I am looking at the maternity ward of a Chennai hospital early Tuesday morning. A friend tilts the phone away from the large family gathered in the dimly lit corridor towards herself so I can see her face — we are on a WhatsApp video call. “The head is showing. Anytime now,” she says, referring to our friend who is having the baby. “I’m calling the others,” she announces, and in under a minute the screen is split into four.
The one at the hospital takes the rest of us — one in transit, one in a Kerala town, and one in London — into the birthing room. We see our friend heaving and pushing, working body parts she cannot feel. Her facial muscles seem more at use than her pelvic ones. She looks strained but it can hardly take away from the gleam in her eye. We cheer her on, but because we are too loud the friend with the phone is deftly ushered out of the room. We are back in the corridor and with nothing to do but wait. We cannot, for the fear of losing connectivity, prance about like the other parent-to-be, but we are just as anxious.
We chat and catch up on our lives. We rarely get together, and the birth of a collective baby is as rare an occasion as it gets. The friend with two girls tells us about them. The married one thinks about planning her pregnancy. The currently single one wonders out aloud if she wants either marriage or children. I, as I am wont to be, ask her why she even needs a man, chide them all for being normative and we are reminded that not much has changed. We talk about technology, thankful to be virtually present at the big moment. We talk about epidural and natural birthing methods.
There is a stir in the corridor. Everyone rushes to the door. The parents-to-be are inside and the baby-to-be’s head is out of the womb. In a matter of seconds there’s a cry (apparently) but we can’t hear it over the call. The man comes out with his phone in hand and bellows “It’s a girl!”, “Three and a half kilograms at birth and all okay with them both.” We catch him on camera momentarily but with that he’s off to share the news with more people. In ten minutes, the pre-edited female version of a picture that has them holding the bump and card that reads ‘Yay! It’s a girl’ goes out on all social media feeds.
We are still on the call, overjoyed, making up names and nicknames. We make promises. The baby will decide its own pronouns. For now it’s an ‘it’. We will teach it to read and dream many different endings for stories, we will train it to fight (like a girl in this context) and swear, and because it is born with a vagina we will teach it to stand it’s ground, take ‘no’ for an answer and never say ‘no’ feebly. And so we go on, making plans for a baby a few minutes old till there is a scuffle in the background. The paternal grandmother has left.
She’d hoped for a boy it seems. Now she’s disappointed because she wanted a firstborn grandson who would keep her family genes going, a boy who would make her husband (and the baby’s grandfather) less bitter about the Hindu-Muslim marriage that made the baby.
The sweet boxes are laid down. For a minute there’s silence. And then someone says, “But at least it’s a fair baby unlike its mom and has taken after the father’s colour”, and a reason (as if one were needed) to reach out to the sweets again is created. We suppose, it is sweets set down for daughter and partly eaten for skin colour. I know why I narrate this story, still so fresh in my memory. If you’re unsure why, give it another read. It should remind you like it did us on the call that some things haven’t changed, and that the glass ceiling gives us a concussion because we are made to believe it doesn’t exist.
I hope you remember to look at your close circles the next time there’s outrage about female foeticide, infanticide or a skewed gender ratio. We do have it in us to straighten the crooked line that is drawn out for girls everywhere.
archanaa seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton