Once upon a time, there was a stingray named Charlotte. She lived in captivity in an aquarium, spending her days listlessly swimming alone in her tank. She often pondered upon her lonely existence. Her heart yearned for a mate, someone she could envision having children with, a future maybe. Sadly, she hadn’t seen one in eight long years, and it seemed like she wouldn’t for another eight. But one day, in a stupor, she hoped for children so fervently that her heart swelled and so did her insides. Miraculously, she had willed her own progeny into existence.
This isn’t the beginning of a children’s novel but a real incident that took place in the early months of 2024. Everyone, including me, was awestruck by the news of a stingray in North Carolina’s Aquarium and Shark Lab, that had reportedly had a virgin pregnancy. Kept away from males for years, there was no explanation for how this rust beauty had as many as four pups in her.
Scientists spoke of parthenogenesis, a phenomenon seen in rays, sharks and bees in different capacities. This rare occurrence allows a female to give birth without the need for sperm to fertilise the eggs, possibly giving birth to her own clones.
There were ultrasound lives, Facebook updates, news channel interviews and even merchandise. Who doesn’t want to learn about a scientific miracle wrapped in a stingray that looks like it’s always smiling?
And of course, I was consumed by it too. Anyone who knows me knows that the enigmas of zoology make at least 50 per cent of my party factoids. I am enamoured by how nature works and that we all, in some sense, belong to this big, vast, beautiful world that we keep learning more about. Hearing about Charlotte’s feat sent me into somewhat of an obsessive spiral. Not about zoology or nature, but an internal one.
If it were possible for a ray to create her own offspring, likely clones of herself, would it someday be possible for humans? Would parents with uteri in the future be able to completely negate sperm donors, known or unknown, to bring forth progeny they’ve always wanted?
Now, mind you, I have never wanted motherhood for myself. I have never ached for a child, nor have I experienced any intrinsic calling to be maternal. This is not to say that I do not believe children are innocent and beautiful, but I am certain that birthing one and then rearing one is not for me. There are many reasons for this. I have met many friends, dates even, who I have had to explain that I do not trust myself to bring up a child well. Motherhood is a complicated beast - there are a plethora of avenues to fuck up and fuck up I will. I am scared of what I have been predestined to become as a mother, and even more fearful that I will ruin my child so very much that it will curse me for the rest of my life. And in the case that I do outperform every single mother that has ever existed, I still do not trust this world to be kind to the children that are coming. Not to mention, children are expensive, and I can’t afford rent. These are some of the many haunting thoughts that have followed me since I was of ‘marriageable age’ and when every relative felt like it was normal to ask me my view on having children.
But parthenogenesis stuck with me. I went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole at 2 am, reading up about meiosis/mitosis egg splits and apomictic parthenogenesis like a woman crazed. This news had suddenly rustled the leaves of a tree I had not known was growing inside me. All at once, waves upon waves of hope crashed into me, and I felt like I was drowning in the possibilities of what could be.
Yes, I had never wanted to be a mother. But remothering myself? Now there was a shiny, lucrative idea. For someone who has spent a large chunk of her adulthood blaming her childhood for all her mishaps, this was the lighthouse on a bleak ocean. Now I had begun imagining life as a mother for the first time, a mother to a fictitious child that was so familiar but a complete and utter stranger.
What if I could birth my own clone? Kaavya 2.0, let's call it. What if I could give myself every single thing that I have cursed my childhood for lacking? What if I could watch this child succeed in adult life not despite, but because of its formative years? What if I, a 32-year-old Kaavya, could someday see what Kaavya 2.0 would look like at 32 without my hang-ups, bitterness and sad ways. What if I gave this child every single ounce of my being and watched the true meaning of nature versus nurture play out right in front of my eyes?
An archaeologist, a fashion magazine editor, a Russian mob wife, a successful businesswoman, a great daughter, a bestselling but also critically acclaimed author, a spy assassin pirate - this kid could be anything at all. A million Kaavya's, a million figs off a singular tree.
I’m not going to lie, many drunken nights have been spent rambling about just this to my poor friends. I have ranted and whined about this possibility and how much I would like to see a more capable, confident Kaavya achieve everything she dreamed of as a kid. She would be able to say ‘I love you, ma’ and mean it. She would be able to come home and talk to me about her hopes and dreams without the fear of being reprimanded or humbled. She would get into tons of trouble and still have me waiting to take care of it for her if she so wanted.
I so badly wanted to be a mother to myself that I teetered on the brink of madness. I dreamt and woke up to thoughts of what all I could have achieved with little tweaks and twists to my childhood. I feared what I could do worse to this child, what new, unerasable way could I change it forever. Was it possible to smother it with affection, or would I give it so many freedoms that it would grow up to be a bitter, jilted daughter regardless? Wasn’t I, in some ways, doing the same thing many of us complain about with Indian parents - projecting my hopes and goals onto my offspring? I was becoming the Dr Frankenstein-esque self I hated parents for becoming. But oh what a sweet, pathetic idea it was to be able to watch, like Charlotte, four different Kaavya's achieve, lose, love me, hate me and become me in their own different ways!
