Only One Lives

I had three children. Two of them died. Only one is alive. Kamala Kumari Pariyar says this to Human Rights Watch while sitting in the shade outside her house in Nepal’s southern Terai region. She was thirteen when she married. You try to hold that number still and it keeps sliding off.

Nepal has the third-highest rate of child marriage in Asia. Thirty-seven percent of girls marry before eighteen; ten percent before fifteen—this in a country where the legal marriage age is twenty. In July 2014, the government promised to end child marriage by 2020. When that deadline arrived, they pushed the target to 2030. Activists report nothing has changed in practice.

Human Rights Watch interviewed 104 children and young people about what marriage meant to them—about men, about becoming mothers before they were done being girls. The numbers say one thing. Kamala’s voice says something else entirely. Only one is alive is a sentence that contains entire volumes about what child marriage actually costs, tallied in the only currency that can’t be argued away.

There’s a reflex to file stories like this under "elsewhere" and move on. Something about a name, a specific region, a shadow outside a specific house makes that harder to do. Kamala wasn’t a statistic when she was thirteen. She was just a girl.