It's simply amazing, the lack of knowledge among Pakistanis. A man killed his seven-day old daughter because he wanted a son. This happened on International Women's Day a couple of days back. Even seventy five years after independence, our men still believe that it's the woman's fault if she can't give birth to males.
I'm reminded of something that happened many years ago (in 1976). I've written about it ("She was doomed from Day One"). This guy was my colleague, a fellow Memon and distantly related to me. He'd married a girl from Bombay and the poor woman went on producing girls. After the fourth girl, she began to suffer from depression and even tried to kill herself once. He didn't arrange for her to visit her folks in Bombay, as that would have prevented the tragedy. He took her to a psychiatrist who warned him, "If she gets pregnant and gives birth to a female child again, she'll kill herself". But the mullah in the neighborhood mosque told him to go ahead, as women are meant to produce as many children as they can and he should stop only afer his wife stopped conceiving. The inevitable happened. When the fifth child also happened to be a girl, the woman went berserk. She tried to kill her husband one day, so he sent the new-born infant to his sister's house. The next day, the demented woman went to the roof of the building in which they lived. She threw the four elder girls from the roof, then jumped herself. Only one girl survived, with broken legs.
If only the bastard had some knowledge of elementary science, he'd have known that his wife was producing girls not because there was something wrong with her, but because the defect was in him. But he preferred to listen to an illiterate mullah.
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