All of these questions kept me up at night, and I was grateful to Charlotte for helping me unlock such a deep wound and simultaneous joy in me.
And then she died.
Charlotte died and took my dreams with her, and I have no one but the owners of this private aquarium to blame.
What I conveniently left out while rambling about my crazy fantasies was that the owners of this aquarium had given one of two possibilities when Charlotte had been found to be pregnant. A. was parthenogenesis, of course, but B. was interspecies mating with the bamboo sharks in her tank. I am by no means a biology expert, but what I do know is that sharks and rays are so evolutionarily far apart that this cannot be real in any shape, way or form. Not only did they concoct these crazy claims, blocking people from sharing real scientific information, but they also called the police on concerned people trying to visit the aquarium and ask questions.
In mid-March, they claimed she had been pregnant since September. And while miracles do happen, round rays’ gestational periods are only three to four months long, making Charlotte’s pregnancy improbable to say the least. No one had heard of a single veterinarian’s name through this process, with the owners themselves claiming that they did not know how to read a sonogram. By May, the pregnancy was lost and by June, so was Charlotte.
Charlotte died, possibly from a rare reproductive disease that mimics pregnancy, but most likely from a cancer that had been growing ferociously in her as she did photo-ops and had an Amazon wishlist to her name. This unaccredited aquarium not only ignored their lack of knowledge while actively ignoring those more knowledgeable, but also let a stingray suffer to create a media blizzard.
From one uterine concern to another, I switched. We never really studied the female body. Here’s a song to ease this for you. Medical concerns by those who have uteri are often dismissed, mentioning female paranoia as a possible reason and considering most of our countries’ monies are going into fuelling wars, we don’t really have any to put into keeping half our population alive, do we? This is why terrifying issues such as endometriosis and cervical cancer often go undiagnosed, being fatal in some cases.
I suffer from something called a Bartholin’s cyst, a fluid-filled lump that is caused when the Bartholin’s gland that lubricates you gets blocked. This is often painless, but when infected can become so painful that you are left unable to walk. The first time I had a flare-up was when I was freshly 18, and I had to be wheeled into a hospital and operated on. The cyst was the size of a fist by then because I was too scared to point it out when I first noticed it, for fear of slut shaming or being blamed for somehow bringing this upon myself.
This was with good reason, because what ensued was indeed slut shaming. I was told that this was caused by sex and nothing else; the nurses treated me like a pariah, my doctor shamed me in front of my parents, and I was told to talk to a counsellor about masturbation. All this while I was not only suffering the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life, but also a raging fever, my first hospitalisation and later anaesthesia. There has been one other hospitalisation since, where I was treated slightly better, but the impact this first visit left on me was profound. So much so that I am now afraid of visiting gynaecologists and now do everything possible to avoid them.
Once every single doctor I ever visited told me this was a flare-up due to sex, I visited the internet. And there, on a long-dead forum that pre-dated Reddit, I found community. There, I saw so many Bartholin cyst sufferers explain the many reasons the initial infection could happen and that you are more prone to getting the cyst as they recur. These people taught me what I could do to stop the cyst from getting bigger as soon as I felt something was wrong, and I have not had a hospitalisation since. A simple Google search could have proved these doctors wrong, but to a terrified 18-year-old, what gynaecologists said was the word of God.
This is, somehow, still a better space than when male doctors believed females had free-floating uteri that would go up and down our bodies. We weren’t even allowed on trains lest our uteri fly out of our bodies because of the speed. No, I’m not joking, I wish I were.
I tell you all this, not to gain sympathy, but to tell you that something is wrong with us. The female body is quick to be commodified, but slow to be treated. While it may be lusted after, desired and viewed as the perfect billboard to sell everything from a pack of cigarettes to a pair of Louboutins, they aren’t deemed worthy of care. And Charlotte’s plight, in my mind, stands as an uneasy allegory of the gross miseducation, malpractice and mistreatment of the female body.
Too often, I have found myself feeling like a stingray in an isolated tank, with people across the glass yelling in glee at my future pregnancy while I ache to be free of scrutiny. Too often, I feel like they are actively dismissing my body and the pain I feel, because I will forever be on the other side of the glass. They ask for clones of us, perfect little future hosts of future hosts and so on. But they cannot promise us that it’ll be better for them or that the current bodies can be taken care of.
They want us to want motherhood, but do not care about the very bodies that will host these sought-after pregnancies. While they want you to go through the myriad changes physically, emotionally and mentally to be pregnant, if you do have complaints or queries or just seek comfort, you will be dismissed.
And once again, I go back to not wanting motherhood, that one inkling of hope aborted.
About the author: Kaavya Pillai is a former journalist turned art writer. She lives in Mumbai and spends most of her time going on internet deep dives on pop culture, books, fashion, horror films, music, zoology, and more. She says this is because she's multi-faceted and definitely not her ADHD.
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