A young girl from the Indian state of Bihar kept cutting the power in her entire village so she could meet a boy from a rival village without anyone seeing them together.

The people of Bettiah, a village in Bihar’s West Champaran district, had been on edge for over a week due to the unusual power outages that seemed to occur almost every night. The total darkness created perfect opportunities for thieves, so people appealed to the electricity company to fix their network, but its representatives reported no infrastructure issues. No one could understand what was going on until one night, when some of the locals stood watch in the village and caught a young couple meeting under cover of darkness. It turned out that the local girl, Priti Kumari, had fallen in love with Rajkumar, a young man from a rival village, and she kept cutting the power in the while village to keep the relationship a secret.

Photo: Ross Sneadon/Unsplash

“Preeti used to cut off the electricity of the village every night due to which many thefts were reported in the village. We were troubled by that girl,” a Bettiah villager told India Today.

A viral video that has been doing the rounds on Indian social media shows a defiant Preeti trying to defend her lover as young men from her village corner and threaten to beat him. Some of them do manage to land a few stick blows on Rajkumar, but according to local media, he managed to get away and then took his revenge on the assailants with the help of friends from his own village.

 

In the end, in order to avoid further violence and power outages, the people of the two villages decided that the young couple should marry, so their wedding was made official at a local temple.

Preeti’s strategy to keep her relationship a secret was actually inspired by the idea of an Indian electrician who made news headlines last year for cutting power in his home village to meet his girlfriend in secret.