Draupadi: True, but by the time people internalised this
experience, it had been too late. The sex-ratio
had dipped!
Nandini:
have bothered to lay claim on daughters raised
in a jungle – outside the “securities” of a “home”
Nandini:
“Seeing they don’t see, hearing they don’t
hear”. The Bible is right. Biases seal yours eyes
and ears.
Draupadi: They denied daughters their share in property
and then declared them dowry-hungry liabilities, worthy to be sold off in the hands of death.
Pinning all their “honour” on daughters ‘touch
me not’ confinements, they killed them at the
slightest pretext. So many baby girls were
killed before they saw the light of the day. And
such crude methods were followed in chocking
these unwanted babies to death — tobacco
paste, Pesticides, thick wet towel on face,
leaving the child exposed in severe cold.
Nandini:
Draupadi: Had Bharat, Shakuntala’s son, been a daughter, Dushyant would have come to senses
much earlier. Daughters are not the least
scared of arguing out the offended mother’s
case with unjust fathers.
Nandini:
I have read the reports that about 78,000 female foeticides had been carried out between
1978 and 1983.
Draupadi: There existed a common belief that ‘bringing up
a girl is like watering the neighbour’s plant.’
Nandini:
(i) Men are so crude in their advances that
there is no trace of poetry in their love
making. It is difficult to go on tolerating the
blunt and to-the-point overtures of grunting
animals that they turn into when they are
“at it”. Soon after the act, they turn their
backs to snore away to glory. One feels as
trivialised” as the tin of a Pepsi-Cola kicked
off after an eager gulping down. And the
moment they get up, they are back to
square one – abusive, as violent, as
bossy.
Hats off to the brave mothers who took the
pledge to keep the daughters and rear them up
as assets, sending them to school and letting
them walk tall.
(ii) All the seven husbands want to have a
baby of their own. The idea of having one
or two kids among the seven mates does
not quite satisfy them. They want every
drop of their semen to inherit them … how
funny!
Draupadi: Sometimes I wonder how Sita and Shakuntala
would have responded, if the children born to
them had been girls!
Nandini:
Unborn daughters paid a heavy price. Some
chose not to be born in an ugly world. Some
literally struggled with life and fought with
Death to set the system right for their yet-to-be
born sisters. A fall in the sex-ratio meant a
sudden rise in our status. Now that we are almost an extinct species, men are showering all
the attention in the world to us, but so much
attention is now getting burdensome.
Draupadi Maa, with the decline in sex- ratio, we
also, like you, have been pressurised into taking multiple husbands. In the beginning, this
was fun – the confidence of ruling over so
many hearts. As long as the affair is platonic,
it is fine, but the day it gets physical, it weighs
heavy on us for two precise reasons:
And they refused to nourish the neighbour’s
plant. Now these unnourished “neighbourhood
trees” are the only source of shade and fuel.
Now they all want to lay their claim on the tough
survivors.
Draupadi: The situation did not seem to improve for a long
time. Even when the strong preference for sons
and negative-son about daughters impinged on
the strongly internalised small family norm,
daughters alone were eliminated. Voluntary
agencies, universities, women’s development
corporation, and government departments tried
their level best to sensitise the issue, but their
effect on the environment was as slow as that
of a tree on the climate of a town.
Nandini:
And had Lav-Kush been daughters, they would
not have deserted their aging mother in favour
of a royal family, a family that had dared to
send an expecting mother amidst wild animals
at the most crucial point of her life, that too for
no fault of hers.
Sita would not have retired in the folds of
Mother Earth. How could she have entrusted
her precious daughters to such a strong patriarchal set-up.
We are working women …. How and why
should we produce so many? And, if at all, we
produce, we will have to eliminate boys, to set
the tilt right and restore the sex-ratio…
And had Lav-Kush been daughters, they might
not have been invited to the palace! Who would
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