Sirpurwa, (Gonda), July 23 :    Sirpurwa, (Gonda), July 23:  There is nothing to tell Sirpurwa apart from the hundreds of other villages in eastern Uttar Pradesh that lie separated more by time than distance from the towns around them. Only the hush of silence over the village makes it different. No one here wants to talk about the 'sale' of Nirmaladevi's 12-year-old daughter to a farmer old enough to be her grandfather. 'Please don't ask about it saab, we are a village that has been shamed,' says Om Prakash Sharma. But Nirmaladevi, a mother of 10 daughters, doesn't think so. She remains stoic in the face of the villagers' scorn and excommunication. Afraid only of incurring the wrath of law, she is convinced what she did was for the good of her daughter. 'The villagers are angry with me,' she says as she wipes her tears. 'In this village of Kulin Brahmins, pride means everything to us and they feel I have brought shame on them by giving off my daughter for a price to an old man.' Nirmaladevi won't say what the price was, but a sum of Rs 10,000-12,000 pops up in village gossip. She won't even admit it was a sale. 'I did not sell her,' the 50-year-old woman says. 'I got her married. I saw an opportunity to free her from this terrible poverty and I grabbed it. I know she is a little girl and he is an old man but I do not care for the man's age. He has promised to look after her.' Villagers, who quickly gather around her, hurl abuses as Nirmaladevi justifies her stand. 'Stupid, ignorant woman,' they scream, 'this old hag has sullied the reputation of the whole village.' Nirmaladevi, a landless labourer who has lost some of her 10 daughters to death and her husband to a debilitating disease, went ahead with the 'marriage' even though some villagers got together and promised to pool in money and get Pinky married later. 'We told her that Pinky should at least attain puberty,' says Uma Shanker, 'but the stupid woman couldn't wait a few more years.' Tottering under the weight of an oppressive poverty, Nirmaladevi couldn't afford to take chances. 'I still have two more daughters (Pooja, 6, and Babuni, 3) to look after. Will the villagers promise the same for them?' she asks. At Teliani, the village where 51-year-old Devnath Vajpayee is now living with Pinky, no one wants to talk about the 'marriage' either. All that some of the villagers would say is that Nirmaladevi 'must have been mad'. Vajpayee is a scared man. He knows he has married a girl who was in her third year of school. Insisting that he is not 'all that old', Vajpayee says circumstances forced him to marry Pinky. 'I lost my wife two years ago. I needed someone to look after my two children. I haven't done anything wrong. The marriage was by mutual consent.' He has no answer, however, when asked how he feels having a wife who is younger than his sons. In a corner of Vajpayee's house, Pinky looks awkward in her newly-bought saree, but not awestruck. Wiser beyond her years, she speaks up for her mother. 'I am happy here,' she says, replying, when asked, she doesn't know how old she is. The only time she slips up is when confronted with the question if she would like to continue going to school. 'Yes, yes,' she answers, her eyes lighting up briefly. 'I would have been in class four.'