Doctors' Daughters

A small town in western UP - the so called heart of North India - where ( I learned later) patriarchy rules, sons are revered, girls are an embarrassment and women who beget them even more so, is not a place I should be proud to call home. And I am not, but I am proud of having a family and being surrounded by people who made it possible for me to grow up completely oblivious to the inherent gender bias existing in that town, the country and in that indefinable institution which rules all our actions - society. 

The first time I got a hint of this bias was when the next door aunty's grown up son (a doctor)  got married and his wife delivered their first child. We were all sitting in the the verandah of our house when my dad spotted the said aunty walking back from the nursing home with a dejected face and pronouned immediately 'it must have been a girl'. I remember that moment because the realization that a girl child could cause sorrow hit me in full force for the first time. It was difficult to process and unpleasant to think about. I didn't dwell on it much because I heard my father gleefully declare how aunty should have been ready for this because, didn't she know, most doctors in our town had two daughters and how he sincerely hoped the second one would be a daughter too.

Before that day I had no scale or comparative measure, no stereotypes to limit my imagination, opinion or activities. I was never told there were games, jobs and hobbies that 'girls' did and another set that 'boys' did. I grew up hanging out with all the kids in our colony where all of us ran around like maniacs and played games like hide n seek, tag and other games with ludicrous names like 'crocodile-crocodile', 'tippy tippy top', 'iron-touch-wood', 'dog n bone', 'poshampah' which mostly involved more running around like maniacs. We played 'chor-sipahi' too, girls and boys alike.Many times  the ring leader role of this rag tag bunch ended up being played by my elder sister who in supreme fairness was omni-tyrannical to girls and boys alike. The only concessions made were due to age, not gender.  I had a He-Man doll as well as Barbies. We played cricket and set up our Barbie paraphernalia with equal joy. 

What saddens me is that I should now feel that I had a privileged childhood instead of one that should be the right of every little girl. I shudder every time I see subtle hints of differential treatment meted out to the girls and boys and all the more because I see it in friends, acquaintances and yes,  family. I boil with rage when a random aunty at Amsterdam airport looks enquiringly at my mom, who's proudly declaring that she has two daughters, and obligingly supplies, "and a son?". 

So here's a very heartfelt gratitude to those people who, whether they were conscious of it or not, provided me the environment where I could be independent, opinionated and and grow up as just a child, not a girl child. And a special thank you for never saying 'we brought you up like sons' as if we were meant to be a substitute.