It should not have been a curse to be born a woman. It shouldn't have been a cause for shame to be born a daughter. There was much to celebrate - that nature had designed all the faculties rightly enough to have a female child and life could be therefore thanked that no extra chromosome had turned the birth into another cursed nightmare. But in the subcontinent, a daughter's birth always comes with a twinge at the heart strings even though the families may have rectified their attitudes to the fashionable political correctness.
As a daughter and woman myself it took less than a decade of infancy and childhood to realise that my and my sister's and my female cousins' treatment at home was different. There was a hierarchy within the female 'zenana khana' (women's enclosure) too. The older sisters-in-law were matriarchs overriding their own mother and dominating the younger daughters-in-law tyrannically. So automatically the daughters born of the elder newcomers had advantages and privileges than daughters born to the recently inducted wives into the joint household.
As a bold and outspoken child with a tomboyish attitude, constantly putting forward logical reasoning, the matriarchs had no answers to my criticism of why my older boy cousins could go out unchaperoned or could do everything under the sun and I wasn't so much as given permission to join the school basketball team. I had to fight for it as usual. My sister being the docile and obedient one, of course, didn't get into verbal scrapes but even she got fed up of being held on the pedestal of what a dutiful and pious daughter should be like.
It was perplexing to see the hypocrisy applied to rules and regulations viz a viz the daughters vs the sons. Of course, on the surface, it seemed there was freedom and unlike the low-income families surrounding us we had relative independence and liberal upbringing. We were educated in top schools, fed, clothed well, provided indulgences of Eid pocket money and luxuries of a TV and books in our rooms. But years down the line I understood that it was to make us more marketable after college or university to the first families that offered their sons for sale (dowry wise).
It's taken ages to understand why the men of the house thought it beneath their dignity to enter the kitchen or even pick up their used utensils and at least place them in the sink for washing; why the women were always washing, cleaning, cooking, mopping, dusting, organising, peeling, chopping, grinding while the men indulged in idle talk. The most hurtful memory I have that still stings my eyes is my mother bent double moping the floor with soapy water around chairs in the lobby and a male cousin of mine not even bothering to lift his feet while she struggled to get to the dry areas. I must've seen red because till this day I regret not pummelling him with my fists -something I was known to do whenever I encountered any unfairness.
It's these daily humiliations, injustices, travesties and seeing all women as inferior that I developed scorn for any man pouting pious verses yet evidently neglecting the women in his own family. Yes, times have changed and people are more aware - the men aware that their women suffer under patriarchy and the women becoming more and more aware of their rights. But this is just the beginning. On the surface it may seem as harmless chauvinism in a society that prides itself on calling the Earth mother or worshipping female goddesses or like every Kashmiri expert on Kashmir likes to say the women are treated better here than in any other state. But it's when the tiny news reports of "Woman consumes a poisonous substance"; "the Kashmir sex scandal; the rising number of domestic violence cases reported in 2016, that the misogyny that lies beneath the surface is revealed.
In the subcontinent which was divided by the British first in 1947 into India and Pakistan and then further into Bangladesh in 1971, the social networking wars of which country produces the most perverted, violent, men often run into long threads of more than 400 vitriolic comments. The basic DNA and behavioural traits are the same even though borders have been redrawn and more borders are being fought to be drawn in the coming years due to fascism, and cross border terrorism. In an age where even the UN recognises that countries cannot progress socially and economically unless their women are empowered in every sense, it seems uncivilised and regressive that we have to rethink our parenting skills in bringing up our sons. I am also advocating re-educating our daughters who will be future mothers and making them understand that they do not need to pamper their sons or their existence and status in the family is not dependent on the gender of their first-borns. The whole patriarchy/matriarchy thing hurts all - sons and daughters.
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