This is the story of an Indian woman who married at the age of 12, became a mother at 19, was deserted by her husband at 23 and was declared dead at the age of 40.
Asharfi Devi, now 64, fought a 24-year-long battle to prove that she was alive and her efforts paid off finally in May 2012 when a village council court ruled that she was indeed alive.
Asharfi Devi's parents married her to a local farmer, Ram Janam Singh, of Barun village in Rohtas district of the northern state of Bihar in 1960.
In rural India, weddings are almost never registered and Asharfi Devi doesn't have any documents to prove her marriage, but she vaguely recalls that she was around 12 when she married.
What she remembers well though is her delight at being dressed in the bright red bridal sari and the loud Hindi film songs blaring from a loudspeaker perched atop a tree trunk outside her parents' thatched house.
Shock
Her happiness, however, was short-lived.
Soon after her wedding, she discovered that she was her husband's second wife - Ram Janam Singh was a widower whose first wife Jhalakia Devi had died sometime before his second marriage.
At 19, Asharfi Devi became the mother of a baby girl.
But, by now, she says, her husband had started abusing her physically and mentally.
"Four years after my daughter was born, my husband deserted us so we went to live with my parents," she says.
As time passed, Asharfi Devi married off her daughter Bimla Devi to a vegetable vendor, Anil Kumar Singh, while living at her parent's house. Her father and brother paid for the wedding.
