Ria Rambally and Rosemarie Sant
As the debate rages on over laws on child marriage, there is scepticism from an elderly woman who was married at the age of nine, before there were even any marriage laws in this country.
Today Dularie Baboonie Kanhai says she had no regrets about her marriage, she and her husband had a good life which produced ten children and a happy home. But she is sceptical whether young people now have the stamina and the mindset to get married at that age.
Born in Felicity, Dularie says she is 101 years old, which means she was born in 1915. She got married in 1924 at the age of nine. Her husband, of Cane Farm, Tacarigua, was 12 years old when they got got married.
Her hands are worn from years of hard work in the sugar fields alongside her husband, but she still has a magnetic smile and a memory which surpasses some younger than her. She laughed as she recounted her story.
She said her father’s father, her Aja, wanted her to go to school. But her mother’s father, her Nana, did not, insisting that it was time for her to get married, because he said “if children go to school who will marry them?” She did not know the boy and he did not know her. Neither the groom nor the bride saw each other before the wedding.
She got her first glimpse of the boy she was getting married to on the day of the wedding.
Wedding day
She recalled “when we go to get married my brother and them saying watch the boy, so I peeping and so I see him.” She said that when they got married back then they had to cover their faces so that the boy would not see them.
She shyly covered her mouth with her hands as she recalled her brothers promptings to peep and laughed as if the memory took her back to her childhood days and the wicked memory of doing something she should not have.
In those days Dularie said girls got married before the age of puberty (before they started menstruating) because they got the blessings of their families who would do aarti (pass a brass dish with a deya and flowers over their heads and touch their feet and forehead to bless them.) A pundit performed the marriage ceremony.
Dularie said she returned to her father’s home where she stayed until she turned ten, it was then she was allowed to go to her husband’s home in Calcutta #2 where their married life started.
They both worked in the cane fields. She had her first child at age fifteen. She and her husband had ten children. Five of them are alive today. Her husband died in his early sixties.
A bygone age
She said times have changed, “now boys and girls going to school, they get to choose who they get married to, they marry at 20 or 21, but girls don’t know how to do house work, they don’t know how to cook and clean house.”
Long ago she said that is all that they knew and they had to make it work. Unlike Dularie, another child bride admitted she was not as happy with the way things turned out for her and now lives with the regret of never having finished her education.
While her identity cannot be revealed, the 14-year-old told her family she was “in love,” and not interested in going to school. As a member of the Christian faith, the teen approached her parents and informed them that she was seeing a man of Hindu faith in his 20s she was in love and wanted to get married.
Both families agreed to meet and consent was given for the 14-year-old girl and her suitor to be married. The marriage was registered under the Hindu faith and followed by a Christian ceremony.
The 14-year-old was removed from school and taught to cook and clean, but she was also encouraged to work. After several years, the marriage which bore no children, fell apart. Now, 22 years later, the woman, now 36, admitted to having regrets about her decision to drop out of school and get married.
She said that at 14 years old, children choosing marriage have different expectations of the union and admits it was a responsibility for which she was not ready.