Words from a suicide note

Leo Tolstoy once observed that happy families are all alike but unhappy families are unhappy in their different ways. The unhappiness within the Bhilai-based Lal family manifested itself last week when the four teenage daughters of the household chose to end their lives by hanging themselves. Youth is usually a time for hope, of promise, of optimism. It is a period in life when the dark walls of circumstance have as yet not closed in and thoughts of death are as yet distant. So what could have weighed so heavily on the minds of these young women that they could so easily slip away? The letter they left behind cites their reasons, and they are the very same that prompted three sisters to hang themselves from the ceiling fan in Kanpur over ten years ago.

It was a nihilistic gesture that arose from a perception of social worth. Those four sisters saw themselves as nothing but a burden on a family that was already under great stress. They also perceived no way out from the maze that life had become. There was the added problem of dowry to contend with. Who would marry the daughters of a Satnami Hindu man and his Muslim wife? Just the other day there had been worried discussions in the Lal family over the need to sell the house they were living in to raise the dowry amount for the marriage of the eldest daughter. Hence, the final solution. 8220;We hope they the family will have some chance of a decent life now that they don8217;t have us to worry about,8221; the suicide note said. What is this but the terrible consequences of devaluing the daughter?

Things surely need not have turned out this way. If, for instance, these girls had grown up in an ambience that had built their confidence rather than destroyed it; if they had been given the training to stand on their own two feet, rather than be dependent on a brother or a future husband, surely the very thought of suicide would have been preposterous. After all, it may be useful to remember that it was the four daughters, rather than the two sons in this family, who had taken recourse to such an act.

The devalued daughter is everywhere and this devaluation marks every stage of her life. If she survives the womb and many do not given the high level of female foeticide after sex-determination tests in India her birth is greeted by sorrow.

As a child, she faces every kind of discrimination, whether it is with regard to food on the table, timely medical care or access to education. She is pushed out of schools and pushed into marriages and early motherhood, because this was how 8220;nature8221; ordained it. But finally it is not nature, but nurture, that does her in. While there are any number of government schemes targeted at the neglected girl child, they have as yet proved singularly incapable of altering this basic reality even as laws, like those governing inheritance, remain seriously flawed and discriminatory. The message from that Bhilai suicide note could just as well have been written by any devalued daughter anywhere in this country: Remember me, before it is too late.