The School for Child Brides

They plait each other’s hair and sleep with diaries under their pillows – but they’ve got husbands waiting for them at home. Corinne Redfern visits the project transforming young girls’ lives in Rajasthan.

- Corinne Redfern

DAPU CAN’T REMEMBER HER HUSBAND’S NAME. She knows that on their wedding day, she wore bracelets stacked up to her elbows, and necklaces one on top of the other. She knows her two older sisters got married at the same time, that their father paid for dresses for all three of them, and that they came with matching veils. She can’t recall, however, what she ate at the ceremony, or if she got to dance. And she isn’t certain if she cried. But if she did, she says, it wouldn’t have been from happiness. It would have been because she was very, very scared.

The ceremony took place five years ago, when Dapu was nine. Until that day, she’d spent most of her time playing outside her hut, or helping her sisters clean the room where all seven members of her family slept. When her grandfather arranged a union with a boy from another village, she didn’t understand what was happening. ‘I still don’t know anything about him,’ she tells me, avoiding eye contact. ‘I don’t like thinking about it.’ Half an hour before our interview, Dapu had been shrieking with laughter and dancing along to Macarena. Now she’s shrinking into herself. ‘Two years ago, when they were 13 and 14, my sisters were sent 200km away to live with their husbands,’ she explains. ‘That’s what normally happens. You marry when you’re young, then go to live with them later. I haven’t seen them since. I don’t think they’re pregnant yet. I worry about it.’

But Dapu’s fate might be very different. For the past four years, she has been living in Veerni Girls’ Hostel – a boarding house that accommodates 70 girls aged 10-17 and is currently working to eliminate child marriage in rural Rajasthan through education.