A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel

by Amulya Malladi

“Let me walk you out,” Priya said, ignoring her mother.

  By the time Priya came back inside the house, Sush was reading Madhu the riot act in the study.

  “I come all the way and you treat me like this? I see how Heidi’s daughters and sons-in-law take care of her, and I’m embarrassed because you two have no manners. You treat me—”

  “Enough,” Priya said. “Just enough.”

  “What?”

  “Just stop, Mummy,” Priya said. “You can’t talk to Madhu like this. He isn’t your child. And yes, we don’t like having you over because you spend the entire time telling us what we’re doing wrong. If it isn’t the surrogate, it’s the car I drive, or the condition of the house, or the garden, or my cooking. You never come here and say, ‘Hey, your roses are blooming, that’s nice.’ Or that we bought a beautiful new couch. Or ask us how the baby is doing, how we’re dealing with this surrogate situation. You just launch into a discussion about what terrible people we are.”

  Sush just stared at Priya and then marched out of the study.

  She stopped and turned around. “Call me a cab; I’m leaving.”

  “No, you’re not,” Priya said wearily. “It’s two in the morning, and you’re not going anywhere at this hour but into the guest room to get some sleep.”

  This time even Madhu gaped at Priya.

  “Priya, you don’t tell me what to do and—”

  “Mummy, for once, no drama. You have to admit that you treat us like garbage. And in return you want us to treat you like a queen. Only Dad can do that,” Priya said.

  “I treat neither you nor your father like garbage,” Sush said angrily.

  “Sure you do. Nothing he does is ever right. You’re nice enough about it and you’ll say, ‘Darling, you screwed up’ or what have you, but you still say it,” Priya said. “And I need you to stop, at least with me. We’re going to have a baby soon. So if you can’t change and can’t start appreciating us, you can’t see the baby. Especially if you intend to rant about us using a surrogate. I don’t need that in my life. And our child definitely doesn’t need that. You can’t say anything negative to me anymore.”

  “Then I have nothing to say to you,” Sush said. “I say what I see. I speak the truth, and I won’t lie to soothe your feelings. I’ll stay the night because, as you said, it is two in the morning, but I will leave tomorrow. I will never come back to your house. And I will never speak with you again.”

  Priya saw her retreating figure and lowered her head.

  “And here I thought if I stood up to her, there would be this great moment between us,” she said.

  “Didn’t work out like in the movies, did it?” Madhu said as he came toward her.

  Priya shook her head, her eyes wet.

  Transcript from message board www.surrogacyforyou.org

  NobuNobi: The baby is due anytime and I’m sooooo nervous. We’re in India now and I all but live in the hospital with my SM. She’s great. And I can’t wait to see our son.

  Trying1Time: Good luck and congratulations. I look forward to seeing the pictures.

  NearlyMother: Congratulations! I can’t wait for when our SM delivers, now that we have one who is pregnant. But my husband just got laid off. Thank God I still have a job and it pays well. Hope I don’t lose my job, too, because we’ll be screwed then.

  CantConceive1970: The economy is tough. My stepdaughter and son-in-law both got laid off last month. They’re fine for now, and my son-in-law will hopefully find a job soon. But if they don’t . . . I think they’ll be moving in with us.

  LastHope77: I’m so scared of losing my house. My husband is so annoyed with me because I keep asking him if his job is safe. I’m a stay-at-home mom so he’s the only one putting bread on the table.

  NobuNobi: I know I’m going to be laid off soon, especially because I’m in India now and then I take twelve weeks maternity leave. My in-laws keep telling us how stupid we are to do this. Like the baby is making me lose my job. I don’t care about the job. I just want to bring my baby home.

  Trying1Time: My mother is not very supportive, either. We got into it last night and I don’t think she’s ever going to speak to me again.

  UnoBaby: So sorry to hear that. I’ve lost friends because we’re using an SM and I say good riddance. But you can’t say that about a parent. After all, you only have one mother. I hope she’ll come around.

