Unwanted

When I was reading an article in Malayalam by Rekha K [Bhashaposhini annual edition 2023], the question that lingered in my mind from beginning to the end of my reading was: How many people born in our world were actually wanted as children by their parents?

Rekha says that her birth was an unwanted accident. She was conceived when her mother was 42 and father 59. Her parents had six children already and they were studying in colleges or high schools. Rekha was not expected. Rekha just happened. A freak birth. Her siblings were not quite chuffed with the new arrival. They were teased by friends with questions like whether their parents had no idea about birth control methods. The aged parents too thought it was quite preposterous to have yet another baby at their age and so they decided to abort the foetus. But the abortion went awry! Some are fated to be born no matter what others do!

The writer goes on to say that her parents gave her a bombastic name anyway. Maybe to make amends for their attempt to eliminate her in her mother’s womb. Thankarekha K Menon: that was her name in school. But she hated that label and got it cut short to Rekha K. Even the Brahminical title of Menon was shown the door.

There were infinite number of times when the thought that I was an unwanted child arose in my mind right from childhood. Not only I but also my siblings might all have been freaks by birth. Not only my siblings and I but quite many, an astoundingly high number of, children might have been born by sheer accident in those days when birth control methods were not in common use. My parents’ religion wouldn’t have permitted them to resort to those methods anyway. The Catholic Church insists even today that every copulation must have the explicit purpose of adding to the population. Sex is meant for reproduction and any other intention will be sin. Today’s Catholics are pragmatic enough to keep the Church’s dogmas confined to the church precincts. Otherwise there would have been millions of unwanted births every year. 

There are many articles in the above-mentioned periodical expressing views similar to Rekha’s. The very first one is written by Gracy, another eminent Malayalam writer, who begins with the assertion that loneliness was her first inheritance as a daughter of a perpetually quarrelsome couple. There are many more such articles in the edition whose theme is loneliness.

If sex was not an instinct as fundamental as biological hunger, many of us wouldn’t have been born at all!

And that would have been nirvana! What is more blissful than non-existence?