School lovers tied knot when kin tried to fix girl with an older man

JAIPUR : Faiez Modi was the only Muslim in his class at Sardar Children’s Senior Secondary School in Jodhpur’s Jalori Gate area. He and Payal Singhvi became friends in Class 7. The two didn’t realise back then that their friendship will turn into marriage one day.

“Our families found out about our affair when we were in Class 10 and both of us faced the music at home. That was the first indication they will disapprove of our alliance but we didn’t know we will marry one day,” Faiez said, talking to Hindustan Times on the telephone from Jodhpur.

The two got married in Jodhpur on April 14, according to Islamic wedding rituals. Payal became Aarifa to be Faiez’s wife. This led to her family approaching the police and then Rajasthan high court against what they called “forced conversion” for marriage and charged the man with kidnapping their daughter.

“After school, we decided to spend our lives together but the trigger for the wedding was my wife’s family trying to fix her marriage with a Bangalore man 10 years older to her. We decided to get married and I approached a maulvi. Our families were kept in the dark because we knew they will not approve of the wedding,” Faiez, 23, said.

Aarifa, 22, is a postgraduate in commerce and Faiez a graduate. “I left college after graduating because I wanted to set up a business to look after her. I set up a small readymade garments shop near my house and began earning ₹20,000 a month,” he said.

After their wedding in April, Aarifa didn’t move into Faiez’s house. “We would be together in the day and she would go home at night. This continued for six months – until October – when we decided to go for honeymoon. But we followed the legal process before travelling. We went to the police to inform about our wedding. We also met the police commissioner for this,” said the man.

Faiez said they went away for a week for the first time in 10 years. “I was fasting to pray to Allah for the issue to settle down. Today, when she came back to me, she told me she too had not eaten anything while she was in the government home,” he said.

The two want to live together for love, he said, and refused to share a photograph, saying they don’t want to get famous. “We only want to live happily.”