SANTA DIVORCED

(Mrs Claus sends divorce papers, claims Santa exploited her and never gave her due recognition)

Breaking News! Now that Christmas is over and Rudolph the Reindeer happily grazed along, resting his tired bones, Santa munched away at the left-over cookies that Mrs Claus baked for the Christmas goodies. But a bang on his door broke his reverie and tore apart his peaceful world.

Mrs Claus has sent him mutual divorce papers deciding to break their seven hundred and nineteen years of togetherness and apparently didn’t even ask for alimony. She just wanted freedom from the man who was highly in demand all across the world. Impossible, Unbelievable!!!!

Santa racked his brains to find out what suddenly went wrong; how could a docile housewife, who half of the world didn’t even know had existed, and who diligently served him all these years without any complaint could suddenly turn hostile and take up such a drastic decision!

“No doubt, I tried stopping her nagging mother from staying with us too often, that complaining wretched old woman! She was always after my life. She never wished her daughter to marry a fat lazy man like me and thought Mrs Claus would find some Prince Charming,” recalled Santa. “I am sure she must have provoked her daughter to break away,” he sobbed helplessly. Or, was it that he made her work late nights to meet the rising demands of the Christmas market. Or may be she found a new man, while he was away on his tours. “Oh that’s a remote possibility, which Mr Bond will suddenly land up in this village covered with snow, no no that can’t be, Mrs Claus is so old now,” Santa lamented. His cries brought Rudolph and the elves running to his rescue.

Meaty, the chocolate elf, who loved gorging on any meat dish that came his way felt he was to blame. “Oh lord Santa, punish me, I am so sorry,” Meaty was in a weeping spree. “I had asked her to visit India.” Santa was aghast.

Apparently Mrs Claus took a terrible feminist approach to life after a recent secret trip to India where she saw a special screening of Bollywood movies starting from KJO’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna to Queen, though her prime intention was to enjoy the lovely tropical sun. She needed a break from staring at the ripples of white snow at her North Pole home. How tired and bored she felt.

She had the sun and sea of Mediterranean in mind. India was never an option, after all who would wish to visit the second most populous country in the world? And with the increasing terrorist threats to India, she had no wish to get ripped off by some suicide bomber. She wanted fun and freedom.

But her elves had hinted last year that Santa himself was giving a lot of attention to India. The country was giving him a very good sales record, India turned out to be one of the largest markets for Christmas goodies and gifts. Though Christians happened to be a minority there, Indians had a very big heart indeed and they loved all festivals, after all winter was the best season to enjoy. And though the government this year round declared Christmas Day as Good Governance Day, the countrymen gave a damn and bought all his home-made cookies cakes and gifts with a vengeance. Santa had even smuggled in some special wine and ale to entertain the young adults. 

Even this year round the sales figures were one of the highest in India. So to keep his bank accounts rolling Santa gave more time to India than to any other country. But, Mrs Claus had heard otherwise. One of her elves informed that Santa brought back lovely calendars from India last year. “Calendars!” wondered Mrs Claus. What does he need them for? He just needs to know one date and that’s 24^th December midnight. Curious, Mrs Claus had raided Santa’s bag and to her utter disgust she discovered pictures of sexy dusky Indian beauties in bikinis popping from every page. When confronted, Santa said a white-bearded man gifted him the calendars to be distributed among the residents of the North Pole and other countries he would visit. It was a sort of publicity gimmick, the man was confident if his calendars reached lands that were out-of-bounds so long, they would sell well and he could use the money to bail out his airlines! Mrs Claus refused to believe one word. Calendar business and airlines, how can they go hand in hand?

So, she needed to find out the truth herself. The North Pole Diaries had hardly any mention of Indian women. But her mother had given her an age-old book about the women in India, and somehow she could relate herself to such women who served their husbands and children at home just like she herself did, spending her golden years, making toys, looking after the fir trees waking up for hours. She even cared for the reindeers, made cookies with the elves. She had never asked for any credit, and Santa never offered her any. Mrs Claus hated one-night stands, divorces and re-marriages. She could somehow relate to the patibrata naari mentioned in the book.

