Being an urban woman — dweller of a concrete jungle — you get an idea of your rural counterparts — the women who inhabit vast lands and terraced mountains — only through crude statistics that tells you of their illiteracy, of their deaths during child-births, of their unpaid labour, of their harsh life.

It’s seldom that you have a glimpse of them, not spun out of the figures of statistical bulletins but of real en­counters, no matter how brief, how abrupt.

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