Friendly Ghosts, Horrifying Reality: Female Infanticide in Ranjit Lal's Faces in the Water

Abstract

Friendly Ghosts, Horrifying Reality:Female Infanticide in Ranjit Lal's Faces in the Water Sietse Hagen (bio) Despite horror being often deemed inappropriate for children, it can be an important genre in portraying the terrors of the real world to young readers. Horror, Jessica McCort argues, "offers young readers...a dreamscape that parallels their reality, sometimes making it easier to cope with the monsters they must face in the real world" (22). Within children's literature, horror allows young readers to face and experience the negative elements of reality through the grotesque in an entertaining fashion. An example of this is Ranjit Lal's Faces in the Water, an Indian children's novel addressing female infanticide through protagonist Gurmi's encounter with the ghosts of his sisters who were killed at birth. The ghosts can be seen as a reference to the 1994 introduction of an Indian government program, the "Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which made it illegal to determine the sex of a foetus unless it was necessary for urgent medical reasons" (Vaze). Despite this act, female infanticide and feticide remain a serious concern in Indian society. Comparing India's male/female ratio to the worldwide natural ratio, around sixty million women are assumed missing in India (Hundal). Allie Dichiara informs us that, in India, "[t]he concept of daughters as 'more expensive' has been normalised throughout history." Lal's novel addresses this issue directly when Surinder Aunty tells Gurmi that girls "are quite useless and then you have to get them married and all that nakhra and expense.... And who will look after us when we're old? Our fine, sturdy sons of course!" (88). The Diwanchands, Gurmi's family, commit female infanticide for economical reasons. Through the Diwanchands, Lal shows that when feticide becomes unavailable, this leads to female infanticide, signaling that the issue of child murder due to sex bias remains an issue in India despite the 1994 act. Titas Bose and Ahona Das describe that "[t]he framework of horror which is at times a mirror, and at other [sic] a foil to the mortal society, is susceptible to be used as a tool for social satire." Thus, the horror genre creates a space for social critique due to its connection to reality and its ability to fictionalize the most frightening aspects of it. Although female infanticide is horrifying and deemed inappropriate for children, Lal manages to make the topic approachable for young readers by subverting horror tropes. Anurima Chanda describes that in Lal's novel, "[i]nstead [End Page 78] of repulsion, [the ghosts] evoke friendship. Instead of fear, they evoke laughter. In a strange way, they allow children to sneak a peek into the society's decomposing centre without really experiencing the full horrors of the situation" (162). Through this subversion of horror tropes, Lal manages to make the terrors of reality age-appropriate for young readers, which he also does with the happy ending of this novel. Happy endings in scary contexts "can function to help young readers...cope with frightening things in reality, translating those things into a fantasy world where fear is rendered manageable" (McCort 14). Therefore, by subverting horror tropes and adding a happy ending, Lal manages to make the topic of female infanticide accessible to child readers. The ghosts in the novel play a significant role as they lead Gurmi to break away from the normalization of sex bias. At the start of the novel, he demonstrates a negative view of girls by saying that he has no sisters, adding: "[G]od forbid—never!" (Lal 3). Gurmi demonstrates the earliest stages of internalized misogyny, while the adults are examples of the most extreme kind as they participate in female infanticide. Only when the sisters show Gurmi what could have been through the well, cleverly playing with the trope of the wishing well, Gurmi changes his mind and comes to the realization of how wicked reality is. By subverting the common interpretation of ghosts and making them friendly and humorous, the narrative allows Gurmi to realize the horrors of societally ingrained sex preference and form his own opinion about it. Faces in the Water brings...