The day Jaya gave birth, she heard four words that shook her to her core, “It’s a girl”. For the next few months her husband reminded her with his fists that he had wanted a boy, until he felt that it was insufficient and threw a can of acid on her face and body.

Nurse Seema’s wizened hands struggle to pull Jaya’s hair into a ponytail. Tall, slim, dark and young, Jaya’s face is split in two by the acid. She has been bedridden for several weeks at the Medicare Hospital, run by Dr. Rakh, in Pune, a city of three  million in western India. Her hands, held close to her chest, are useless, hardly mobile. Thirteen years have passed since the day she gave birth to a non-boy and her husband attacked her.

Acid is the most cruel of liquids. When we are attacked, common sense tells us to shrink and minimize the exposed surface of our body. But acid does not just burn the skin, it melts it. If our arm is next to the trunk of our body, it will bind them; if our chin is pressed against our chest, the acid will melt them. A single can of acid can turn a woman into a tangle of skin and flesh.

As the acid fed on Jaya’s body, her husband locked her in a room and left her for dead. Hours later, realising she was still breathing and scared at the prospect of ending up in jail, he took her to a hospital. “In the police report, they wrote up the incident as a domestic accident. While I was unconscious, they used my thumb to sign the statement,” says Jaya.

“In the police report, they wrote up the incident as a domestic accident. While I was unconscious, they used my thumb to sign the statement”

Watch Jaya tell her story.

Back in 2016, eight years after the attack, Jaya laid in a cot in the intensive care unit, wearing a faded red nightgown with the hospital’s name embroidered in yellow letters. Sitting at the foot of her bed, her brother Satish spent time helping to balance the hospital’s pharmacy bills. They had been in the hospital for days, waiting for Jaya to gather enough strength to endure one of the many surgeries required to undo the damage the acid had wrought on her body. She was so weak that the nurses had to collect blood to test from her ankles.

Jaya’s long journey to regain mobility of her body, racked by violence as a consequence of the birth of her daughter, was just beginning. “My husband should be in prison, my husband and my mother-in-law,” said Jaya from her bed.

NO COUNTRY FOR GIRLS

More than 63 million girls are missing in India. Greater than the population of Spain and Portugal combined. Years of selective abortions and female infanticide,  along with the fact that families stop having children once they have a son,  have led to this anomalous situation. The preference towards a male child at the time of feeding or vaccinating children has meant that girls up to the age of 5 years are 50 percent more likely to die than boys from the same age group. Every four minutes, a girl dies from discrimination in the country.

Behind this ‘gendercide’ are some long held traditions of the subcontinent. India has advanced since the ban on Sati, the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre,  and it was abolished entirely in 1987. But the prohibition on the dowry – the price bridal families pay to marry off their daughters – has had no effect and remains the norm for weddings across the country and its neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh. For humble families, having one daughter or more can mean bankruptcy.

In the state of Maharashtra – where Dr Rakh’s hospital is located – from 2001 to 2011, the number of girls aged 0 to 6 per 1,000 boys decreased from 913 to 894. The World Health Organisation states that a healthy society should have 953 girls for every 1,000 boys.

During pregnancy, some families rely on quacks who promise the birth of a boy in exchange for a few rupees. Dr Rakh tells of a couple who went to his hospital to give birth. “When their daughter was born, they were enraged and accused the nurses of having changed the boy for a girl. We had to show them the whole hospital so that they could see that there were no other children that day, and they calmed down.”

To the north of the country, in Haryana, the state with the worst ratio between men and women, the Avivahit Purush Sangathan (the Union of Single Men) in 2014 offered politicians from the different parties votes in exchange for wives. Haryana is one of the epicentres of bride trafficking in India. Traffickers get girls from the eastern states of India under false promises of work and then sell them there as wives for between 10 to 50 thousand rupees.

Watch Doctor Rakh working in his hospital.

There are two turning points in the life of Ganesh Rakh. 23 years, eight months and four days separate them.

