Geetanjali Krishna: Bearing children differently

These days, newspapers and billboards across south Delhi are full of advertisements for an ultra-luxury maternity hospital, with the image of a newborn wearing a crown and a matching sense of entitlement. The other day, just as I was ruminating over this vaguely disturbing image, I saw a pregnant housemaid in the neighbourhood when I was out for an evening walk. She was lifting a heavy cement pot to clean under it. "Don't do that," I cried. "You shouldn't lift heavy weights when pregnant." She smiled and said these things didn't matter. These were just pregnancy myths meant for rich city dwellers, she added. "My mother bore six children and worked as an agricultural labourer till the last day of her pregnancies," she said. "She routinely carried bales on her head, walked miles to get water for the house and remained fine." In her job as a housemaid, she had to clean fans, shift furniture and do other heavy lifting. "I do it all, as I'm afraid that if I say I can't, I may find myself out of a job."

Her name was Ranjana, and she had moved to Delhi barely two years ago from her village in Bihar. "When I got married two years ago, I came to Delhi for the first time," she said. While life in the city was more comfortable than it had been in the village, she said that one thing remained the same. "In the village, when my mother got pregnant, she had no option but to keep working in the fields till her labour pains started. In the city too, it is the same story," she said. Her husband worked as a security guard, she informed me, and her income was necessary for them to be able to rent a good room with an attached toilet. "We're paying almost Rs 5,000 for our room here, and would never be able to afford it on a single salary," she said.

She had a point, I mused. Even so, I urged her to eat nutritious food and take calcium and folic acid supplements. Again, she cited the case of her mother to tell me that these dietary precautions were superfluous. "My mother always ate after feeding all of us. Sometimes, if we were very hungry, there would be no dal left for her to eat with rice. She'd quietly eat plain rice with a green chilly or onion. This used to be her diet whether she was pregnant or not," Ranjana said. Pregnancy and childbirth, she said, were natural phenomena that women were built for. "And if it's in a baby's fate to come into this world, it will."

I asked how she planned to work after childbirth. "I'll take 15 to 20 days off after delivery. After that my husband and I will have to work at different times. I'll work all morning while he takes care of the child. He says he'll take on night shifts," she said. It would be tough, but they'd just have to manage, she said. Then she sighed and told me how in her village in Muzaffarpur district, her mother and other village women aspired to be able to not work for a living. Ranjana used to wonder why. "Now I understand what they meant," she said. "I too would have liked to have the option to not work for some time."

Saying this, she went back to cleaning the garden. "I'll be fine, don't worry," she said as a parting shot. "People like us bear children differently from people like you." I flashed back to the image of the crowned infant on the billboard and realised she probably didn't even know how right she was.