Forty-five days of cohabitation was all it took for the marriage to sour but, entwined in the complexity of law, Gaurav Sahu and Gauri spent nearly 11 years to obtain a final divorce.
An arranged marriage may be difficult enough to, well, arrange but breaking it has been a greater ordeal for a Mumbai-based couple. Forty-five days of cohabitation was all it took for the marriage to sour but, entwined in the complexity of law, Gaurav Sahu, 40, and Gauri, 37, spent nearly eleven years to obtain a final divorce.
“There was no possibility of reconciliation between the parties after the wife left the matrimonial house due to cruelty to her. We have found that the behaviour of the husband made cohabitation impossible and therefore no reconciliation was possible,” observed the division bench of justices Sharad Bobde and SJ Kathawalla, while granting the divorce on Tuesday on the grounds of cruelty to the wife.
The Bombay high court rejected the husband’s objection over the wife filing for divorce within a year of the wedding. “The objection is raised only because the decision is going against the husband,” remarked the judges.
Representing the wife, advocate Rajan Jaykar had argued that his client had applied for divorce under section 14 of the Hindu Marriage Act. “One can apply for leave of court to file a petition for divorce within one year of marriage under the said section,” Jaykar told the court.
The court was hearing an appeal filed by Sahu, a city-based hotelier. He had moved the HC in 2006 after a family court granted the couple divorce. The trial court heard the case for seven years after the wife sought divorce in February 1999. The couple got married on April 16, 1998, and lived on their own in a rented flat in the posh western suburbs. According to Gauri, her husband started torturing her mentally and physically in less than a month of the marriage. “He used to call me ‘rascal’ and ‘idiot’ regularly,” she said in her petition.
Gauri said that Gaurav would beat her up without any reason. On June 1, 1998, said Gauri in her petition in the family court, she was badly beaten up by her husband. The HC also took a serious note of the said physical assault.
“He first had a verbal fight with her and then assaulted her mercilessly. He delivered blows on her chest. She was badly injured on her right chest and also suffered pnuemothorex (lung collapse). He also had threatened her then,” observed the judges in an order, which was dictated in open court.
The court has also taken on record the testimony of a physician, who supported the wife’s case. “There is no doubt in our mind that it is a clear case of cruelty,” remarked the judges.
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