Rani and Raqiao live in a remote village in India, and they take a long-distance bus to another nearby village to arrange a marriage for Rani's 17-year-old son.
Rani got married when she was 10, her son was born when she was 15, and her husband died in a car accident when she was 17. Now only 32 years old, she still looks very young, but she is going to be a mother-in-law. The woman's family introduced their daughter Zhan Qi to Rani, and praised Zhan Qi as a good daughter-in-law who would take care of her mother-in-law. After some bargaining on the gift money, they settled on the marriage. Rani was a little nervous, because her family was poor, she mortgaged the house to get money for her son to beg a wife, so she must carefully understand the bride's situation and ensure that the large sum of money she spent was worth the money.
In the village where Rani and La Qiao live, men rely on long-distance transportation to support their families, while women stay in the village to work hard, take care of the elderly and raise children. Living in poverty, there are few entertainment programs, and the most cultured person in the village is none other than Jishan. He also married a foreign girl, and his wife often went to the neighboring village to teach the children to read. Every time his wife took the long bus home, Kishan would pick her up at the station and drive her home on a bicycle. This is a very common behavior, which is already apostasy in some cultural atmospheres in India. Many people in the village have little education, including young people like Rani's son Gulab. They booed around Kishan's wife, mocking that her literacy would one day kill her husband, and disguising their inferiority by demeaning each other.
Not long after Rani and La Qiao returned to the village, they were just in time for the meeting. In fact, under the leadership of the village chief, they gathered the villagers to hold a meeting. The theme of this meeting was about a girl in the village who escaped back to her parents' home, whether to send her back to her in-laws' home. Kishan strongly advocated not to send the girl back, and cited the previous example of a girl in the village who committed suicide after fleeing to her parents' home and being sent back. But the patriarch has absolute authority, what's more, other people in the village believe that according to Indian tradition, once a woman gets married, she has nothing to do with her parents' family. It was all men who advocated sending them back, because women had no say, so they could only sit on the sidelines and watch silently.
The girl was dragged out of her parents' home, and even her mother agreed to send her back, saying that her relationship with her husband would improve once she had a child. The girl cried and told her mother that her husband would not touch her at all, how could there be a child? The mother thought it was because she was not doing her duty as a wife. As long as she returned to her husband's house and served her husband well, everything would be fine. Seeing that she was about to be sent to the car, the girl could only tell the truth. It turned out that at her husband's house, not only would she be beaten by her husband, but any man in her husband's family could forcibly sleep with her if he wanted to. Brother-in-law, father-in-law, anyone can, she is powerless to resist. I was pregnant once, because I didn't know who the child was, so I had to have a miscarriage. If you send her back now, you will undoubtedly send her into the fire pit.
The girl's narration surprised her mother, and even the surrounding villagers looked at each other, helpless. But the next scene may be even more shocking. After a short pause, the mother and the men dragging the girl still pushed her into the car that her husband's family came to pick up. The girl stopped resisting and looked at her mother in disbelief until the car drove away. Rani wanted to help the girl, but was stopped by La Qiao. It is not so easy for a person to rebel against a group, which means that you become "them", not "us" to those around you. Knowing that women suffer all kinds of unfair treatment, even women themselves do not have the courage to help other women.
Rani's life is the same. After marrying into her in-law's house at the age of 10, she learned to do various housework to take care of the whole family while enduring her husband's fists. The husband had a mistress outside, and he often took out the money to support the mistress. Rani worked hard to support it, but did not dare to say "no". La Qiao had no children for many years after her marriage, and even she thought she was an incomplete woman, so she always felt that she should endure it when her husband beat and kicked her. The women of the village, or the women of other villages, who do not live like this.
Group situations may lead to loss of self-awareness, ultimately leading to individual loss of self and self-discipline. The girl's mother was able to push her biological daughter into the car because she had lived in this culture of devaluing and objectifying women for so long, she had long bowed to such a group consciousness, and lost the basics of being a person and a mother. ability to perceive. In this village, or in the group under this cultural system, the phenomenon of group polarization causes everyone in the group to accept this set of moral rules, while ignoring other issues of ethics and human nature.
And Rani's good best friend Bikili, although she often comes to the village to perform with the song and dance troupe, does not live in the village, which allows her to see the truth more clearly. She is the backbone of the song and dance troupe. In addition to performing, she also does skin and flesh business. The men in the village not only like to enjoy her hot dance performances, but also like to line up in front of her tent, waiting for her relative Fang Ze.
