At 80, you'd expect Tara Mistry to be living a peaceful life befitting her age, surrounded by her doting children and grandchildren. But as a Hindu woman in India, Mistry has endured a torturous life since her husband died more than 20 years ago. Despite a lifetime's work, decades of marriage and having three sons, the rheumy-eyed widow found herself homeless and facing abject poverty.
After her husband's death, Mistry says her sons and daughters-in-law refused to give her food. 'You don't earn so why should we feed you?' they said, even though they lived in the house Mistry had built
with her husband. Desperate, at 60, she found work as a maid in Kanpur. 'I was paid only a few rupees a day for sweeping and dusting, but they gave me food.
And an old friend gave me a sari sometimes,' she says. 'I used to ask my sons to intervene with their wives but they shrugged their shoulders and said, 'What can we do?''
To placate her sons, she handed over the house to them, like so many widows who hope this will protect them against eviction. But one day, her daughters-in-law beat her and dragged her by
the hair out onto the street, forcing her out of her home forever.