A dear friend of mine in Delhi, Sujata Bose, ordered a video-tape for me on the internet and had it mailed to my home. I didn’t know all this, however, when the tape arrived at my door. It came in a box that said “Women & Men: Stories of Seduction.” No receipt, no note. The following day was Valentine’s Day. My wife and I sat down to watch the film, and it wasn’t till late into the session, when the third part of the tape began to play, that I guessed why I had received this gift.

Some time ago I had posted a blog called Hemingway in Haryana, mentioning the short-story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Sujata had written in response about a film made from the story, with Melanie Griffith and James Woods in it. In “Stories of Seduction,” the first film is an adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s fun tale “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” the second film is based on Dorothy Parker’s “Dusk Before Fireworks,” and the third, directed by Tony Richardson, is an adaptation of the Hemingway story, with the script written by Joan Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne.

Hemingway’s story is considered a masterpiece of understated narration. The word “abortion” is never used in the text. I was disappointed to see that in the film version, perhaps because of the demands of television, Didion and Dunne had tried to give the story a fuller, more explicit form. Hemingway had lines like “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig.” Didion and Dunner have the woman say, “They put a knife in you.” Perhaps the latter believed that “the American” in the story was Hemingway himself and wanted to critique the idea of a macho male writer; the script plays clumsily for a while with the irony of the man worried about losing a manuscript but not about losing a child. I bristled a bit at this. I have always treasured the terseness of Hemingway’s prose, and here I was getting what sounded like a term-paper.

And then, partly because of the way in which Hemingway’s lines still shine through, partly because of Melanie Griffith’s performance as the pregnant woman, and partly also because the idea of a writer’s life gathered more momentum and density, the story became powerful in the closing minutes. Didion and Dunne have produced a few lines of marvelous dialogue when the woman imagines the man going his separate way and writing about the abortion in a story which she will one day come across. The woman says, “And I’ll be wherever I am and I will read this story by you… And I will put it down and I won’t show it to whoever I am with.” The man says, “I don’t want to write a story about this.” “But you will,” she replies, and sketches a quick scene, involving a man and a woman, waiting for a train, and, she says, the man and the woman in the story will, and also not, be them. The way the woman says this is disturbing, and haunting, and you are left feeling that she is right.

(The above image shows Melanie Griffith delivering that famous line toward the end: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”)

I had opened the discussion of Hemingway’s story in the context of gendered violence in India. Female foeticide, especially in northern states like Punjab and Haryana, may have claimed 10 million lives over the past 20 years. The latest issue of Outlook magazine has a cover-story on this. Also check out the accompanying article by Khushwant Singh that he begins with this broad historical take:

Punjab has a long history of doing away with newborn girls. The preferred method today is foeticide after a sex determination test, but centuries ago, the practice was to bury them. This tradition perhaps goes back to the days of repeated invasions by Muslim armies from the northwest, who used to carry off girls as booty for their own pleasure or to be sold in the slave markets of the Middle East. Today, it is the extortionate dowries that parents of girls have to provide on her marriage. The custom of polyandry in Punjab probably arose out of the shortage of girls—the eldest son of a family would take a wife, his younger brothers would also have access to her.