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“We have parked our boats in safe places,” Dhobi said.

In Kutch, where the cyclone was expected to hit land, 57-year-old boat owner and businessman Adam Karim Dhobi said this was the worst storm he’d seen since 1998.

Varsha, the daughter of a dhobi, or laundry man, wants to be a police officer.

The couple, their two children, Dhobi's parents and his three younger brothers were struggling to subsist on the erratic sales of the family's small rice and onion crops.

"We were very poor," Dhobi's father, Shivapujan, said of the decision to marry off his eldest son at 12.