London: The foreign fairy tale ended for Gursharan Kaur just a few months after her marriage to an NRI in Britain. Her husband was cold and abusive and his family treated her like a slave.

"I had wanted to come to England. In the beginning it was very nice. The family was good to me. But there was a drastic change in their behaviour after three-four months," recalls Gursharan.

At 18, she was lonely, a victim of domestic violence and worse, pregnant with Manmeet, a girl child.

And one day, when Manmeet was just four months old, Gursharan was packed off to India with her mother-in-law on the pretext of a sick father. Her baby did not go with her. A month later, the mother-in-law returned with her passport, but without Gursharan.

"When I spoke to my mother-in-law she told me she had gone to leave me," Gursharan says.

Meanwhile, another deserted wife, Manjit moved to England in 1997 on a six-month-fiancée visa. Her marriage seemed over even before her visa expired. Her husband had no intentions of renewing her visa and overnight she became an illegal immigrant.

"They got me arrested twice saying that I was an illegal immigrant. I had to spend the night there," says Manjit.

However, the British legal system has come to the rescue of these women. When they came to the Newham Asian Women's Project (NAWP), a charity in east London, they got legal advice and took their husbands to court.

The main difficulty that women like Gursharan and Manjit, who are abandoned by their NRI husbands, face is that they can’t count on any help from Indian laws.

They have to fight long legal battles in a foreign country, which isn't easy given the costs and often the language barrier.

These are just two stories, of two women who stood up and fought, but many stories are out there - where wedding bells turned into echoes of despair, and foreign dreams turned into nightmares.

(With inputs from Nilanjana Bose)