What, no baby?

It’s one of the fascinating paradoxes of Indian society that on the one hand people are so prudish about sex but on the other, after a girl is married, elderly relatives she barely knows have absolutely no compunctions about coming up to her, gleam in eye, and asking when “baby is coming”. This line of questioning, if not immediately discouraged with a sharp glance or retort, will be accompanied by advice on seduction and the like. Female friends have told me stories about 60-year-old aunties propagating the virtues of badaam-milk and sensuous massages. One of them actually had to hear “don’t let your husband go anywhere, keep him tied to the bed until you get pregnant”. (Naturally, there is the unspoken assumption that the girl is a virgin, and so must be given explicit instructions. I’m glad to report that at least one of my friends managed to clear the air on that point, nearly causing heart attacks by announcing that she already knew many more tricks than the old fogeys would have learnt over their several years of mundane procreative sex.)

This subject’s been close to my heart for a long time - mainly because it crops up so wearisomely often in discussions with friends, and I never cease to be surprised by some of the anecdotes I hear - and that’s probably one reason I haven’t blogged about it. It just seems so obvious, so ubiquitous. The reason I’m talking about it now is because a very close friend just called up and she was quivering, literally shaking with rage, because she had just returned from a wedding function where complete strangers (or maybe people she had met once or twice before, at other like functions) came up to her and said things like, “So when are you going to wrap up that PhD of yours so you can start a family?” This is an enormously intelligent, ambitious woman who has other priorities in life (and she and her husband are in agreement on that point) and who doesn’t subscribe to that timeworn view that an Indian woman can be considered “successful” only when she’s started a family.

One tends to think of all this as just another irritating element of the Indian societal framework. Some of us might even subconsciously think of it as “sweet” because of the association with babies - especially when the couple on the receiving end are planning to start a family anyway, and there’s no conflict involved. But the offensiveness and intrusiveness came into clearest focus for me a few weeks ago when a friend, Ajitha, cut right to the heart of the matter in her measured, soft-spoken way: “What these people are really asking you,” she said sweetly, “is, when are you and your husband going to start having unprotected sex.” It appears the all-important matter of perpetuating the family line gives even the most conservative people full sanction to inveigle their way into the most private affairs of a couple.