One Saturday morning

She was a pretty girl, maybe in her early twenties. Swinging her legs ever so slightly while she kept murmuring softly in disagreement and despair. Her companion, a stocky balding man in office attire, flicked through a magazine. They had a striking resemblance to a man who has an irritating fly circling around his head—the man was trying in vain to ignore the fly, wishing it to disappear. He reassured her now and then, that it was OK and it would not hurt and would be over soon.

I couldn’t help noticing then and their plight, wondering if it was any better or worse than mine?He definitely looked a married man from a stable middle-class Bengali family. And she definitely did not look like his wife. But I could be mistaken.

It was the dawn of a new era. The dark ages were giving way very tentatively to the women’s liberation, financial independence and the right of women to be taken seriously as living, thinking and feeling human beings. It was the early eighties in the back lanes of Calcutta.

We were sitting at the waiting room of Marie Stopes clinic in Free School Street. You couldn’t get more back lane than this, unless you chose the bylanes of Sonagachi.

The receptionist was a middle-aged lady with sparkling rings and ear studs, complete with the podgy layers around her middle as befits a middle-aged lady of that time. Stiff upper lip was the order of the day although the eyes looked piercingly with mocking and judgment.

The walls around were sterile and as blank as possible, although they seemed to close in with suffocating speed. The air was sparse and filled with contempt and despair. There was not enough to breathe. 

It felt more like a morgue than a clinic. In a way it was rightly so. This was a place where unwanted pregnancies were medically terminated. No appointments necessary. You could turn up and have an abortion and go back to living a so-called normal life, all in a day. Easier than going to a dentist to have your tooth extracted. For that you needed an appointment.