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"It feels as if you've been turned inside out. You've just given birth and finally you feel emptied. You're exhausted. Your breasts are painfully full of milk. And then you look at your baby. And you see that she's a little girl. And you know that you have to kill her." Vaira Mani drops her head in sadness as she recounts the death of a neighbour's newborn baby. It is as if the child had been hers, for she speaks with a conviction that seems to come from personal experience. She knows that I know, and this, unacknowledged and unspoken, creates a special bond between us.
We are in the village of Usilampatti, about 40 miles west of the holy city of Madurai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Usilampatti has gained notoriety as the centre of the so-called "killing fields of Madurai", one of many regions where the ancient custom of female infanticide is still widespread.
According to some studies, more than 16 million baby girls a year in India are killed by their mothers or by village midwives called dayans.
Usilampatti is a place of great beauty. It is surrounded by paddy fields, dotted with tall, elegant palm trees and framed by distant blue mountains. Only the earth, rich and blood coloured, suggests the deadly annual harvest. For it is here that the children are buried. I arrived in the village early one morning. Children were getting ready for school and their mothers were busy with household chores. We were greeted with polite curiosity. Most of the men were out at work.
I met Vaira later that morning when I ventured into the paddy fields. That afternoon, after a simple lunch of rice and lentils, we talked and became friends. Vaira is 35, one of seven daughters born to agricultural labourers, and the mother of two children; a boy aged 12 and a girl aged six.
Female infanticide in India does not affect the upper classes, who have enough wealth to provide for their children. The middle classes, likewise, can afford access to modern technology to establish the sex of a foetus and the subsequent cost of an abortion if one is wanted. But among the poor, especially in backward rural areas of states such as Tamil Nadu and Bihar, female infanticide is still commonplace.
The practice is excused and condoned on many grounds. Girls are seen as nothing more than a drain on a family's resources. The first daughter is allowed to live because soon she will assume household chores. But the chance of life for a second or third female child diminishes drastically.
A woman's life is dominated by rituals which involve the distribution of money and gifts. A family's honour rests on its ability to conduct ceremonies appropriately, including, of course, the dowry and wedding. In Tamil Nadu, a prospective groom with a secure government job commands a dowry of up to 25,000 Rupees (£500) and 100 grams of gold, as well as household goods and, perhaps, a vehicle. These gifts do not guarantee a successful marriage, but without them there would be no marriage at all.
Holding my arm tight and with tears in her eyes, Vaira told me of the different ways in which girl children are murdered in the village.
Some babies are buried alive or interred in pots where it takes up to two hours for them to suffocate. Others have their mouths stuffed with wet cloths or are slammed against walls. Or an infant may be fed the poisonous sap of a local plant which destroys the internal organs, causing convulsions and internal haemorrhaging. But perhaps the most horrific method is "dry drowning", whereby the open mouth of a baby girl, searching for her mother's nipple, receives instead a handful of grain which chokes the child to death.
Recent government programmes to safeguard baby girls in Tamil Nadu have failed. Cradles where unwanted children could be deposited were installed in public spaces, and the authorities said that rescued children would be placed in orphanages. But this was not enough to change the attitudes of village women, who said they would rather kill a female child than create an orphan with no caste and identity, who they feared could one day dishonour the family or return to seek vengeance.
This custom, created and perpetuated by men for their own benefit and supremacy, makes their wives and mothers killers.
According to the United Nations, there are an average of 105 women to every 100 men in most countries of the world. But this pattern, tellingly, does not hold in four countries where female infanticide is still practised: India, where there are 93 women to every 100 men, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, where the ratio is 94 to 100, and China, where there are only 88 women to every 100 men.
I left the village of Usilampatti, and later India, heavy in the knowledge that only profound and fundamental change can bring life to girl babies. Until then, future female generations will continue to be decimated as a tragic consequence of ignorance, poverty and repressive custom.
At the end of our talk, Vaira mimicked the convulsions of a baby girl dying from poison. Her eyes shone with a terrible sadness and acceptance. Perhaps it was a bad memory. She never told me whether she, too, had been forced to kill one of her own children. But for me it was all too real. It is one death scene that I shall never forget.
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