Not all births are celebrated equally in this country. Some arrive with grandeur and dhol-baaje, while others do not have the fate of a happy arrival. More often than not, it is the girl child who is greeted this way, while the male child is celebrated, supposedly destined to take over his father’s legacy and continue the generation.
I can’t help but wonder, how is all of this attached even before the child is born? The grandeur doesn’t just mark the arrival of a generation, but also the quiet beginning of expectations waiting to be fulfilled.
Today might coincidentally be the birthday of many of our readers. Some of us were celebrated, while some of us were met with a silence we only came to understand years later. And maybe, it doesn’t really end there.
It shows up later, not always in visible ways, but in how certain ideas about you seem to already exist, even before you’ve had the chance to become anything on your own. Maybe in this way you start second-guessing yourself a little earlier than you should. Or in the way you feel like you have to prove something, without really knowing what it is. You begin to feel that you need to become something before being fully accepted.
Because it doesn’t really end there. It stays, not as something you can clearly point at, but as something you feel. Its presence lingers in small, almost unnoticeable ways, in the slight pause before speaking, in the instinct to soften one’s voice, in the quiet habit of taking up less space without ever being told to.
It is rarely said out loud, yet it reveals itself over time. In this way achievements are acknowledged but not quite celebrated. In the way more adjustment is expected, more understanding is assumed, more compromise becomes natural. In this way hesitation settles in before even asking for something that is wanted.
And perhaps it begins much earlier than all of this, with the idea that a girl child is, in some way, unwanted.
Unwanted not in loud declarations, but in quieter beliefs that take root within families. That she will not carry forward the name. That she will eventually leave. That her presence is something to be managed carefully rather than embraced fully. These ideas are not always spoken, but they are felt, in reactions, in expectations, in the subtle difference between how two children are received.
And when a life begins like that, it does not leave unchanged.
It creates a need to justify one’s presence. To earn space rather than simply exist within it. It teaches restraint, of desires, of voice, of ambition. It builds a habit of questioning oneself before even beginning, without always knowing why.
Alongside this, a contrast quietly exists. Boys are often given more room, to take chances, to fail, to try again without their worth being constantly measured. Where a girl learns to hesitate, a boy is allowed to move forward. Where she feels the need to become “enough,” he is often assumed to already be.
And perhaps that is the consequence that lingers the longest- not just that a girl child may be unwelcome at birth, but that she grows up learning, in quiet and lasting ways, how to make up for it.
And slowly, it starts to make sense.
That perhaps it began much earlier than remembered.
In a beginning that may not have been fully celebrated.
In a presence that may have been quietly questioned before it was even understood.
And maybe that is why this feels personal.
Because today marks a beginning for me too.
And it is difficult not to wonder what that beginning looked like whether it was met with certainty, or hesitation. Whether, at some point, my existence was also something that needed to be justified.
But somewhere along the way, that question stopped being the only thing that mattered.
Because what matters now is that the same life that may have once been measured is now choosing to build, to create, to take up space in ways it was never taught to. To turn something that began in silence into something that speaks.
To the readers,
If there was ever a moment that made existence feel like something to be justified, let this serve as a quiet reminder, however the beginning was, here it is, continuing, becoming, making space in ways it was never promised.