How to give birth to a male child
When I was a very young kid, I was the darling of many of our area’s would-be mothers. (Awwww). Not because I was something special but because they all wanted to give birth to boys!
They would ply me with cuddles and candy and sweets and generally too much attention. One couple even took me to their home outside Bombay to stay with them for a week at a crucial time in the process! To a boy already thoroughly pampered by his grandparents, all this affection was just a bonus and taken for granted. My wife says that I was spoilt so much by all this attention that I have not been able to get over it even now. She has a knack for picking up these things from my childhood, storing them in her vast memory bank and using them at just the right moment to clinch any argument. Sigh, anyway.
Unfortunately, most, if not all, of the aspiring mothers delivered girls. After each of these disappointments, I was unceremoniously dropped from their favourites list. It was not nice to see the sweets and the cuddles drying up so suddenly. None of them came back for their second attempt, otherwise I am sure we could have worked out something.
A few days back I was invited by a family for a pooja cum dinner event. They didnt explain. Men living alone are supposed to be in a constant state of ravenous hunger and will therefore attend any function as long as food is attached to it. Well, I went.
It took me just a few minutes to gather what the pooja was all about. The lady of the house was in the family way and the whole ceremony was to obtain celestial blessings for a boy child. Just to add weight to their divine petition, there was even another young male child dressed up as a God and forced to sit much against his will on the dias.
Later, one of the women tried to explain to me how critical the pooja was. She told me that she herself had offered to divorce her husband after giving him three daughters in succession. She was grateful that her mother in law, of all people, had nixed the idea even though the husband had not really voiced any opposition to the idea. Well, men…..
It’s been many decades since the days when I was considered a lucky charm for mothers to be. Women in India today have taken giant strides in social and professional life, and match men step for step in every walk of life. And yet, it seems women have a lot of hills, nah, mountains still left to scale. Like they say, the more things change, the more they remain the same.