Most marriages are arranged by families, and a man who does not marry for love learns he can marry for possessions. The dowry system, outlawed in India, has degenerated into extortion that goes on long after marriage. For this man, and his family, a woman becomes the ticket to a few imported watches, a stereo, a refrigerator, a motorbike or a car through the system of dowry. A dowry, once a way a father could endow a Hindu daughter with material goods when she could not inherit property, has evolved into a reward paid to a man and his family to take a woman off her parents' hands. In her name people can get any number of things.
Some Deaths Suicides Some deaths are in fact suicides.
Women forced into marriage and harassed by their in-laws poison themselves or jump from buildings or into wells. In separate incidents this fall, two young physicians at the same New Delhi hospital injected themselves with lethal doses of drugs because they could no longer bear seeing the pressures exerted on their fathers to provide more and more goods to greedy husbands. Having sold their gold and land, we are not sure that they will be able to provide anything for our marriages. Hence the decision to end our lives. Her father promptly offered a younger daughter, Kanta, as a replacement.