But once she landed in Mumbai (for that’s where Santa had the largest business accounts) she was in for a rude shock. The country was now swept by feminist movements and women’s rights groups. She was so influenced by their ideologies, that she started asking herself: “Why should I remain married to a fat man like Santa Claus who has never taken any interest in diet or exercise and who never helped me cook a meal or clean the house? Were these just the work for women? Even the Indian ad-world was showing stay-home dads with their women going on jobs while their husbands taking care of kids and the needs of the household. And just look at Santa! He never even told the world that I make all the gifts that he proudly distributes and takes the credit.”

Mrs Claus had at last learnt it the hard way. She declared: “I want to be known as the oldest feminist icon, not as Santa’s wife anymore.”

Claus looked quiet and sullen, and finally threw away the eggnog and the bowl full of jelly. He left the room with the reindeers and elves staring as he left in search of the calendar that he secretly kept in one of the drawers away from Mrs Claus when he tumbled upon a needlework that Mrs Claus was working on. It said: “Why can’t a woman be given the chance to do the same work as a man?”

TALE OF A LOST WOMB

(The Indian IVF Market and A Woman’s Trauma of Failed IVFs)

The doctor’s chamber was like a harbinger of hope, the procedural room felt like heaven. For Rupsha, they bore the seeds of a dream, the need for a child in her otherwise happily married life. The pulse of motherhood that rips off a woman’s heart in the midst of anything negative, that drives women on an instinct that’s as raw and primitive as sex, can at times be twisted by the hands of failure. Every dream and every need might not always come true.

Spikes of haplessness and hopelessness strike when the womb fails to deliver what it’s supposed to deliver. When hormones play wrong and when a lively embryo formed by the union of a sperm and an ovum fails to bloom. The womb produces hormones that force it to miscarry or the sperms turn antagonistic to the ovum ensuring the production of a non-viable zygote that cannot and will not flower out into a much-awaited baby.

But Rupsha’s husband needed an heir and she too needed the taste of motherhood. Her husband was ready to spend lakhs of rupees but he had to have someone of his own flesh and blood to gift to his parents. He was their only son and any failure to produce a baby would be like missing the link of heredity. Adoption won’t do. For that meant not his genes to boast of. He convinced Rupsha that in-vitro fertilisation is the last word and he was confident that medical science was well equipped to fill in their void.

However, Rupsha had heard from one of her colleagues that chances of having a biological child after 40 with her own eggs through IVF and carrying that child to maturity would be rather difficult and the hormonal treatment she has to undergo in the process might have long-term impact on her health. Even the viability of ova after the age of 35 for a woman is doubted. Chances thus fall. But Rupsha was unperturbed, she was ready to allow doctors to experiment with her body, she had to succeed. It was like winning a war for her. 

And well, doctors at the infertility clinic did give her immense hope. They made the whole thing sound like creating a Christmas doll in the factory. They cited examples of women above 40 having IVF babies and how easy the whole procedure was, promising her a 50-50 chance, and so on and so forth. She plunged. Taking hormone injections at regular intervals to prepare her womb for the much-awaited child that nature had refused her was like conquering the fear of the unknown. And she had conquered the fear of pain, the fear of subjecting herself to shots, medicines and repeated hormone therapies. Her child would be born in a laboratory with her own egg and her husband’s sperms. The dream of this union kept her going.

Every procedure ran into tens of thousands, every time the light of hope kindled, doctors assuring the embryos were of very good grade, tested in the laboratory, would surely produce healthy babies. Yet, the cruel hands of destiny triumphed over human knowledge and expertise. Rupsha conceived but every two months later she miscarried as well.

Every month she got a daily dose of injection to suppress her natural menstrual cycle. Then she was given FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone) injections for 12 days to increase the number of eggs she produced per cycle, to increase chances of getting more and more embryos. Then again 34 hours before the eggs were collected she got another shot to help the eggs mature. Egg collection at times led to cramping and vaginal bleeding. But she just ignored. She was on her mission to produce a new life. She cried at times alone when none could see her, in fear of another miscarriage and the pain of repeated shots. On days of embryo transfer she would be given more injections to prepare her womb for the transfer. She feared she might get ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome (occurring in almost 10 per cent of IVF cases due to the fertility drugs) or even end up with ectopic pregnancy (where the embryo grows outside the uterus usually in the fallopian tube), but the experiments continued.

