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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
Thc shocking act was so obviously involuntary, done in utter despair, that the judge, while sentencing the accused according to the letter of the law, recommended her for mercy. I do not know if the mercy was granted.
She came from an ordinary peasant family. After the death of her husband, she had been lizing with his people as is customary in such cases. Only in well-to-do families, young widows can have the poor consolation of returning to their parents instead of being forced to live with strange people with whom they have no longer any connection, and who usually trcat them as bcasts of burden, not cvon kindly, they being regarded as embocliments of misfortune. For some tortuous rcason, young widows are held responsible for the untimely death of their husbands, and consequent), also for the matcrial loss suffered by the families concerned. Death of able-bodied male youths amounts to considerable material loss for joint families living mostly on the proceeds of the labour of their own members. Widows are held responsible for the calamity, because it was their fate to be widowed. The families, into which they are married, not by their choice (that little fact is not taken into consideration), are adversely affected by their bad luck, which is the result of their own sins. The belief is that a particular youth would not have died, thereby causing material loss to his parents, had he not been married to a girl destined 200
