and if work was available.

In 2017, she decided to try marriage one more time, and a second daughter followed. “I tried to live my life again, but the second marriage turned out to be even worse. This husband also drank and beat me. He would sell essential household items for liquor—first the grains and the cooler, then even my sewing machine. He later started stealing from people’s homes. I was humiliated.”

Weary but determined to protect her daughters, Anju returned to her mother’s home. “The people around me thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t make either marriage work.”

An unskilled labourer who works on harvesting vegetables, weeding and sowing, Anju struggles on many days to find any work at all.

During an overcast afternoon in August, Anju is working in the paddy fields. She sometimes shares her emotions with other women workers; this gives her the courage to live.

“It lightens my mind,” Anju says. “Sometimes, when my frustration overwhelms me, I tell them that I feel like dying, and they say, ‘No, no, don’t think like that. Who else do these children have besides you? Take care of yourself, think of these children. Your husband decided to leave you. Let him stay gone.’ This gives me some comfort.”

Despite the sisterhood in the fields, Anju finds herself struggling to fall asleep on many nights as traumas of the past creep back into her thoughts. At Raksha Bandhan this year, she rued the loss of her brothers early in her childhood. “My two daughters don’t have a brother either. I wonder if their condition will be like mine, with neither a father nor a brother in their lives.”

Anju belongs to the Chamar community (listed as a Scheduled Caste in Uttar Pradesh), formerly associated with leather work. Large numbers of this caste group are landless agricultural labourers who continue to endure stigma and disparities in access to basic services.

Her challenges, not uncommon among women in rural India, are felt more acutely by Dalit women, she says. These struggles inside and outside the home contribute to deeper mental health issues, but unable to access medical care for stress, many women accept their struggles as fate or misfortune.

Anju, like other Dalit women interviewed for this piece, pauses when she narrates the story of her life, the silences conveying almost as much as her narration. Those moments of silence, when the women seem lost in thought, explore the mind’s spaces from sorrow to emptiness.

Often unaware of the nature of her mental stress, Anju, like tens of thousands of other Dalit women, has never viewed her darkest moments as symptomatic of worsening mental health or a mental disorder. However, no specific data exists on the incidence of mental illness—the National Family Health Survey records mental disorders only under the broad umbrella of ‘disability’.

“My only dispute was over his drinking habits,” she says emotionally. “My failure to compromise on that one thing has punished me, leaving me alone to bear my sorrows.”

The education of her two daughters is a solitary source of inspiration, but this too does not bring respite from stress. “I have given up hope of finding happiness in my own life,” she says. “Now, whatever I have to do, I will be doing only for them. My own life is hell anyway.”

Similarly resigned to her fate is Shivani, 23, who also belongs to the Chamar caste. A resident of the Valmiki neighbourhood of Ayadnagar, she was married off while still in Class 10, missing her tenth grade exams as the wedding date had been fixed.

Shivani has now been bedridden for eight months. Her frail body hurts if she walks, steadying herself with a palm on the wall. Struck first by jaundice and then tuberculosis, she is battling both illnesses.

Longing to hold her daughter close, Shivani is eager to recover soon. As she dwells on her inability to take care of the three-year-old girl, she feels overcome by helplessness. Prone on her charpai, she watches her daughter build minars (castles) from mud, wipes away a tear, and props herself upright.

She says, “Before my illnesses, I could easily handle household chores. Now, my family does my share of the work. I feel suffocated with shame as I lie in my bed and watch my parents-in-law do all the work. I hope I can recover enough to resume my duties towards the family.”

Her long illness has taken a toll on her appearance, and on her complexion, she thinks. “I don’t even feel like looking at myself in the mirror.” Her mother-in-law agrees: “She used to be so beautiful, but the illnesses have blackened her.”

Only 17 years old when she was married, Shivani’s first child was a boy, who died when he was 18 months old. “Everyone says he had the same illness I have. Mucus built up in his chest, but we found out only after he passed away.”

Her little girl is sick too, with a congenital defect, an abnormal opening in the wall of her heart. “She has a hole in her heart.”

Her husband is a labourer, but with a disability in one leg, he struggles to find work. Before her illness, Shivani could sometimes supplement the household income by working in the fields during the harvest of chillies or paddy.

