Crossover Marriages ; Kullu-Manali and Manikaran Valleys Have Foreigners Marrying Natives and Adapting to the Customs and Learning the Dialect so That They Hardly Look Incongruous Among the Locals
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Summary
Deserted by her husband four years after marriage, an illiterate Revti Devi, 23, was resigned to a life of drudgery and uncertainty. With two minor children to look after, she would graze cows, work at apple orchards and collect firewood till three years ago when she met a young German back-packer Francois Norbert Bordier.
Bordier was a paying guest at her grandparents'. He fell in love with Revti who stayed with her parents at Vashisht, a sylvan settlement in Kullu-Manali in Himachal Pradesh. They married when she was eight months pregnant. In 2004, Bordier's name was cleared in a pending narcotics case and he chose to settle in Manali. Two years since, today they own a picturesque stone-and-wood house on the Deodhar-dotted mountain ridge. "We helped each other rebuild our lives and now we are living for the kids," says blue-eyed Bordier. Sporting a Kullu cap, he speaks the local dialect fluently and is converting his in-laws' orchard house into tourist huts. For now, he spends much of his time playing a doting father to four children - of them two from Revti's first marriage. They study in an English medium school. "The relationship has transformed our lives beyond imagination" Revti muses, as she watches her husband e-mailing the children's photographs on a laptop to his parents in Germany. "He is everything to me," says Revti, who is better known among locals as "phorner ki laadi" (foreigner's bride).See the full content of this document
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Crossover Marriages ; Kullu-Manali and Manikaran Valleys Have Foreigners Marrying Natives and Adapting to the Customs and Learning the Dialect so That They Hardly Look Incongruous Among the Locals
Kullu, Manali and Manikaran have foreigners marrying natives and settling down in the verdant valleys, gradually adapting to the local customs, dialect and dress so that they hardly look incongruous among the locals. Cross cultural matches have steadily been on the rise and, more si...
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