One Saturday morning

She was a pretty girl, maybe in her early twenties. Swinging her legs ever so slightly while she kept murmuring softly in disagreement and despair. Her companion, a stocky balding man in office attire, flicked through a magazine. They had a striking resemblance to a man who has an irritating fly circling around his head—the man was trying in vain to ignore the fly, wishing it to disappear. He reassured her now and then, that it was OK and it would not hurt and would be over soon.

I couldn’t help noticing then and their plight, wondering if it was any better or worse than mine?He definitely looked a married man from a stable middle-class Bengali family. And she definitely did not look like his wife. But I could be mistaken.

It was the dawn of a new era. The dark ages were giving way very tentatively to the women’s liberation, financial independence and the right of women to be taken seriously as living, thinking and feeling human beings. It was the early eighties in the back lanes of Calcutta.

We were sitting at the waiting room of Marie Stopes clinic in Free School Street. You couldn’t get more back lane than this, unless you chose the bylanes of Sonagachi.

The receptionist was a middle-aged lady with sparkling rings and ear studs, complete with the podgy layers around her middle as befits a middle-aged lady of that time. Stiff upper lip was the order of the day although the eyes looked piercingly with mocking and judgment.

The walls around were sterile and as blank as possible, although they seemed to close in with suffocating speed. The air was sparse and filled with contempt and despair. There was not enough to breathe. 

It felt more like a morgue than a clinic. In a way it was rightly so. This was a place where unwanted pregnancies were medically terminated. No appointments necessary. You could turn up and have an abortion and go back to living a so-called normal life, all in a day. Easier than going to a dentist to have your tooth extracted. For that you needed an appointment.

Marie Stopes clinics were God-sent to unwed mothers and unwanted pregnancies that threatened the starched and ironed fabric of the Calcutta Bhadrolok society. Unwed mothers and illicit liaisons outside of wedlock were unheard of, and any whisper of these were suffocated even before the thoughts became words. Many women took recourse to their services so as not to be ostracized from society.

I waited my turn, darting furtive glances at the lady on my right still moaning softly in disagreement, and my so- called boyfriend sitting on my other side. He had promised to marry me if I got pregnant. So why were we here?

Why did I not ask that question then? Why did I wait for some twenty-five years to even pose this question to myself? Was I afraid to ask, because I knew the answer? Was I a coward not to face the facts that were staring me in the face? Do I have the guts to face it now?

Maybe all boyfriends, in those days, promised to marry the girl they were having fun with in bed. But how was I to know? I loved him in good faith and had put all my trust in him. Maybe the married man promised the same to the lady beside me. Maybe it slipped his mind to tell her that he was already married. And what was one day of fun and frolic in bed? The men could always pay the clinic fees in cash. It is the women who pay for it with our lives.

Mostly, I was in a shocked daze. I did not feel anything. I was just observing a drama unfold in front of my eyes. I was an audience, not an actor in it.