May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (20 page)

All four couples worked on the land for a living, but only Chinnaswami and Karuppai, an uneducated Harijan husband and wife who made less than a dollar a day between them, were desperately poor. They were thin, dark and sinewy, and most days they worried that they would not have enough to eat. I remember when I took their picture that they stared straight into the lens with intensely serious expressions, even more than other villagers, as if believing that the camera might uncover their souls. Karuppai, the wife, wore a thin cotton sari, and Chinnaswami, her husband, had on a Western-style shirt and a worn, faded lunghi, the traditional cloth that men tied around themselves like a skirt. Both husband and wife were barefoot, and no one could doubt that they had worked in the fields all of their lives. Eight years before, they said, they had hired an old man who lived in the hills to kill their fourth daughter. He gave the day-old baby the sticky white milk of what the villagers called the erukkampal plant, a spindly, light-green bush that grew along the roadside. For his services, the parents gave the man a free meal. “We felt very bad,” said Karuppai, the child’s mother, who was nineteen years old when her daughter died. “But at the same time, suppose she had lived? It was better to save her from a lifetime of suffering.” She spoke in a quiet, flat tone as we sat on the floor of a local doctor’s house. I had expected a dramatic, anguished revelation; instead her admission was made in grim, simple detail. I think this was partly because she was talking about an event eight years past, and also because she was nervous and terrified. Karuppai’s face was expressionless, and she sat very still. Jaya was herself uneasy interpreting my questions. By the end of the interview, the tension in the room was suffocating.

A second couple, Muthuswami and Rajeshwari, were from a slightly higher caste and made more money. But three years before, they had their second daughter killed. “Abortion is costly,” Rajeshwari, the child’s mother, explained, almost defiantly. “And you have to rest at home. So instead of spending money and losing income, we
prefer to deliver the child and kill it.” I honestly don’t know if Rajeshwari saw no difference, other than the expense, between abortion and infanticide. Her words were shocking, and would be powerful fuel for an antiabortionist. Perhaps the harsh economics of her life had made her as callous as she sounded, but I suspect she was putting on an act and was too proud to let an outsider like me feel sorry for her. Her manner continued to be lively as she explained, as we sat at a local landowner’s house, that she had waited twenty-four hours before killing her baby. “I was of half a mind to bring up the child,” she said. “I couldn’t decide. But because of the problems she would face at a later stage, I decided to do it. And everybody else was in favor of putting the child to sleep, so I decided to go along.” But it was the mother-in-law, not the mother, who gave the child the milk from the erukkampal plant.

A third couple, Mariaye and her husband, Natesan, both illiterate and from a low caste, had also stood back while Mariaye’s mother-in-law had administered the milk to their third daughter two and a half years before. We were talking at the same landowner’s house. “The child had breathing difficulties, and then froth came from her mouth,” Mariaye told me slowly. “She became pale, and then she died.” I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Mariaye’s husband, Natesan, filled the silence. “It was a peaceful death,” he said.

Of the four, the last couple I met, Muthaye and her husband, Mohanasundaram, were the parents I understood the best, to the extent that I understood any of them at all. Or maybe it was just that I saw a glimmer of their tragedy that the others had not allowed me to see. They were low-caste field laborers, and they too had killed their second daughter. We spoke first at the doctor’s house where we had talked with the first couple. Muthaye was twenty-four, a slip of a woman in a yellow cotton sari, with her hair in a simple ponytail that made her look like a schoolgirl instead of a mother who had been through the kind of trauma she had. Like most village women, she was wearing her wealth: two nose studs, a pair of diamond-and-gold earrings, several gold toe rings. She remained utterly silent, with a serious, worried expression on her face, while her husband and mother-in-law did most of the talking. Her husband could have been any one of the thousands of young Indian men I had seen on the streets of small-town India: thin, with a little mustache, and an open, cheerful face that displayed an innocence mixed with a hard-learned savvy. He was
twenty-nine years old and wore a Western short-sleeved shirt and a lunghi. His mother, Nallamma, had a wiry build, white hair, sun-leathered skin that crinkled around her eyes and the take-charge look of mothers-in-law across India. As she talked, her grandson, a little ten-month-old boy in a T-shirt that said “Freeport, Bahamas,” gurgled and played on the floor.

