Page:Shubala - a child-mother (IA shubalachildmoth00soraiala).pdf/26

 now talking of the instances where children are unloved and wilfully neglected. I am talking of the loved and cared-for.

I am not talking of the cases of the baby-girl victim of supposed ill-luck, placed in premature death at the cross-roads for jackals to carry away.

Or of the babies whose heads and bodies are battered to produce stunted idiocy, that they might be vowed to a certain idol for whose shrine these "little mice" are perpetual beggars.

I am not talking of the cases of intrigue where, as in one household of my acquaintance, baby after baby was destroyed at its birth, one smothered in tobacco fumes, one plunged in boiling water, one… but what need to enumerate? because the lady its mother, the gift-bearer of sons, was supposed to have bewitched her co-wife, the bearer of daughters only.