A woman who was forced into an arranged marriage with a disabled man has told how her husband asked his mum for chocolate after raping her for the first time. Sunny Angel was 19 she said her parents listed her on three Hindu websites and wrote her a profile describing her personality, bra size, and height. After seeing a few men, they settled on Ajay*, then 25, who would write love letters to her and phone her with promised to ‘treat her like a princess’.
But when they met in person for the first time, just weeks before their wedding, it became clear that his voice was completely different and she realised that is was another person she had been speaking to. But despite her worries, Sunny felt like she had to go through with the nuptials as she didn’t want to bring dishonour on her family.
They married in front of 500 guests, but Sunny said her wedding day felt ‘like a funeral’, and she couldn’t even see her groom’s face as it was covered the whole day. But it was on her wedding night that her torture began. It became clear that Ajay had severe learning difficulties and was described by Sunny as having the ‘mental age of a child.’
It also became clear the love letters had been written by his mother, who told her son to take off Sunny’s clothes and hit her if she tried to resist. She told The Sun: ‘I could see in his eyes he didn’t want to rape me or hit me. He also looked scared and knew I was in pain.
‘Essentially, my parents had just chosen my rapist, which was a horrible feeling.’ The first time after he raped her, she says he asked his mum: ‘I’ve done it now, can I have the chocolate?’ Sunny said that her mother-in-law would show her son pornography for hours on end in order for him to learn how to have sex and would then stand outside their door telling him how to do it.
Shortly after their wedding, Ajay’s mother began to abuse Sunny in order to extort a Mercedes and £10,000 as her dowry. But because her parents couldn’t afford it, Sunny was forced to work until 2am cleaning the house.
Just four months after the wedding Sunny said she was hospitalised because her mother-in-law banned her from eating as a punishment, and she collapsed. When her parents came to visit they realised they had been lied to and took her home, but she had to wait for a year under UK law before being able to divorce.
Refusing to be cowed by her experience, Sunny, now 40, has written a book about her experience called Wings, which was published in July 2017. She also thinks that Ajay is just as much a victim as she is, and said: ‘He was clearly vulnerable – if they’d wanted a carer, it would have been better, but his mum was obviously just using him to reproduce to make money out of him.’