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They can't get married because they live in a dangerous village.
Dozens of men and women are straining to hear the wedding bells in the Regaal village of Jammu and Kashmir, where an eleven-year-old insurgency has left nearly 30,000 dead and destroyed tens of thousands of families.
But no one wants to tie the knot with them.
All because bullets keep zipping through the village and many others, which lie on the border between India and Pakistan, pock-marking houses, scaring people and sometimes even killing them.
"Pakistani rangers (border guards) open fire from their border posts and hit our houses," said Regaal resident Major Singh.
"We do not venture out," he was quoted as saying by The Tribune newspaper.
The death knell to the nuptial gongs seems to have come when a stray bullet killed a marriage negotiator.
"Since then nobody is willing to have his son or daughter married in our village," said Bablee, another villager.
And since local customs don't allow couples from the same village to marry, the problem has aggravated.
Border Security Force personnel have been patrolling the area, but have failed to boost the confidence of the villagers.
"Once a boy or girl is 18 or 20 years old, they should get married. But for the last three years, they have long passed that age," said Madhubala, another villager.
Despair seems to be setting into these villages.
"If this trend continues, several villages in this sector will witness a sudden decrease in population," said Regaal villager Balbir Singh.
Indo-Asian News Service
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