  Trying1Time: I don’t think she will. I raised my voice at her, which I’ve never done. But in some ways I’m OK with her not being in my life right now. She’s too critical, not happy for us or the baby. Sometimes it’s just easier to let it go rather than fight to keep the relationship going. It’s just too painful.

  PART III:

  SECOND TRIMESTER

  CHAPTER TEN

  The mother had cried when Asha had told them that she missed her children. She had told her that she liked living in the Happy Mothers House, but as the mother had prodded, Asha had also told her how much she missed Manoj and Mohini. And because the mother cried, Asha felt a little better, as if her sorrow were now shared.

  The mother had asked her what she missed the most, and she had said that she missed dropping Manoj off at school. That, and bringing him back home. She loved to walk with him, his hand in hers and Mohini in her arms while he rattled on in the morning about what he would learn in school that day; and on their way back, he would tell her what happened during the day.

  But the best part, the very best part, was when she would lean down at the gate of the school, Mohini standing next to her, and Manoj would hug her and kiss her on her mouth. And then Mohini would giggle and ask for a kiss, too. Manoj would sigh and kiss his sister’s cheek. Then he would run inside and Asha would feel her heart swell. My God, her children were wonderful.

  Asha counted the days.

  She had another eighteen weeks to go.

  She had to admit, the weeks went by faster in the Happy Mothers House than they had at home. Her days had a pattern here. She woke up and there was a yoga class. After that, they took a bath and ate a hearty breakfast of idlis or dosas or vadas with sambhar, fried curd rice, and fresh hot rice with a vegetable curry. The breakfast was the big meal at the house, which was different from how she did it at home. But apparently it was healthier to have a good breakfast and a light dinner. After breakfast, they had computer class. They took a break and watched television after that and had a snack of fruit and milk. Asha had to learn to eat fruits like apple and pineapple because she ate only bananas and mangoes during the season at home. Fruits had always been too expensive to eat every day.

  After they snacked, some of them got massages or just sat around. Then there was lunch and more rest. Many of the women took naps. Some women read; others watched television in the TV room and chatted. Asha tried to nap, but she wasn’t used to having time to rest. There had always been clothes to be washed, dinner to be made, homework to do with Manoj, and Mohini to take care of.

  Unable to nap, she would join her new friends, Narthaki, Keertana, Gangamma, and Gita, in the TV room. They’d play cards during the day and watch the serial Anandam in the evening. Mostly they talked.

  Gita’s parents, who were American, were now in Srirampuram, and they came to see her every day at four when Asha’s children came to visit. Asha had seen the parents. They were generous, bringing gifts for Gita every day. One day it was a television for her room, another an empty photo album for pictures of her children, and just yesterday they had given her dried fruits.

  “Gita knows how to get things,” Keertana said as they played rummy.

  “I don’t know how to get things; my parents are just good people,” Gita said.

  “Oh come on, just the other day I heard you tell them, in English, too, ‘My back hurts so much; the bed is so hard,’ and arrey, they get you a new mattress,” Keertana said, dropping a nine of hearts in the pile of cards among them.

  “I wasn’t asking them to bring me anything,” Gita said angrily, and threw her ca
rds facedown on the table. “I pack.”

  “You always pack,” Narthaki complained. “Do you never have any good cards?”

  “Maybe not, but she has a new Sony television in her room,” Keertana said.

  “You’re just jealous that my parents are better than yours,” Gita said.

  Keertana’s parents didn’t want to have any contact with her. They didn’t want to meet her or know her. They just wanted to take their baby and never deal with the woman who gave birth to it. There were at least three other surrogates in the house whose parents didn’t want contact with them. Doctor Swati said it was to not have an emotional attachment because it was so hard for parents to have a baby this way.

