Sreelatha Menon: Magical beans for having a male child
EAR TO THE GROUND
The germ of son-preference is eating into the intestines of the entire population in every state in the country. The Indian girl-killing bean figured in a work of fiction by Lebanese writer Amin Maaluf some time back. The Century after Beatrice, a futuristic documentary of a journalist's enquiries into the truth of certain beans consumed in India and Africa which guarantee a male child, her encounter with a village in Gujarat where women no longer gave birth to daughters and a medicine industry which sells these gender ills in the garb of fertility pills