Muthaye and Mohanasundaram had been married six years. Mohanasundaram had a fourth-grade education and made a dollar a day harvesting rice, peanuts and the tall stalks of the cassava plant, whose roots were dried and made into small, starchy granules of tapioca. His wife, because she was a woman, made fifty cents a day for the exact same work. They could not find jobs every day, but in a good year, with rain, the couple could bring home about $350 between them. Mohanasundaram’s parents owned an acre of land, and this brought them about $250 a year, putting the total annual income of the family of four workers at $600. Although the four made less than India’s average per capita income of $250, the family was not desperately poor. Everyone ate two meals a day—a warm cereal before leaving for the fields at eight in the morning, and a dinner of rice and perhaps cooked vegetables when they returned at five in the evening. They lived in a collection of smooth mud huts with thatched roofs, all very clean, under a cluster of coconut palms at the edge of a peanut field. They had a fresh-water well and several animals, including a cow, which Muthaye milked in the mornings. Life was hard, but the family was not living a hand-to-mouth existence. The acre of land gave them security, and unlike so many other villagers in India, they seemed to have a plan for the future.

This, in fact, was what had driven them to murder. Three years before, Muthaye had delivered her firstborn, a girl. A year later, when she was pregnant again, the family decided—although it was not clear exactly who Mohanasundaram meant by “the family”—that should the second child be a girl, they would “put her to sleep.” The reason, the mother-in-law and Mohanasundaram said, was that “we wanted a male baby.” When Muthaye felt her first labor pains, about noon one day, she was taken to the home of a dai in a nearby village. She delivered a little girl at four that afternoon. Three hours later she returned home with the child. The next morning at dawn, “the family” gave the newborn some cow’s milk mixed with five sleeping pills they had bought from a pharmacist in town. This was done inside one of the huts as the mother-in-law and both parents watched. The baby,
they said, fell fast asleep. Two hours later she had stopped breathing.

A few relatives were called for the funeral that day, and were told simply that the little girl had not lived. No other explanation was given, and the relatives asked no questions. Possibly they suspected what had happened and knew not to press; possibly they really thought the girl had died a natural death, since it happened all the time. Ten days later, a government health worker came by on her usual rounds and asked about the child. The family said she had died because she refused her mother’s milk. The health worker noted it down, made no accusations and left.

Through Jaya, I then asked Muthaye and Mohanasundaram how they had felt afterward. Like that of the first couple I met, their story had so far been unemotional and straightforward. “For a month, we cried every day,” Mohanasundaram, the husband, said. “We felt bad, but bringing up girls is very difficult nowadays.” Then the mother-in-law chimed in. “It was not wantonly done,” she said. “We were not in a position to bring up the child.” Muthaye, the mother of the dead child, said nothing and stared into space with a strained expression on her face. It was impossible to read her mind, but I had the feeling that bringing up the murder of her daughter—which had happened only slightly more than a year before—was a nightmare for her. I wondered if she played the death over and over in her mind, or if she had forced herself never to think of it again.