  “My parents have had so much bad luck with other surrogates that they want to keep things simple. Which is fine by me,” said Keertana. “Don’t want to know strange people from Britain anyway. And I don’t speak any English, so we’d have to talk through Nursamma, which is more trouble than I want in my life.”

  Nursamma, or Nurse Alice, was the live-in nurse. She was in her midfifties, a portly woman who wore a cross around her neck. She was a Christian and spoke English very well. She was nice to all the surrogates, and Asha liked to speak with her about her life in Kerala, which she had left behind after her husband had died. She had no children and no relatives. She thought of the surrogates as her family. She and Revati, the housemother, were good friends. These two lonely ladies had made their home here at Happy Mothers, and when she saw them, Asha was glad that she had a husband and children.

  Nursamma spoke Telugu very well, now that she had lived in Andhra for nearly fifteen years, but her Malayalam accent was strong. She would still say b for p, especially when she spoke hurriedly.

  She had very curly hair, which Asha associated with all Malayali women, and instead of a sari, she wore a kurta over a long skirt.

  “In the old days, women used to have children before they turned twenty,” she told Asha once while they sat out on the veranda stringing jasmine flowers for the women to wear in their hair.

  “Even now in my village that’s how it is,” Asha said.

  “And there, women don’t have trouble having children. But in the city with women working and everything, they wait and wait to get married, and then they complain when they are thirty that they can’t have babies,” Nursamma said.

  “Thirty and no children?” Asha asked.

  “Yes, and they say in America women sometimes have children even when they’re forty,” she said. “It’s not healthy.”

  “Have you always been a nurse?” Asha asked Nursamma.

  Nursamma nodded, took a string of jasmine, and handed it to Asha. “You take the first one.”

  Asha took the flowers and secured them on her head by lacing the jasmine flowers through her hair, just like her mother used to do. Asha had always had long, black, flowing hair that she braided, and her mother would always say that a woman looked beautiful with long black hair crowned with sweet-smelling jasmine.

  “I was a nurse in the Indian army,” Nursamma said. “For seven years. From 1982 to 1989.”

  “Really?” Asha asked as she laced the jasmine flowers together with a white thread in a practiced motion. “Is that where you learned such good English?”

  “Yes,” Nursamma said, and laughed. “The stories I can tell you about those days. Oh my. But then my husband fell sick and I had to leave. You move around too much in the army, and that wasn’t good for my husband. So I became a nurse in Kochi, and then after he died, I just couldn’t live there anymore. Too many memories.”

  “Was your husband nice?”

  Nursamma nodded, her eyes clear and bright, her face smiling as if thinking of something pleasant. “The nicest man in the world. Now let’s finish this before Anandam starts.”

  Asha wondered if she would be so content with memories if Pratap died. She saw Puttamma and how bitter she was as a widow, but then, Puttamma probably had been no better when she was a married woman.

  “How about your parents, Asha? Are they going to come here when the baby is due?” Narthaki asked now.

  Asha shrugged. “I think so.”

  “They send you things, too. They must be wealthy,” Narthaki said.

  The surrogates competed with respect to how nice their parents were, how much they sent, how often they called. White parents were more exotic than Indian parents. But the women agreed that it was strange to give birth to a white baby. A baby with marble-white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes—it was a sight to behold for the mothers when they gave birth.

  “I have no idea if they’re wealthy,” Asha said. Fact was, she didn’t know much about her parents at all, and she didn’t feel loyalty toward them, as some of the other surrogates seemed to.

  “They must be. Only rich people can afford to have children like this,” Gita said.

  Bored with the conversation, Keertana slammed her cards on the table. “Are we playing or not?” she demanded.

  “I don’t want to play anymore,” Gita said.

  “You packed already, so I wasn’t talking to you,” Keertana said as Gita stormed away.

  “Why do you always pick on her?” Narthaki said as she piled the cards together and started to shuffle them.

