In Bengali, a barren woman is called আঁটকুড়ে —Antkure. 

আঁটকুড়ে is a curse word. My mother says it means cursed. If said aloud, one will soon notice the lack of softness or any attempt of neutrality in the way it lands. Exactly like a verdict. One of my aunts once used it at a wedding about a woman in our bloodline, and though I was eleven and unaware of its meaning, I understood as much from the way she said it that it was among the worst things a woman could be. Even worse than the neighbour we crossed the street to avoid

But at least the witch has powers. A barren woman got nothing for she had simply failed at the one thing she was born to do. I want to be precise about what I mean by the one thing, because I think all of us have grown comfortable pretending we don’t know. A Bengali woman’s body has never really been perceived in the right way, be it institutionally, culturally, ritually, or even as her own. From the moment her father transfers her custody to another man by placing her hand in her husband’s at the wedding fire, her body is nothing more than a mere communal investment. Now, everyone has a stake. The mother-in-law, the neighbors. That astrologer who was consulted about auspicious dates for marriage, now conception. Fertility is not hers. It belongs to the family she has married into, the lineage which she now has been recruited to continue. She has been imported only to produce sons.

If, by any unfortunate chances, her body fails to cooperate, the family has every right to want its investment back.

 

*

 

I want to start before Bengal. With Hannah.

Hannah, in the first book of Samuel, cannot conceive. Her husband Elkanah has another wife, Peninnah, who produces children with something the text describes as “routine efficiency,” and who also, the text notes almost casually, provokes Hannah yearly about her barrenness until Hannah weeps and refuses to not eat. Peninnah does this on purpose. She does it at the temple, during worship, even in the presence of God and family.

Elkanah, meaning well, asks Hannah: Am I not better to you than ten sons? 

He isn’t better than ten sons—he cannot be. That is precisely the problem and he does not understand it. To be failed by the one person who thinks he is helping is its own kind of excruciating loneliness. Hannah goes to the temple and prays with such desperate intensity that the priest Eli watches her lips moving and assumes that she’s drunk. She has to explain herself by justifying her own grief to a man who mistook it for intoxication. 

This was all written approximately three thousand years ago. It’s also a Tuesday in Kolkata. Every family gathering where a woman in her third year of marriage is asked, with a tight-lipped smile, whether there’s any good news yet. The architecture is the same; it’s the names that have changed.

For centuries, we’ve been cradling the habit, in polite company, of speaking about these things in the past tense. Used to be. In older times. Not anymore, mostly. I’m not interested in the past tense. But in the woman in the next building whose mother-in-law stopped speaking to her after the fourth year of marriage produced nothing. The gynecologist my sister interviewed for a university project in 2015 who told her that at least sixty percent of her patients came in not because they wanted children but because their families had sent them, along with a list of questions the women themselves had not been permitted to ask. 

Whose body is it?

 

*

 

The Devi Bhagavata Purana, one of the eighteen Mahapuranas of Hindu scripture, lists the Ashta Matrikas—eight mother goddesses—each governing a domain of existence. Fertility is not merely one domain among many. It’s the axis. The goddess Shashti, specifically worshipped on the sixth day after birth in Bengal, governs childbirth and child protection. She is depicted always with children clinging to her arms, seated in her lap, surrounding her in the visual language of abundance. Everything Kaki wasn’t allowed to be. The worship of Shashti is tied explicitly to the hope for sons. Mothers pray to her. Young brides pray to her before the marriage is even a month old. 

Bengal’s religious architecture has no goddess for those whose body will not conceive, or the woman who simply doesn’t want to. These women fall outside the grid of the sacred, and what lies outside the sacred, in most cosmologies, is either the profane or the monstrous. There is not much room between the two.

Growing up in Kolkata, I knew a woman whom children used to call Kaki (aunt) which is the generic honorific we were taught to give to women whose actual names we never get to know. She had been married at twenty-two, standard. Hadn’t produced a child in the decade that followed, less standard. Rather, increasingly catastrophic. By the time I knew her, she was already in her late thirties and the silence around her had its own weather system. Visits to her home were accompanied by a particular adult behavior I now recognize as the fractured management of discomfort: conversations moving carefully around the obvious absence, pairs of eyes trying not to linger too long on the empty corners of her flat where a child might have been.

Kaki was warm and funny. Every time we visited her, she’d feed us sandesh and nimki, ask us about school, laugh so easily at our silly jokes. Nothing else mattered. What did, however, was the womb and everything it hadn’t done.

 

*

 

In Hindu cosmology, a son is not optional. He is soteriological. Meaning, he’s the mechanism of his father’s salvation. The word putra, son, derives from put which refers to a specific hell reserved for men that die without male offspring to perform their last rites. Technically, a son literally saves his father from damnation. This isn’t, however, folk belief. It’s the Manusmriti, the Garuda Purana, one of the foundational texts of a civilization. A woman who cannot produce this son is not only merely unfortunate but also, within this framework, cosmically obstructive. She is standing between a man and his afterlife. Is it any wonder we made her into a monster?

The leap from barren to cursed is not a long one, and it has been made consistently across cultures, centuries, even continents. If the body won’t do what bodies are primarily for, something must have caused it. Something could be God’s punishment for a past-life sin, the evil eye of a jealous neighbor, an unnamed curse placed by a woman that was wronged. In rural Bengal as well as several urban households that would deny it, the explanation for infertility is almost never medical. Something was done, or something wasn’t, and now the womb’s keeping score.

This has a very specific function. If infertility is a curse, then it can be cured by the correct spiritual intervention with the help of the right priest, pilgrimage, and ritual humiliation. And if it cannot be cured, then the woman clearly didn’t try hard enough, or simply didn’t deserve the cure, which brings us back, efficiently, to character. The medical explanation, in contrast, offers no villain. But we prefer a woman, and always have.

In a 2017 report by the International Journal of Reproduction, Contraception, Obstetrics and Gynecology, researchers studying infertile women in West Bengal found that the majority reported experiencing social ostracization, verbal abuse, and in numerous cases, physical violence from in-laws. A significant number reported being publicly blamed for their husband’s infertility—even where medical testing confirmed the husband was the source of the fertility issue. 

Read that last line again.

 

*

 

Kaki moved away eventually, into a different city, I was told. For a fresh start, my mother said, which is what adults say when they mean to say somewhere people don’t know yet. 

I never saw her again after that summer. I’ve thought about her often in the years since. I watched her be unmade terribly by a room full of people who loved her, technically, in the way one can love another and still hold the latter responsible for their disappointment. The love and the verdict coexisted without canceling each other out.

 

*

 

I am not barren. But I do know that I don’t want to have children. These are related facts, and I’m aware of how much room I have to say that. The first time I said I don’t want kids in a room of Bengali women, the silence that followed was the same from childhood. The translation being, you’ve just placed yourself in a category we have only unkind words for. I am not banja. Only that for a moment, womb wasn’t the point.

What hunger, what pain did these women carry? What did they do with the grief of the body that wouldn’t, the one that wasn’t for once asked what it wanted? I don’t have an answer; perhaps the question alone doesn’t deserve one. All I have is the image of my Kaki at her own dining table, feeding us, laughing, asking about school, warm in every direction—and the room around her busy making her disappear. She wasn’t a monster. It’s a shame she was in a room that had run out of room for her.

Ma, I’ve been thinking about that room ever since. I think you have as well.