Girl talk

I like being a woman. And I am glad to be one. When she dreamed of having a child, as almost every woman does, at least once in her life, my mother wanted a girl. My friend Bela-Chameli, fairly recently a mother, also thought more of a girl than a boy, and eventually had a daughter who now is the focus of her life. And on the few occasions I ever considered the matter, a girl child was the only choice for me.

But that is not the case with so many women who are part of the Indian population today. Recently there has been a spate of reports about new plans that the government has for dealing with the girl child, wanted or not. Special education schemes, special banking plans, special insurance packages and, best of all, special status for the baby who just happens to be born with a double dose of the X chromosome. All this, because the baby who is thus genetically gifted is deemed by fate and much of traditional India as unfortunate, undesired and, worst of all, unloved. She is often killed before she is born and as often after. Or she is thrown away.

What frightens me is that this is not a figment of some deep, dark and dire horror film script-writer’s imagination, but really truly part of today’s ethos in much of the ‘modern’, ‘civilised’, ‘educated’ world. Friends of mine shock me with the way they think in this matter, when they tell me stories of how it all works in their own families and, even more horrifyingly, in their own lives and minds. For me, to be a girl child was to be wanted, to be cherished, to be given the best, of not better, than any boy would get. For them, to have a girl child was anathema, a disgrace, an urgent need to try again and get it ‘right’.

I first heard this when a friend and colleague of mine was pregnant. She had worked with the newspaper group that I called home for as long if not longer than I had, and had taught me a great deal about coping with everything from fast food to commuting in the city we lived in. She and I would take off just after lunch for a quick walk around the block, determined to keep our waistlines trim and our minds from becoming filled with the cobwebs that infested the heritage building in which we spent most of our awake time. So when she announced that she was getting married and moving away, I was a little upset at losing a friend, though glad that she was doing what she had always seen as the personal aim of her living. As a middle daughter of three, with a younger brother to keep the family name going, she knew where her destiny had to travel to.

Then she told me that she was going to have a baby. While she insisted that it did not matter whether it was a girl or a boy, she also told me, over and over, that a male child would mean that she did not have to have another. I took that as a joke, a passing comment on the orthodoxy that we had often written about and lamented. But then it became said so often that I realised, albeit rather painfully, that it was true. It took a while for me to understand what it meant, culturally speaking, but when I did, she had already had the child and told me that she was so glad that it had been a boy, because otherwise family pressure would have been overwhelming. They would have been very disappointed in me, she said in a letter, telling me that she was relieved that she did not have to go through the process again, since she had done her duty the first time around.

That was some years ago. I have become a lot less sensitive about the subject and a lot more understanding of what my friend was all about and where she came from. But I still do – and will always – believe that a girl is the best thing to be. No matter that I am part of a culture that tends to believe otherwise.