Next they are hoping for a boy, boys being valued in traditional Indian society for both bringing a dowry through marriage and retaining the family - and the caste - name.
When Joy Gardener, a young black mother, was killed by immigration officers in front of her young boy, we didn't see her as an Afro-Caribbean cause; when a Hindu wife was burnt to death because she didn't bring a big enough dowry we didn't consider that to be a little local difficulty to be sorted by the community.
In the years when rains or crops fail, so-called "drought brides" – who bring in a dowry while being one fewer mouth to feed – push numbers up dramatically.
Kerry does bring Obama a dowry of millions of Democratic voters - a potential gold mine for any candidate.
"Every member brings a musical dowry," Ms. Sweet said, adding "Music has always been a part of my life".
The suspicion remains that the EU does not really want a lot of poor new members, and may yet try to wriggle out of the deal.The applicants will certainly not be bringing a rich dowry.
Having brought a large dowry into the family she contemplated turning the casino into a convalescent home for the poor who would benefit from recuperation in warm climes.
Growing up in India in the 90's, news reports of brides being torched to death by their in-laws for bringing an insufficient dowry and maids being slapped around by their drunken spouses were commonplace.
When Ben Yong married May, in 1990, his family brought over a dowry: two roasted pigs, four cooked chickens, Chinese pastries, a cake, a bunch of coconuts and 24 bottles of Rémy Martin XO cognac, many of which are still sitting in a cabinet.
Almost every day newspaper columnists berate Islam, often couching their prejudice in the highly moral language of women's rights: it is not due to oversight that Indian women murdered for failing to bring sufficient dowry - a staggering 6,787 in 2005 - occupy a fraction of the print acreage devoted to the tiny minority of veiled Muslim women.
