Crumb

The tightly weaved, rigid plait  reaches the floor, whereupon it coils snakelike. A strand on the right-hand side of the temple has slipped from the bunch, but instead of swinging freely in the air the sweated forehead has captured and glued it.

The face beneath the coal black, greasy tuft is marked by a sharp-edged nose, a thin cut mouth and two burned out dark brown eyes, which are shaded by strong intertwined brows.

Gleam, caused by the sweat and the reflexion of the poor hearth, emanate a wrinkled face populated by blackheads and painting the image of a haggard woman.

An estimation of her age is due to milieu and culture. A West European eye would see her beyond forty, but she has just completed her twenty-sixth year of life.

In the centre of the hut, made of loam and chaff, kneeling on the compacted clay floor, she stares absent-minded into the white-hot cow-dung. Upon the fire in a cast-iron cauldron an indefinite, but fragrant yellow soup is bubbling. Robotically she stirs it.

Her swollen belly, which clings to her skinny figure like a dewdrop to a twig, weighs heavily upon her thighs. The stillness of her stature veils the turmoil of her emotions and thoughts, which flare up, associate, just to dissolve again and combine new connections, which structure and organise themselves, without her consciousness participating.

She had born sons for the poor soil; four sons. Two of them had been devoured by hunger and thirst. The other two were born in prosperous years. They were a pledge of future for her husband and his family as well as for hers.

The sons were assigned to conserve and continue what had been wrested from the soil throughout generations. They were assigned to carry on a name, to assert the existence of their ancestors and award them immortality.

Sons were the seeds out of which maize, rice, oranges, coffee, tea, blossoms and flowers germinated.

Sons were the soft, lush, green grass, upon which one retired. They were the high grown trees with ample sprouts, which shaded the emaciated, exhausted body, when the high standing sun threatens to desiccate him.

Her daughter, the firstborn daughter, now three years old, was her aid, her sheep-dog, who assisted her with the quotidian activities, as she had once done for her mother. She had been drilled to fetch water, to collect cow-dung, to run errands and to serve the men.

Besides that, she was the burden of her family. Daughters always impoverished the family.

She was soil, one worked without yield; soil, into which another one would plant his seeds, where others would harvest.

She was the crumb, the residue she fed on, after the meal of the men and after the meal of her mother.

What was happening to her daughter had happened to herself, to her mother, and to her grandmothers. They had all learned to serve and obey. They had learned to be easy, yielding, receiving and endurable soil of men.

As soon as her first bleeding had set in, when she had become fertile, she had been wedded.

Her family had rid themselves of the heaped, useless crumbs, of the barren soil by adding a cow and a golden chain, which already had been the dowry of her mother and her mother’s mother.

The barter seemed promising for both families. She was healthy, strong, resistant, not deformed, and her teeth were in a good condition. Her appearance indicated prosperous harvests.

Her family, having no surviving son, procured the claim on the firstborn male offspring, who would be their pension when they grew old.

She had been fecund. Every year a seedling had shot up in her womb, but often it withered away, caused by malnutrition and abuse of the host, or the fruit had not been reaped.

In a few hours she will give birth to another child. The child, who was still sheltered in her body, who was alive, will die immediately after it has been born.

She, the mother, will kill it.

She will cover the nose and the mouth of the newborn with her hand until all signs of life will have been extinguished.

What she was to set about, was no novelty to her. Often she had executed this procedure, and she will accomplish it again. She had and has no choice. After all it is tradition.

The child has to die.

During a supersonic examination in one of those ambulant hospitals, provided by a humanitarian organisation, which turned up once every six months, the nurse had told her: “The child growing under your pounding heart is hale and hearty. And it‘s a girl.”

- Every year, approximately 500 000 baby-girls are been killed after birth in India. Nowadays, with the supersonic examination, about 700 000 are aborted. Only because they are female. -