And every time it failed, Rupsha’s husband looked so angry and frustrated, like a wounded animal ready to strike back. Rupsha recoiled at his anger, was it her fault that she couldn’t hold the baby? Every time she stepped into her house, her in-laws would sigh at the prospect of losing another baby, reminding her if they had a grandchild the house would have turned so joyous. But hadn’t the IVF clinic promised them that their success rates were so high that some patients who had failed IVF cycles elsewhere were even offered a guaranteed pregnancy program?

And after two failed cycles even the doctors turned aggressive trying to assert that their work of producing beautiful embryos was done. Rupsha was a patient of implantation failure, a tag that refers to patients who have undergone many IVF cycles, produced viable embryos, yet the embryos consistently failed to implant for unexplained reasons. Tagged and branded she was like a piece of paper thrown into a waste paper basket. Even her husband who was so confident and ready to spend lakhs started complaining how his hard-earned money was flowing down the drain. Rupsha’s sense of failure was so overwhelming that she even had nightmares of her bleeding and losing the foetus amidst a stack of thousand rupee notes popping out of her husband’s wallet!

To add insult to the injury the doctors and her husband suggested of taking a donor’s eggs as after two cycle failures it seemed the doctors finally realised her eggs might not be healthy enough. Her child would not look like her, her husband persuaded it will have his genes, wasn’t that enough? Then why not adopt, was Rupsha’s query? But her husband was adamant, he needed his own baby.

They saved up another lakh to pay the egg donor and go through another IVF cycle. The donor was 25, was brilliant according to the needs and went by the medical textbook details, but this time round Rupsha got a call from her clinic after a few weeks stating her pregnancy test after 3 weeks of implantation showed weakly positive. That meant it might not be viable at all. She had a scan done and the doctors dramatically presented the death of a tiny foetus that just grew up to two units though it was supposed to have grown four times. They charted the possible reasons of such a phenomenon in their own medical terms. For Rupsha it was like witnessing the slow death of a life. She walked out of the clinic silently, no tears, her husband was not there to console her, he was off to a meeting as he had already heard the hopeless case from his doctor in the morning. Why didn’t anyone put a hand on her shoulder and say it was really an awful thing for her to go through all this? 
For Rupsha's family, infertility was shrouded in shame as she kept on losing her babies, she felt she was undergoing a silent reproductive death. She had indeed turned a victim of the IVF global market. She was their experimental specimen, a product who could not be packaged and sold.   

 HARD TRUTHS ABOUT IVF FAILURE

• Female age, embryo quality, ovarian response, and implantation issues.

• Some infertile patients undergo many IVF cycles and produce embryos, but the embryos consistently fail to implant for unexplained reasons.

• Another group of patients who often do poorly in other IVF clinics are those who have PCOD (Polycystic Ovary). Because many doctors are so worried about the danger of OHSS ( ovarian hyperstimulation) in these patients, they often end up superovulating these patients badly, and retrieve few poor quality eggs, compromising the pregnancy rate.
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• A look at the data shows in Europe 77% of treatments fail. The Centre for Disease Control has it at 70% failure. It’s amazing that five million babies have been born out of IVF but there are least 10-15 million couples whose treatments have failed.

ALL ABOUT EVE

I am EVE.. erudite, versatile, emotional… I have been chosen by evolution to be synonymous to Mother Nature, I have been blessed with a womb to nurture life, with milk laden breasts to suckle my babies, the depth of a vagina with all its pleasures, a sensitive soul that gives a patient hearing, a caring heart to embrace your sorrows, an alien intelligence that tries to set all things right. Yet, I too cry… the tears of loss, of heartbreak, of cruelty, of torture, of rape and of loneliness… For the WOMAN in me and for the EVE in you, for the ADAM in you, who love and respect their EVEs, come and share any tale of any EVE’s triumph, moments of her defeat, her insecurities, challenges and experiences. And gossipy chitchats too.. all ya girls, that’s something we all love. I am a media professional with one of the largest dailies of India and an author who loves being a woman and with an MSc in Biological Sciences, I will write on the challenges of being a woman, her complicated physical set up and her tremendous fertile mind that have been dominated quite often, I shall interview real life women and their men who have achieved against all odds, girls who have stood against society to prove their worth, men who have supported them in their endeavour. I am also a mother, one of the most rewarding yet challenging profession and relation in the world.

So celebrate with the Goddess of Light, Lord’s best creation.. Naari, Shakti, EVE…