The love-nest for a newly married couple – or is it just a mud hut?

I was invited to a wedding of a close associate of mine, in Hingurakgoda, whose runs a small rice mill close to my agricultural property there. The wedding photos are in the previous blog entry.

It is considered normal for a man in this area to get married before they reach 25 and the girls before they are 20. I do not know the reason, but I fear parents do not want their children to go astray and often it is they who encourage early marriage. Often the age difference between the young couple is barely a year, and some associations are made in the school itself. Here very few make it to University, a normal method, where marriages are delayed due to higher studies.

It is also worthy of note that many who get married at a young age, are not sufficiently mature, and many of the men are still in their flirtatious stage. It must be noted that as I write this, my boy who is 19 has just been thrashed (while I was writing this entry) by the father of the girl he had an affair with in the village here in Ratmale, where I am at the moment.

She is 17. It was not my place to intervene, and he took the blows, without beating up the older man in turn. It is the way parents get it off when such an incident happens, without blaming their daughter also for the association. By the way she is gated, not allowed to go to school anymore, which is a worse sin for this association from which she has no chance of bettering herself. Now tell me when the girl discovers the Dad has just beaten up her boyfriend, she will be more determined to pursue a dead beat relationship, than if the parents allowed them to associate in their presence when both would finally give it up. So who is the fool?

Anyway to get back to what I was writing, the newly married couple will be living in the main house with his parents. So in the end of the property on the other side of the paddy fields that surround it, the father has built a cosy hut, I went there yesterday to relax in an easy chair in the shade. It is quiet and with the windy season in full swing in the area, a clear breeze blows with the sound of rustling leaves a perfect spot for privacy.

It is a charming property well tended, a right little ranchette with about 3 acres of paddy to make it whole. No wonder those in Rajarata live like kings sometimes, even though in terms of assets they posses very little.