Koi Good News?
Page 18
‘Ramit …’ I whisper, so as to not wake up the baby.
‘Ramit.’ I whisper a bit more loudly. Nothing.
‘Ramit!’
I consider throwing a pillow at him just when the nurse walks in to administer some medicines. That wakes him up.
‘What?’ he asks, judging my expression.
Ramit
To tell you the truth, I’m a little afraid of Mona, ever since I saw her bearing her fangs while pushing out that … purple human being. So when I see her looking at me angrily, I almost run out of the door. Then I remember all those books asking me to be a supportive husband and I get myself to sit by her bedside and hug her by the shoulder.
‘I have something to confess,’ she says softly.
She stays silent for a long time and suddenly I feel more awake. Is she going to now tell me that the baby is not mine? Is it … Shashi’s? Has he impregnated all the women around him?
‘I know I’m supposed to feel all the maternal love oozing out of me the minute I hold the baby, but I’m just … I don’t feel anything.’
I hold her for quite a while.
‘Why is this child so … purple?’ she says finally.
I laugh so loudly, the baby wakes up and screeches and oh my god, what a screech it is!
So we stay up all night.
Mona
We don’t know what the hell to do with the baby. I try feeding it and it hurts like hell. We finally call in the nurse who takes the baby out for a diaper change. When she brings him back in, he’s fast asleep.
I’m now checking WhatsApp while Ramit snores on his couch. I scroll through all the pictures taken in the last thirty-six hours and my heart sinks below sea level.
I’d always thought I’d look fresh and happy and glowing, holding the tiny, fatty baby in my arms, dressed in blue overalls. But here I am, in a faded purple, polka-dotted nightgown, my boobs pouring out from every corner and my hair dishevelled. Not at all like Laila and her shiny scrunchie.
Ramit
Woken up by a nervous nurse who comes screaming in to announce, ‘Daacter is here, daacter is here!’
Dr Mehak floats in with a bouquet of assistants.
‘How’re you doing?’ she asks.
‘Very tired,’ I reply, rubbing my eyes. She gives me an amused look. Apparently the question was meant for Mona.
‘Dr Mehak,’ Mona says. ‘My stomach is still so huge. Are you sure there isn’t another baby in there?’
Mona
Dr Mehak may say it’s normal and it’ll take a while for the uterus to settle down, but I don’t remember seeing Laila looking pregnant after Adriana was born.
Laila walks in a little later, her tiny baby wrapped in her arms wearing.
‘Here, beta,’ Mom says magnanimously, ‘place little Andrea next to the baby on the sofa so that we can take a picture of them together.’
‘She’s Adriana, not Andrea,’ I correct her.
‘Oh that’s even lovelier than Andrea. I loved the name! Mona, have you decided finally what to name the baby?’
‘We could call him Chooey till then,’ Mummy pipes in. ‘He’s such a little chooey, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ she starts cooing at the baby.
I wanted to barf. Chooey! If they shorten the pet name further it’ll be Choo! Choo for …
Ramit appears by my bedside to show me a picture of the two babies he’s clicked. My heart sinks further. I have given birth to a mouse, compared to Laila’s fluffed-up little girl. I have to say a couple of weeks and her baby already looks beautiful and not how it did on the first day. While mine …
Then Adriana starts crying so I panic that Laila will pull one boob out in front of everyone and feed her. But she whips out a bottle and both mothers immediately gasp.
‘Already on the bottle?’
‘I pumped it, Aunty. It’s not really a top feed. Don’t worry.’
We will be justifying our choices and actions to total strangers a whole lot more in the future, I realize with dismay.
Five minutes later, here I am, feeding the baby in front of Laila and the mothers and my pink-eared husband, who’s glued to his phone.
Ramit
Shania’s cooing at the baby, rocking it to sleep.
‘They’re so tiny, so delicate. I want one too. But, I guess I’ll probably need to get married for that and I’m not sure if that’s really worth it.’
‘What do you mean by ‘probably’? Don’t you give me a heart attack, young lady!’ Mona’s mom takes off on her.
I turn back to the form I’m filling.
‘Mona,’ I asked her tentatively, ‘I need to put down the baby’s name on the birth certificate form.’
I am praying she’s dropped the idea of Zayn.
‘Of course we do,’ she replies cheerfully. ‘He’s going to be Kabir Deol.’
