Story on Female Foeticide – I COULD NOT
Photo credit: mzacha from morguefile.com
I stood at the edge of the cliff.I looked down and then plunged.I felt the cold ,grey water washing away my wounds which I had suppressed for so long.The huge wall of waves paralyzed my mind.I could not breathe.Was I lost?Was I dead?Was I on my way to heaven?But would heaved have a place for me after knowing my story?
I woke up in a room.I tried to move my head and desperately tried to make out where I was.My head ached badly.There was a terrible pain on the back of my neck and on the edge of my shoulders.I could barely open my eyes.
“Why did you do this?Don’t you know committing suicide is a crime?”,an unknown shrill female voice almost yelled at me.I couldn’t say a word.Only a silent tear trickled down my cheek .
I was born in 1978 and on the following year the Chinese Government passed a law that a couple cannot have more than one child.Thus my parents dream of having a boy was shattered forever.
I was married in a peasant family at the age of fifteen.I was not very sad as I thought I was treated better there.Unlike my home I was wanted there.Though I was not more than a maid servant with a dignity of being someone’s ‘wife’.
My life went on like this for the next few years ,until one day I discovered that I was going to give birth to a child. My husband was indifferent while my in laws were happy. One day my mother-in-law stole into my room. She told me that she wanted a boy child and since she could have only one grand- child. I should take care of it.I was surprised.How could I decide whether It was a boy or a girl?But I could not say a word.I was scared.
I gave birth to a beautiful girl child at the age of twenty.For the first time I felt the unearthly happiness of being a mother and for the first time I witnessed the cruel side of man.They killed my new born infant.I cried.I was torn inside and out.It seemed someone stabbed me right in the centre of my heart.But I could not protest.I was too weak.
I had five more babies .All of them were killed because of the simple reason. They were all girls. Before the birth of my sixth and my last child they threatened to kill me if I gave birth to a girl child yet again. But God was too cruel, I gave birth to a girl child at night and at midnight I fled away .I searched for my infant without success. I assume they killed her already.
I could barely walk. Still I managed to rum to the nearby town .I managed to get a job as a maid servant in a small inn, there. I also found a place to live in.
Often I used to think about my babies, whom I could not save and sobbed in silence.
Today after so many years, when a couple celebrated their daughter’s birthday at the inn,I could not control my tears.I felt I was stabbed again , just at the same place where I was stabbed when they killed my infants. I felt I had no reason to live. I felt guilty for not protesting, not carrying my babies in my arms and cradling them to sleep, feeding them. I felt , that I should be punished.
When that woman yelled at me for attempting to commit a suicide.I felt like yelling back at her.I wanted to say”Why didn’t you consider it to be a crime when I witnessed my babies being killed?Why didn’t you kill me then?”.
But as usual, I could not.
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