Sanjay Sircar | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 27, 2002

Reading Gillian Bennett’s snippet of Roger Highfields letter on baby’s sex and mother’s ape in Letters to Ambrose Merton 25 prompted the following reflection.

In the mid 1960s in Calcutta my maternal aunt Mrs Bali Das (later Sundarji), in commenting on her pregnancies while she was carrying her daughter and then her son, said that “people say” that when a pregnant woman swells at the sides it indicates a daughter, and when she swells in front it indicates a son [or the reverse, for my memory does not serve me well in this regard]; however, the reverse had been the case wfth her pregnancies. This was the only time I heard an Indian woman talk about her pregnancies in mixed company, and the only time 1 heard this “lore”. At that time English-speaking Indians tended to use the word “expecting”, “pregnant” was considered “not quite nice”.