  “I don’t pick on her,” Keertana said, and then sighed. “She just annoys me, OK? She’s such a beggar. At least I’m only taking the money they give me. I don’t send letters saying I want this and that. That’s what she does. ‘My son needs spectacles and we don’t have the money’—and then they send money for that, which she uses to buy herself a sari.”

  Narthaki shook her head. “She bought her son spectacles, too. Gita is a good mother. And she’s right, you know, you do sound jealous. If your parents kept asking you what you wanted, wouldn’t you tell them?”

  Asha had had enough of the discussion and stood up, promising herself once again that she would try to take a nap or read a Telugu book in the afternoon instead of sitting with these women. They fought every day about one thing or another.

  Even though they had all the creature comforts they could dream of, none of the women in the Happy Mothers House was happy. Asha saw it everywhere. The frustration of being away from their families, the humiliation of lying to everyone about their pregnancy, the conflict of having a baby inside them they mustn’t bond with—these were definitely not Happy Mothers.

  That evening, Doctor Swati came to speak with them after dinner, collecting all the surrogate mothers in the television room.

  “A television news show from England is doing a program about mothers like you,” Doctor Swati told them. “They are coming here in two weeks, and they will want to talk to some of you. Nursamma and I will select the women who will talk to the television crew. I know you’re worried about being seen on television, but you can cover your face while you speak with them.”

  “What will they want to talk to us about?” Gita asked.

  “Will they show the program in India?” someone else asked.

  “Will they pay us for this?” Keertana asked.

  Doctor Swati raised her hand to quiet the room.

  “They will ask you what it means for you to be a surrogate,” Doctor Swati said. “They will ask about your health and how you feel about living here at Happy Mothers. And no, they won’t pay you, and the program will only be shown in England.”

  There were murmurs among the women, and Gangamma seemed more agitated than most, so Doctor Swati asked her if she had a specific question.

  “What are we supposed to say to them when they ask us questions?” Gangamma asked. “What do you want us to tell them?”

  Doctor Swati cleared her throat. “The truth. I think you’re very comfortable here. This is a nice house and you’re well taken care of. Tell them how you know what you’re doing is a gift for these couples who cannot have children.”

  “Like that is the truth,” Chitra whispered into Asha’s ear.

  Asha had not spoken much to Chitra, w
ho had come to the surrogate house the previous week. She was barely four months pregnant and looked like she was already about fourteen months along. Asha didn’t like her, and it wasn’t just her weight; she looked mean. She reminded Asha of an aunt who used to beat her when she was a little girl. She would twist her ears or give her a quick slap for no reason at all. Asha had been only ten then, but she figured that her aunt was one of those women who enjoyed beating children. She felt the same about Chitra. It was unreasonable, really—Chitra was probably nothing like her aunt, but Asha couldn’t help the feeling.

  Doctor Swati continued to talk about the filming details as Chitra babbled on.

  “It’s a business, you know. We just get five lakhs, but she . . . she gets fifteen. We carry the baby and she gets more money,” Chitra said. “And look at this house. The paint is peeling off, and they stuff as many of us here as they can.”

  Maybe Chitra came from a bigger house, Asha thought, because she didn’t think the house was small. She had seen a program on television about a house like this for surrogate mothers in Mumbai, and in that house all the women slept in the same room. Here, Asha just shared a room with Gangamma. Sure, the room was small, with barely enough space for their beds; still, it was bigger than what she shared in Kaveri’s flat with Kaveri and Puttamma.

  “This is a baby business,” Chitra continued, still whispering. “They sell our wombs to make money.”

  Asha wanted to ask her to shut up. Ask her why she had agreed to it if it was so terrible. But she didn’t. Partly because it wasn’t in Asha’s nature, and partly because she had thought the very same things Chitra was saying.

  Doctor Swati went into the computer room and asked some of the women to come and talk to her, one by one. Asha was one of those who was asked to come in. Chitra was not.

  Asha knew why she had been chosen. She was the quiet one, polite.