Rani and La Qiao like to chat with Bikili when the song and dance troupe is performing in the village. They know what Bikili does, but they have never disliked her. Instead, they are attracted by her daring spirit. Beachley encourages Rani to find a man, and tells La Qiao that it is not necessarily her problem that she has no children, and that men may also be infertile. She described to them a man she had met who had opened up her body perception ability, and introduced this man to La Qiao.
Finally, it was a good day for Rani to marry her daughter-in-law. Having a daughter-in-law meant that Rani could become a mother-in-law and free herself from the heavy housework. Perhaps the arrival of this girl meant more to Rani than to her son Gulab. However, when a group of them happily rushed to the bride's house, Rani learned that because the bride had lice, she shaved all her hair, leaving only the short hair hidden under the sari. Rani was very sad. She felt that it was not worth the money to mortgage the house to get such a bride. Moreover, she also felt sorry for her son, shamed him, and became the laughing stock of the villagers. So she let her son do things wrong and beat the bride on the wedding night.
Such tragedies continued from generation to generation. The son watched how his father and other men in the village treated his wife. When he grew up, he also believed that violence should be used to demonstrate his husband's authority. And her daughter-in-law, Zhan Qi, was just like Rani back then. Apart from washing her face with tears, she endured it silently, and her eyes gradually lost the brilliance of a girl.
La Qiao really saw the man who had awakened her female sexual pleasure in the mouth of Bickley. In the cave, La Qiao was the first to cry because of the beauty of sex. This man knew how to appreciate her body, how to teach her to enjoy sex through touching and kissing, something she hadn't experienced in more than two decades. She could have sex as a human being, not a vehicle for her husband's lust, a beast, or something. La Qiao's young and beautiful body woke up.
Beachley came to Rani, and gently reminded her that she should be optimistic about her son, because her son actually came to the song and dance troupe with a stack of money, trying to buy sex from Beachley. Beachie watched him grow up since she was a child, and she couldn't accept that this boy wanted to be her benefactor. How could Rani not know that her son was out of control, and that arranged marriages ruined not only women's lives, but also men's happiness. When he saw Zhan Qi with her hair cut and pitted, all his illusions about a good marriage were shattered, and he became the laughing stock of his companions. In order to regain his dignity, he beat Zhan Qi, looked for prostitutes everywhere, and even owed a lot of money. He thought it was Zhan Qi and the other women who had embarrassed him, so he took his companions to urinate on the textiles that the women in the village were waiting to sell for money. He thinks that his mother and Zhan Qi don't give him a good look anymore because the village's Ki-shan and his wife have given the women a source of income and are no longer subservient to their men. They drove up to Kishan and beat him hard, thinking it would scare the women. But in the end, Rani woke up, her son would only ruin the happiness of her daughter-in-law Zhan Qi, and let her see clearly her failure as a mother.
La Qiao had a child because of the joy that night. She happily waited for her husband to come home and told him the good news. What she didn't expect was that another beating was waiting for her. Her husband told her that she had long known that she was infertile, so La Qiao's child could never be her own. La Qiao looked at her husband in disbelief. The face of the man in front of her turned out to be so ugly. For so many years, La Qiao has been condemned by her conscience for not being able to give birth to a child for her husband, and she hopes to make up for her indebtedness by enduring her husband's fists. Even if she told her that men might be infertile, she didn't ask him to check it out in order to maintain her husband's self-esteem. Who would have thought that her husband had long known that he was infertile, but he still watched La Qiao being ridiculed by the villagers, and still took La Qiao punches and kicks as a matter of course. During the fight, he accidentally knocked over the oil lamp, causing his whole body to catch fire. La Qiao stopped Rani, who wanted to save people. They fled the village and went to find Biqili together.
Bikili's life was not easy either. A new girl came to the song and dance troupe. The boss told her that her good days were gone forever. In order to regain the top spot, she even accepted the most tyrannical guests. Originally thought that another actor in the song and dance troupe had always admired him and would propose to him and take her away. Unexpectedly, the other party really wanted to take her away, but it was just to become her pimp. This was the awakening of Peachy. So when Rani and La Qiao came to find her, the three of them decided to leave here and live only for themselves from now on.
The story takes place in a poor rural area in India, and the tragic living conditions of the women in the story also exist in some parts of China. In many villages, girls are born, some of them are given to relatives or friends who have no children, and some are even thrown into the river. Maybe such a thing has not happened around us, but in many rural or mountainous areas as poor as in the story, such things are still emerging one after another. For these women, it is too far to talk about women's rights, because they are persecuted and suppressed too severely. So for them, being able to realize that they are individuals, possessing human dignity, and possessing human emotions is already the greatest awakening.
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