Dehlvi’s 1914 memoir raises the possibility that the women of the Meerut were not bazaar prostitutes but “women whose men had been imprisoned” – “respectable” women, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Building on this clue, this chapter asks who were these women, why were they at the cantonment, and how did they regard the British? For answers, this chapter turns to “family pension” records from the 1850s. What emerges are soldiers’ family relationships and, from the British point of view, their scandalous nature. British “Pension Paymasters” came to argue that many bereaved women receiving pensions were not what they claimed to be, namely, war widows. Official distrust of such women grew dramatically in the mid-1850s, largely based on a narrowing definition in the official mind of what constituted legitimate marriage. The result was the denial of pensions to these women and, not infrequently, their criminal prosecution, especially in the region of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, whose marriages were deemed insufficiently legitimate. Pension fraud investigations also revealed, in the western reaches around Delhi, the Punjab, and Afghanistan, secondary marriages to younger women.