We Indians are all gender benders in the negative sense. Doesn’t matter how advanced and urbane quite an impressive percentage of our metropolitan, municipal and bucolic population have become, many of us still feel slightly desperate at the birth of a girl child as a first born. In such scenarios, the gender of the future second offspring becomes anticipatory and prayer dependent— a prayer that holds fifty-fifty proposition of guaranteeing. What if there is a repeat of another girl child? All of one’s emancipation and gender liberality get weak knees in the corridors of the maternity ward at the apprehension of repeat daughters. Not that all the rank and file of expecting parents come under the negative bracket of heart throbbing, never mind, any result, hopeful parents, but the cheerless thing is that many among them with some sense of gender humour show it at the cost of themselves in case of any happily acceptable tight spot.
Years ago when I congratulated a well educated and well-off friend on the birth of his first child, he reciprocated my expression of happiness with rather a grim look and cold, disinterested handshake. The words he uttered with a sense of acerbic humour was insightful of that newly bred, elite, but traditional mindset. He asked, ‘Why congratulate me when I have failed?’ with a pun on the word ‘failed’, meaning a daughter was born to him. Needless to say, in the jocular lexicon, passing with flying colours would have been if a son had been born to him. That useless and downbeat humour has always haunted him as I see him being a doting father to his darling daughter who is very well taken care of by all the members of his family.
I knew a village school teacher decades ago who was allegedly lucky to have passed the test after five failed attempts; in his words the gender humour was with rather an arithmetic connotation. He called his son a plus sign.
It was obvious that he was calculating the amount he would have to spend on the marriage of his daughters and estimating what his son might bring in dowry in return. This only plus was supposed to help him to add to the family’s slim assets in marrying off his five minus signs. That was the initial reason of great rejoice when the boy was born. Khristabdha, as he was called, hated his name; why could not it have been something meaning a scapegoat or something like that?
A few wise elders in the locality never forgot to discuss Khristabdha’s predicament in waiting. He later ran away from home with nothing but the overture of his confused mind. In his father’s family arithmetic, he as a small plus was under bracket with five minus, some big some small standing guards with it. The result would be that the plus sign was bound to falter in adding any sum. An educated daughter-in-law in the neighbourhood was heard giggling often. Reverse gender humour was equally biting.