Her husband, Uttam, 53, is a farmer and knows about all her poems. From that instant, he has never doubted me,” she explains. Once after coming from the field, I wrote a poem in front of him. “In the initial days, even my husband didn’t believe that I could write poems. A lot of fellow villagers even falsely accused her of plagiarism. People used to ask me how a farmer can be a poet?” she says. “No one believed that I had written them. Within a fortnight she wrote a handful of poems. “That was the moment when I felt I could achieve something in life,” she says with the widest grin.Īfter the incident, she started exploring the art form. Immediately, Jadhav replied saying that Suvarna is a ‘big poet’. A school teacher praised the thank you note publicly. “I didn’t know what a poem was,” she remembers.Ī week later, she went to the school again for the parents meeting. Later, she wrote a thank you note which became her first ever work of poetry. Once while bringing her children back from the school, she conveyed everything to Jadhav ma’am and felt ‘liberated’. Tired of her routine life which had cut her freedom, she would often pray for death. “I felt like I had lost everything in the world.” “During that time, girls were rarely sent to school and I also faced the same,” she recollects. A farmer and a home-maker, Suvarna always wanted to complete her education. The note is a conversation from 2008 which the 46-year-old Suvarna had with Jadhav ma’am, a Government school teacher in Shirgaon village of Satara’s Wai taluka in Maharashtra. I spoke everything,” she says with a sigh of relief.

These are the lines from a thank you note written by Suvarna Maskar who describes it as ‘the moment of awakening’. Jivhala (Translated from Marathi by Vishakha Ghadi) … And I still cherish the memories of that day I came across a person on this turn of lifeĪnd a day came when I forgot everything and dissolved into you The moment had brought back joy in my life

So much, so that I begged for my death to the almightyīecause our friendship was destined to be Never had a moment of happiness… but just gloom Never found respect in that house… but only disrespect The warmth of love harbours relationships This story is part of a series on the everyday heroes of rural Maharashtra.

Bahinabai chaudhari poems