Hema soon found work as a housekeeper, but quickly left after the eldest son began sexually harassing her at night. It was her next stop in a neighboring town where she got her first taste of education, when she began working for a doctor and his wife.

“They didn’t want a girl from the orphanage, but I begged them to give me a chance for just one month,” she recounted with pride. “Even without any formal training, the doctor’s wife still trained me in how to be a nurse’s assistant; how to give injections, check blood pressure, apply dressings.”

After five years, a matchmaker friend asked Hema, then 25, if she’d be interested in marrying a man from Nagpur: a fellow Gujarati named Ashok, who was missing a leg. As she was beginning to lose eyesight in her second eye, Hema warned that Ashok’s family may not want her once they knew she wouldn’t fully be able to cook and clean. Anxious to get their son married, Ashok’s family not only agreed, but offered to shuttle her to a non-profit eye institute to try to save her second eye.

“Before we got married, [Ashok’s family] told me that because of my eyesight, they wouldn’t have me do much work, they’d keep taking me for checkups. They told me I’d have no difficulties in life,” says Hema. “In my whole life, no one has ever offered to do so much for me. I was certain I’d found a home, a family, and my place in life.”

Shortly after marrying Ashok, Hema lost sight in her second eye; soon after that, she learned she couldn’t bear children. “My husband would joke from time to time that [now that I was blind] he should get a second wife, to take care of me. I would joke back that I’d get right on it, and one time he just took me seriously.” Ashok asked Hema if he could take on a second wife, though he and his family assured her that it was purely for taking care of the house. “They made a big to-do that when the second wife came, I’d still be the most important wife, and that Ashok would be able to support me better, so I agreed. I found his bride, I organized the wedding, and within eight days of the wedding, his family changed their tune and told me I couldn’t ask them for anything except food or shelter.”

No longer earning an income and newly blind after 26 years of vision in one eye, Hema contemplated suicide, before opting for another path; after all, she had been able to survive and earn a living once before.

“I realized this was my new reality: I don’t have my eyesight anymore, and this is the road I have to forge. Instead of dying, I could take my life in my hands by going somewhere else.”

Once she made up her mind to keep fighting, Hema divorced Ashok and began bouncing around ashrams for blind girls, most of which she was too old to stay at permanently. At one ashram, an administrator suggested to Hema she head to Surendranagar,. The administrator had heard a woman named Mukta Dagli was running some sort of school for blind women, and thought that Hema might be able to find a place to stay there.