Exports not worth bragging about

As a teenager in Kanpur I knew a fellow we called Poachy, a young man in his teens who boasted of landing a lucrative job in an international firm.

He would disappear now and then on ‘assignments’, the nature of which he kept secret, dodging queries with vague phrases like ‘import-export’.

He implied that his firm dealt in tea and tobacco and was a great source of income for India.

It was only when one of our friends caught Poachy at work on Lucknow railway station that we discovered what he did for a living.

He attempted to bribe the friend, but the truth was begging to get out. Poachy was seen on the platform with several trappers and porters loading animal cages with monkeys onto the trains for conveyance to the ports.

The monkeys were in apparent distress in captivity. From the coast they would be sent by ship to Europe for live vivisection and other medical experimentation.

No doubt the experimentation in far-off lands assisted the progress of medical science or the commerce of cosmetic companies, but it struck us as an affront to the pride of the country that Poachy was poaching wild monkeys for export.

Later, in my travels I came across the traffic in hair and its export from India’s sunny climes, mostly Kerala. Indian maidens with thick black tresses would be induced to sell them. Tons of this hair was gathered and exported to Europe for the propping up of vanity.

Undoubtedly the women who sold their hair made some money out of it and it was not as though they lost a kidney or an eye. The hair would grow and they could be as beautiful as they were before or indeed sell the next crop. Even so, the trade struck me as ignominious.

Even later, living in Europe, I was acquainted with the fact that some or most of the dead bodies that medical schools in Germany used for dissection and anatomical studies came from India.

On enquiry I was told that the bodies were acquired from police and municipal morgues and had been vagrants who died unclaimed in the cities, or they were people whose relatives had abandoned the bodies rather than bear the cost of any sort of funeral.

Again I am sure science and German medicine benefitted from this ghastly trade but I found it sad that dead bodies were one of my country’s perhaps limited but valuable exports.

And now, coincidentally again in Germany, I come across a documentary which features the services of the Akanksha Infertility Clinic which, on the evidence of the film, sells reproductive, baby-making services in India. The women whose wombs are used for surrogacy are, again on the evidence of the film, young Nepali or North-eastern girls.

Fertilised embryos are placed in their wombs and they are made to, by and large, lie down for nine months till the surrogate baby grows in them and they give birth.

The babies are then sent to the ‘mothers’ or families who have ordered and paid for them. All the clients I saw or heard of were women from America or Israel.

Again, surrogacy is not a practice that I find repugnant or reprehensible. What I did feel disturbed by was a sequence in which one of the young surrogate mothers has a miscarriage and is treated as though she is somehow at fault for not delivering a baby “even after we’ve so carefully fed you ghee, milk and luxurious foods”.

Phone calls, insurance services, even medical tourism sell the skills of the country. Somehow surrogacy for the rich West doesn’t seem the same.