Dinner near New Friends Colony in Delhi, with Shruti, Siddharth, and Pragya. At one point, Pragya says that while she was in Bihar she knew that people around her thought of girls as social inferior but it wasn’t till she came to Delhi that she realized that women there were seen as nothing. That scrap of conversation returned to me when in early January the BBC reported that more than 10 million female births in India may have been lost due to selective abortion in the past 20 years.

“The BBC’s Jill McGivering says the problem is complicated by advances in technology. Ultrasound machines must be officially registered but many are now so light and portable, they are hard to monitor.” Now, matters have gone further. There is a globalization of murder, or what a blogger on Sepia Mutiny has called an “outsourcing of abortion.” The British newspaper The Observer reported last month that “pregnant British Asian women, some in effect barred by the NHS after numerous abortions, are now coming to India for gender-defining ultrasounds and, if they are expecting girls, terminations.”

While the BBC reports and others like it emphasize the fact that in places like Haryana and Punjab men are finding it difficult to get wives, it makes more sense, I think, going back to Pragya’s comment, to talk about how the brutal practice of female foeticide is part of the systemic violence against women. The idea that female foetuses are deemed unworthy of living is not removed from the set of reasons which earned Delhi the nickname of “the rape capital of the world.”

The brief BBC report mentioned above had ended with the following words: “Although doctors in India must not tell couples the sex of a foetus, in practice, some just use coded signals instead, our correspondent says.” This detail stopped me. I am interested as a writer in the injustice rampant in our societies, but I’m also curious about language and its uses. How is it that a doctor in Chandigarh or Ludhiana conveys to a young woman–and, alas, to many, many more like her–that she is likely to give birth to a child of the “wrong” sex? What secret analogy is considered suitable? How crude is it in its invention?

Hemingway’s short-story “Hills Like White Elephants” is about a young woman and a man who are waiting for a train, and while they wait they are talking of a “simple operation” that the woman is going to have. I hadn’t realized, when I read the story the first time, that it was about an abortion. I have taught the story more than once, and am always surprised that not all students get that meaning on the first reading either. And yet, if you read it again, the signs are all there in plain view.

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”
“Then what will we do afterward?”
“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

I have tried to remember what I had felt when I had first read this story without understanding what the operation was about. I had only been in touch with the unhappiness, I think, the difficult sadness that surrounds the young woman. It is possible that I had read the story somewhat abstractly, about men and power, or even about the cruelty of those who impose their desires on others while arguing that it is for the general good. I remember that I had resolved to be tender in my fights with my girlfriend.

But, as Hemingway’s story shows, cruelty can be indirect and still concrete. It is this which makes me wonder about the woman in the clinic in Haryana.