Columnists

The Cost of Gluttony

by JESSI KAUR

 

During a recent visit to India, I attended a wedding. It was, to put it succinctly, of the super-rich and the flamboyant. It was the "mother of all weddings".

An old palace, turned into a hotel, had been rented for the occasion. The guest list was comprised of New Delhi's rich and famous, as well as the movers and shakers in the country's political circles.

It was day five of the festivities and feasting. The actual wedding was still a couple of days away. The food bonanza offered each day would put a maharaja's chef to shame. Everything from casual fare like chaat phaat, to gourmet dishes like lobster and oysters, was flown in and freshly prepared in kiosks, which were dressed up like floats depicting the respective regions that the food came from.

I heard someone whisper that the bride's wedding dress had been designed in Pakistan by a karigar whose ancestors had once made coronation robes for Mughal princes.  I wondered aloud: how much did it all cost?  The annual salary of a few hundred people that work for the bride's dad, someone quipped.

For some reason, my mind went back to the previous evening's news that had turned my stomach. At a rally in Bhopal, little girls were shown carrying placards that highlighted the plight of aborted female fetuses. "But Why?" they screamed silently.

A helpless sadness engulfed me when the newscaster went on to say that Punjab was amongst the leading states where the medical community was abetting society-at-large in getting rid of unborn girls. 

"But why?", the tightness in my heart wanted to know.  In the land of Guru Nanak where, even five hundred years ago, female infanticide was condemned, sati was abolished, and widows encouraged to re-marry, why was the age-old oppression of women reaping a harvest of female foeticide?

What kind of pressure do these mothers face that changes them into ruthless murderers? What unnatural instinct makes them turn their wombs into graves? Wherefore has this ill wind taken on such a vicious might that a mother's nurturing milk of kindness can become a stream of blood?

If these heinous crimes, that have resulted in the ratio of less than eight hundred girls for a thousand boys, are not a slap across the very face of motherhood, what is?

Random thoughts flooded my mind as I sat nursing my virgin pina colada, in the old palace gardens where majestic queens once roamed in yesteryear.

I remembered, from childhood days, the scrawny old lady who came to pay her condolences to my aunt, at the birth of her third daughter.

I remembered the horrific facts that turned up while doing research for an article for The Hindustan Times on bride burning in the capital of India. Fake stove accidents, that covered up the deliberate pouring of kerosene on daughter-in-laws who were burnt alive, had become an epidemic in the late 70's and 80's.

I remembered our neighbor's daughter who was sent back home bruised and beaten the day after her wedding, because the parents could not provide a scooter in dowry. 

I remembered my stewardess friend who committed suicide after her mother-in-law forced her husband to take another wife, because my friend had not given birth to a son.

In many cases, the assaults against women were made by other women who, at the very least, aided and abetted their errant sons. It was women who devalued women by considering the birth of a son to be a more joyous occasion than the birth of a daughter.

The girl child was always considered "borrowed wealth", and that is why the "giving away" of the bride by her father found a place in many cultures. (Even during Anand Karaj, the father of the bride hands over the edge of her pallaa to the groom.)

The male psyche that treats the woman as a commodity has sadly rubbed off on women too, and made them co-perpetrators.

Guru Nanak and each of the Gurus that followed had seen the scales of power and privilege heavily tipped on one side and raised a clarion call for true equality. But society remained tardy and reluctant in setting the score right.

Today, educated women submit to a matrimonial system that demands their parents make lavish gifts to the groom's side, promote a culture that is impressed by obscenely grand weddings, and sadly ties a woman's self-esteem and worth to the number of events that lead up to her wedding, or the dowry she brings.

The connoisseurs of ostentatious weddings that drag on for weeks, are blithely unaware of the pressure they cast on the less well-to-do.

That is why many a young man from a lower-middle-class family in Punjab has to give up his education to take up a low-paying job that will help him collect the money for his sister's dowry. And when it is time for him to be wed, the mother demands a recompense that she believes she is entitled to. The vicious system perpetuates itself.

Laying the blame of female foeticide solely on the evil of dowry or the lavish expense of marrying a daughter that has bankrupted many a father, would perhaps be an oversimplification. But who can deny its role as a major contributing factor?

When an extravagant wedding for one becomes a tombstone for another, isn't it time to recognize the hand of man in yet another form of exploitation of women?

We owe it to ourselves to dig deeper to find the cause and the cure of the devaluing of girls, but it is about time that the obvious excesses perpetuated by society are tackled.

The power and the responsibility lie on the shoulders of educated women.

If they refuse to become the reason for the flagrant display of wealth at a ceremony whose beauty truly lies in simple elegance, perhaps a lovely girl-child will be born, instead of aborted.

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