Nirmala
A girl of fifteen, engaged to a young man of her own age, loses her father to a murder and her dowry with him; the match collapses and Nirmala is married instead to a widowed lawyer of forty with three sons of his own. The eldest is very nearly her age, and the household has to work out what she is to him. Serialized in a women's magazine, it is Premchand's flattest and most unsparing account of what the dowry system did inside the house.
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