The first was the day his father took him to learn about hard work. He was 12 and dreamed of being a kushti fighter – the traditional art of Indian wrestling. Twelve hours working as a porter in the wake of his father made him understand that studying led to a better future. “Loading grain is the worst experience I have ever had. The heat is unbearable and you have to work barefoot carrying extremely heavy sacks of grain,” says Dr. Rakh. That summer, Ganesh’s stiff back turned him from a mediocre to model student.

The second is the day that he sat around a table with his wife, parents and two brothers  to discuss a crazy, almost revolutionary, idea. The epiphany of Ganesh Rakh – “I want families who give birth to girls in the hospital to not pay.”

For the doctor, it was a considered, almost instinctive decision. Collecting money from parents giving birth to girls had become an arduous and exhausting task that often resulted in either a call to the police or having to offer discounts to parents to cushion the disappointment of having a girl.

Until he was nine, Ganesh Rakh lived in Vanjarwadi, a village with hardly any houses, an inhospitable place where year after year, the few families that survived there rode drought after drought. Until it was impossible. In the 1980s, 90 percent of Vanjarwadi’s population was forced to emigrate. The doctor’s family moved to Pune, 150 kilometers to the west. They exchanged a few square metres  of straw and adobe for four square metres of sheet metal in a city slum.

From there little Ganesh climbed the social ladder step by step, with his elbows glued to books, until the beginning of the new millennium, in 2001 when he graduated as a doctor and was able to open a small private practice where he attended to construction workers with snake bites. Today, three three-storey brick and concrete blocks linked by sturdy metal bridges make up Pune’s Medicare Hospital, the hospital of Dr. Rakh.

Dr Rakh examines a newborn girl.

celebrating girls

The first thing Vimal asked Dr Rakh after delivering her baby girl was if her husband was angry. Nurse Seema, who was the liaison between the delivery room and the waiting area where Bhupendra, her husband, awaited news, replied, “Your husband is fine.” Vimal’s face lit up.

On January 6, 2012, Vimal and Bhupendra Chaudary crossed the threshold of the Medicare Hospital. Vimal – fair skin and dark hair – wore a white sari with red and gold motifs that covered a rotund belly occupied by a nine-month-old resident waiting for freedom. Vimal didn’t know it at the time, but she was going to inaugurate Dr Rakh’s new undertaking. She was already a mother to a son and a daughter, but the latter died shortly after birth. Three days later, Vimal was holding her third child, a girl.

Tejashree and her husband Keitan are two representatives of what is contemporary India – computer artisans writing code on marathonian days in front of a screen for a company located on the other side of the world. Sitting in a delivery ward surrounded by their closest family, they look at their most precious gift and smile at each other. The orange curtains in the small room warm a white metal crib. In it rests Kartiki, a girl barely one day old who wanted to remain in the safety of her mother’s uterine embrace a little longer. Tejashree limits her movements to the essential, a scar crosses her lower abdomen horizontally and any movement is an arduous task. 

A few steps away from them, nurse Seema turns off the lights in the room that in the past served as the hospital’s ICU. The same room where a few years ago Jaya hoped to gather enough strength to survive the operation that would free her limbs. Today a few beds pushed back against the walls occupy the space. Hospital staff strive to light dozens of candles, while a small bunch of roses and a cake rest on a table. The nurses smile. A girl is born and there is going to be a party.

Vimal was the first mother – it’s been so long that Dr. Rakh remembers the name of the parents but not the daughters. “Sometimes parents can take weeks to baptise their children,” says the doctor. After Vimal’s daughter came Aditi and Madhuri, Naina and Pooja, later Pia and Sneha, Varsha, Sajili, Rohini, Radhika and then Deepa, Beenish, Jana, Rana, Ahana, Pooja, Dea and Manavi and so on, adding up to 1,700 girls with the arrival of Tejashree’s daughter, Kartiki.

Dr Rakh, blessed with a round face carved into gentle angles and a serene and comforting voice, says: “They called me Mad Doctor Rakh because I was celebrating the birth of other people’s girls.” More than 1,700 celebrations and counting – the 1,700 daughters of Dr Rakh.