Twenty-year old Malini (name changed) is eight months pregnant but her meagre salary cannot support her medical expenses; her in-laws don’t want to keep her either. Her husband Vishnu (name changed) vanished a month ago but she suspects that his parents have sent him away to their native village to prevent the couple from meeting.

Malini’s mother Nirmala Gaikwad, who works as a nursemaid, does not earn enough to support her family and is worried about her daughter’s medical expenses. “Owing to our poverty, I got her married to someone else but Vishnu continued to visit her often. He promised to marry her and they had an affair. When her husband learnt of their relationship, he told her to leave the house,” said Gaikwad.

Advocate Asuntha Pardhe and Vaibhav Mogane, who are representing Malini, said that her first marriage was null and void as she was a minor then and it was her husband’s second marriage. Malini discovered this February that she was pregnant.

She and Vishnu were married in April in Gaikwad’s presence and Vishnu moved in with the Gaikwads. However, he left the house around a month back and did not return.

“Malini visited her in-laws for information on his whereabouts but was thrown out of the house. Her in-laws also threatened to kill her if she came back,” said Gaikwad.

Her in-laws reportedly visited her house a couple of times in May and assaulted her grandfather. Petrified and yet desperate to find her husband, Malini first filed a ‘missing persons’ complaint and then an application under the DV Act, seeking a monthly maintenance of Rs 2,000 and praying for an injunction restraining the in-laws from committing acts of domestic violence.

Her in-laws opposed the application and denied any kind of relationship with her, refuting her marriage to Vishnu. Their legal counsel submitted that “she had had stayed with Vishnu but never with her in-laws and, hence, she does not come under the relationship of domestic relation”. Malini’s lawyers submitted a copy of the couple’s marriage registration certificate as proof of marriage and the domestic incident report submitted by the Probation Officer corroborated the assault.