Char Meghna (Nadia), May 18: Eligible bachelors are finding it difficult to get brides in a pocket of Nadia because they have been fenced out of India.

Char Meghna village found itself on the wrong side of the barbed wire fencing along the Bangladesh border when it was erected seven years ago.

The fencing had to be in a straight line, parallel to the border road, and so it left Char Meghna out. To enter the village now, one has to go through a gate manned by BSF personnel after several checks on identity and luggage and a gruelling round of questioning.

That’s not all: the gate is open for only seven hours a day — from 6am to 9am, 11am to 1pm and 3pm to 5pm. Visitors have to deposit their voter I-card and sign in a register.

Which father of a bride would want to marry off his daughter in a village that appears enemy territory.

So, Ramesh Biswas’s family has been running in vain for the past few months. The Biswases are affluent, owning about four acres of farmland, but that would be of little consolation to a newlywed girl cut off from her family by barbed wire and rifle-toting jawans.

The furrow on his father’s forehead grows deeper as he ponders that he has two more sons to worry about.

Another young man, whose name is also Ramesh Biswas, was divorced by his wife within three months of marriage because she couldn’t accept the “life in jail”.

“She demanded that I shift to Nabadwip or Krishnagar. But I refused. So she left me and filed for divorce,” said Ramesh, 28.

Prarthana was from Nabadwip town, about 120km from Char Meghna.

Ramesh was lucky to have got married once. A second is almost in the realm of impossibility, at least that is what he feels after searching for a bride for two years now.

“My family has seen at least 30 girls. But no family wants to give their girls in marriage here,” said Ramesh, whose family owns three acres.

“Who would want to have us as son-in-law? Whenever people come to arrange a marriage, they are stopped at the gate and asked to deposit identity cards and questioned.”

A D-shaped village between the border road and the Mathabhanga river, Char Meghna houses about 172 families.

Neither the fencing nor the border road can be built through villages, a BSF officer explained. “So, a few villages might land on the wrong side of the fencing. But we have to be strict about people entering such villages because of their proximity to Bangladesh. Outsiders going inside have to deposit their I-cards and enter their names, addresses and purpose of visit in the register. We can’t help it because we work under orders.

“Our intention is to guard the border and not harass villagers,” he added.

Forty-two-year-old Bijon Biswas is not sure whether to call it harassment, but feels he is too old to marry and blames the fencing for his being not-so-happily single.

“Around the time the fencing came up, I was 35 and looking for a bride. But the fencing stood in the way. No one was willing to give his daughter to a man who lives beyond India’s border.”

But he loves his village and will not move elsewhere to get married.

Like Bijon and the two Rameshes, there are about 15 others — Sahadeb Mondal, Kalu Mondal, Ananta Biswas, Ramen Mondal… — who are trying to get married.

All of them come from farmer families owning three to four acres.

There is no such problem with the girls of Char Meghna. “They get married and go to their in-laws’ home. Neither the in-laws nor the girls have to worry about the fencing every day,” said Kalu.

Local CPM MLA Prafulla Bhowmik said he had raised the problem — faced by Char Meghna’s men — in the Ass- embly and written to the Union home ministry about it.

Block development officer Shyamal Pal, too, is aware of the problem but pleaded helplessness because “it is a matter concerning the international border”.

With no solution in sight, the unmarried Ramesh Bis- was who has two younger brothers said his father was mulling a move to another part of Nadia.

“But that is if anyone is ready to take our Char Meghna land on lease,” Ramesh said.