For her treatment, Shivani has to travel to her parental home in Hapur town, 10 kilometres away, where medical facilities are better than in Ayadnagar.

With a population of about 4,400 as per the 2011 Census, the village has a health centre under the National Rural Health Mission. A community health officer conducts health check-ups and provides care for common illnesses such as fevers, sore throats or digestive disorders here. For more complex cases such as Shivani’s, the only option is to travel to Hapur, to visit a private hospital.

Shivani is dispatched to her parents for every illness. “They think that my illnesses originate from my parental home. At my in-laws’, I am in no state to work while sick and they don’t even take me to the doctor. At home, my mother would bathe and wash me. My brother would carry me to the toilet and bathroom.” She would stay with her parents for months, returning to her marital home when she felt a little better.

“I feel like I am becoming a burden on my family,” she says sadly. “I am still alive only because of them.” Her father is a mason earning a daily wage, and he has taken several loans in recent years to pay for her treatment.

Not very far from Shivani’s home lives Kiran, 28, who belongs to the Koli community, classified as a Scheduled Caste in Uttar Pradesh. Kiran suffers from a fungal skin disease that causes sores on her upper body, which spread if untreated. The chronic illness is not her only source of mental trauma. In 2019, her five-month-old baby boy died in her arms, after months of the family trying, in vain, to diagnose his condition.

Doctors in Hapur town advised them to visit the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, about 60 km away, where tests revealed a heart defect. By the time they could save enough money to return to Delhi a second time, the child’s health suddenly deteriorated.

“Some time later, he stopped crying,” she says, defeatedly. “He could have been saved.”

The tragedy occurred during the monsoon, when her husband was away for thes annual ‘Kanwar yatra’, a Hindu pilgrimage in which thousands of men walk, some of them barefoot, to collect water from the Ganga in Haridwar to offer to Shiva temples in their hometowns or villages.

“I had asked him not to go, but he brushed me off and said that he wanted to use this excuse to travel. All the men of my family were away in the Kanwar yatra,” Kiran says.

A year later, Kiran became pregnant again, but lost the foetus during the second trimester. She later gave birth to twins.

To cope with her family’s poor financial situation, Kiran does tailoring work and teaches sewing. Her husband is a labourer. Kiran says, “Some women in the neighbourhood bring their clothes to me for sewing. Thus, I am able to earn one thousand to two thousand rupees a month.” It is not adequate for their expenses, including rent and interest on various small loans. In the face of all these responsibilities, Kiran says, her skin disease “feels small”.

Despite the discomfort, she works hard to stay busy with housework and sewing. “Otherwise, I cannot continue living. It is still hard for me to get over the trauma of losing two children.”

Kavita Rani, an Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA worker) in Ayadnagar, says the women she meets everyday are too powerless to talk about their poor mental state or pay any attention to it. “Forget about getting treatment for depression,” she says, “even for any physical illness that their family members contract, there is no money to spend on medical care.” On rare occasions if women gather the courage to seek treatment, they are compelled to borrow money, Kavita says. “And if there’s no money, how would they repay it?”

Kavita herself had a lengthy bout of fever in November 2024, and had no choice but to borrow money from a neighbour for medical expenses. Like most women in the villages around Hapur, she too approached a “jholachhap” (quack doctor), who gave her medicines for a few days. “I would take my medicines on an empty stomach and go to sleep. One day, my health deteriorated severely. There was no one to look after me. I felt I wouldn’t survive. Only one thought kept troubling me: If something happened to me, who would take care of the children?” she says.

Like Anju, Kavita too could expect no support from her husband. “Whatever little he earns is spent on alcohol.”

On the wide gaps in awareness about depression and socio-economic stressors that may exacerbate or contribute to mental health disorders, she says women find that stress and anxiety are part of their daily lives. “They get lost in their own minds and overthink until their heads start bursting with pain. Sometimes they tie a dupatta around their head and lie down. If that doesn’t work, then they fetch some Saridon from the chemist, and thus the cycle continues.”

Anju acknowledges the inclination to dismiss their own emotions. It has become a habit now to suppress her feelings, she says, and to focus on her family instead. “I cannot receive anything more than what God has written in my fate. I have tried many times to live life on my own terms. All I found was loneliness.”

This story was originally reported in Hindi.

The opinions and views expressed are those of the author. Laadli and UNFPA do not necessarily endorse the views.