Sensing my uneasiness, her husband moved on to explain the family finances. As part of a local bank savings program called the Marriage Saving Scheme, he had deposited 3,000 rupees—2,000 of his own, 1,000 borrowed—when his first daughter was a year old. This was the equivalent of about $250. The bank had promised, he said, that when his daughter was twenty-one, an age when he expected her to be ready for marriage, it would give him 22,000 rupees, or $1,700, an adequate dowry for his caste. Mohanasundaram explained that he would then ask for the same amount in dowry at the time of the marriage of his son, the ten-month-old who was gurgling at our feet. This was the common way that people like Mohanasundaram afforded dowries at all. Mohanasundaram felt that a second daughter would have ruined his financial plans and the family’s future as well. Another 3,000-rupee deposit in the Marriage Saving Scheme for another girl would have been almost as much as he and his wife earned in a good year. They would have had to borrow all of the money, which would have put them in debt, probably for life. And yet without a dowry, Mohanasundaram
almost certainly could not have married off the second daughter, which was his chief responsibility as her father, and a duty Hindus like himself believed was an essential part of a meritorious life. As an unmarried woman in rural India, his daughter would have been shunned for the rest of her life. Mohanasundaram told me he didn’t like dowry, but that he felt he had no other choice.

Jaya and I went from the doctor’s house with Muthaye and Mohanasundaram to their collection of huts, first piling into the car and then walking along a red dirt road under a blazing sun. When we got there, the family insisted we sit down on a charpoy in a patch of shade and have something to drink. The mother-in-law then directed a man who appeared to work for them to climb the trunk of one of the palm trees. The man scampered up, and with a big knife cut off several green coconuts, which came thudding down to earth. The man climbed back down, lopped off the heads of the coconuts, then presented Jaya and me with two each. Jaya took the first one, leaned back her head, opened her mouth, and poured the milk in directly from the coconut. I followed her lead. The milk was sticky and warm, but clear and not too sweet. I found it an oddly pleasant moment, sitting there in the shade enjoying the bounty of nature, as if I had not spoken to the family an hour before about what they had done to their second daughter. Jaya continued to talk to the family while I took pictures. Muthaye told us she was using no form of birth control, and that she was afraid of a sterilization operation because she was convinced it would mean a month away from her work.

As Jaya and I were leaving, I asked the husband where his daughter was buried. He pointed in the direction of our car, and then walked us down to the grave. It was an unmarked spot right along the road, with a beautiful view of the peanut fields and the hills above where the temple stood. The scene was so lovely that when I saw two women walking along the road carrying bags of rice on their heads, I got out my camera to take their pictures. One of the women was obviously pregnant, and Jaya went up to talk to her. She soon came back disgusted. “That woman has one son and two daughters,” Jaya said. “She told me that if this one’s a girl, she’ll kill her.”

SIX HUNDRED MILES FROM BELUKKURICHI, BOMBAY RISES UP ON THE
other side of India, a fetid megalopolis of twentieth-century skyscrapers, crumbling Victorian gentlemen’s clubs and wooden shacks jostling
for breathing space on a narrow island that extends south into the Arabian Sea. Calcutta has long been India’s internationally famous urban disaster, but I came to feel that Bombay is catching up and in sight of surpassing it. The stench of Bombay’s poverty is particularly hard to take because nowhere in India is there such an abyss between those who have and those who do not. Bombay is the nation’s financial capital, industrial engine and the home of its film industry—in short, the source of most of India’s wealth. A sliver of the population, the very rich, inhabit apartments overlooking the sea for which they pay five thousand dollars a month, yet more than half of Bombay’s ten million people live in squatters’ slums. Bombay is the chic woman in the latest silk salwar kameez, but also the beggar who thrusts his leprous stump through her open car window when she stops at a light. Bombay is the “Queen’s Necklace,” the twinkling lights along the dramatic sweep of Marine Drive, and also the reeking swamp of raw sewage that greets visitors as they leave the airport after arriving on a direct flight from London. Bombay is the new industrial baron who hurries by the oxcart, and the elegant French restaurants not far from the street food of Chowpatty Beach. While Delhi is a political capital, like Washington, that goes to bed early, Bombay is up late, drinking imported Scotch on marble terraces open to humid breezes and the ripe smell of fish. Bombay is glamorous, exciting, decadent, appalling. Nowhere in India is money more important.