Kabir
My God it’s bright out here! I can barely open my eyes. And someone has had the bright idea to strangle me with this swaddle cloth. I really need to stretch but there’s no place in this blanket. I had a lot more place inside the dark cell I could float around in.
Anyway, coming out into this brightness has been very exhausting. So I’ve slept most of the day. Every time I opened my eyes, there was a new face shining down at me saying stuff like ‘Golu-Molu, Chhotu-Motu.’ It’s like everyone has to speak in rhymes and rhymes alone.
I have warmed up to Round-Face, of course. She smells sweet and feels like a giant mattress. And the bespectacled bony guy is okay too, except he bounces me around a bit too much. I also like the other pretty girl who keeps discussing plans of taking me to some ashram and taking me trekking and I thought we were friends till she blinded me yesterday with some sort of flashlight. I told her off then and it took a whole lot of hands to calm me down after that.
I’ve also been sung to a lot – especially by tall blunt cut woman and short dishevelled hair woman who keep saying Naaaani- Daaaadi, training me to say that as my first word but I’m smarter than that. Plus their singing sucks! It sounds nothing like Remix 90s by DJ Suketu that I was made to listen to in the dark cell.
But my favourite is Angel-Face. She smells sweet, she glows at me and has this husky voice I remember hearing a lot in the cell. And all was well till she placed me next to this giant pink ball of fur who scowled at me immediately and I returned the favour. Not sure it registered because my face muscles aren’t working very well.
Ew, you look like a mouse! she had the audacity to tell me.
And you look like a giant cotton candy, I bit right back.
I’d rather be a cotton candy than be a squeaky mouse.
Oh really? Because your voice is really sounding a whole lot more mouse-like than mine is.
Oh really? Would you like to hear what my real voice sounds like? Take this! And she screamed.
How dare she! I gave it right back at her. We volleyed another three rounds, taking it several pitches higher every time, when Angel-Face quickly took her away and I was passed on to Round-Face, but we both continued our verbal assault till the massive ball of pink fur was taken out of my sight. It was sad to see Angel-Face go with her but we’ll just count it as collateral damage.
I hope she isn’t coming back.
Anyway, all that lung exercise was exhausting. Time for another nap.
Acknowledgments
I have so many people to thank for this book.
My amazing husband, Moksh, who dutifully reads whatever I write, compliments it sufficiently and encourages me to do more of it. Thank you for telling me to pursue what I love. And thank you for being the inspiration behind workaholic Ramit (haha!).
My mum, for always telling me she’s proud of me and for giving me the time to hammer away at my laptop by patiently looking after my brats as they turn her house upside-down.
My mum-in-law, for her constant encouragement and for calling dibs on playing the role of the mother-in-law if the book is ever made into a movie!
My
sister, Seemeen, my biggest pillar of strength, for believing in me and for guffawing madly at the manuscript for days.
My brother-in-law, Amar, for promising to secretly buy lots of copies of the book and gifting them to all his friends. I’m sure a book on pregnancy will make for great reading for a bunch of CEO-type people.
My niece, Kyrah, for agreeing to be my official photographer and for very kindly blaming the light rather than my face for not getting it right a hundred times.
My cousin, Ayesha, for being the inspiration behind Shania. For being crazy but lovable. But crazy.
My various lifelines: The Burneys, the Chopras, the Khans, the Wadhwas, my Giggles, my Secret Society, my Usual Gang and my very own grammar coach from Chennai – thank you for your enthusiasm. You guys are the best!
Thank you, Yashodhara Lal Sharma, for being my mentor, in so many ways, always.
Thank you, Harper Collins India – Swati Daftuar for telling me you loved the book, Arcopol Chaudhuri for your patience with my childlike excitement, and Diya Kar, for believing in this story.
Thank you, my ‘good news’, Zayn and Iram, for bringing such incredible amount of joy to our lives every single day, and without whom I would have never realized the hilarity of the journey.
Thank you, Dad, for being my guiding star, for passing on your love for writing and for watching over me always.
And finally, thank you dear reader, for picking up and reading this fairly fat book. I hope it brought you a nice, hearty laugh.
About the Book
The hilarious private journal of a highly public pregnancy.
When Mona Mathur of Dehradun married her college sweetheart, Ramit Deol of Amritsar, there were two things she wasn’t prepared for:
1. The size of the Deol family – it put any Sooraj Barjatya movie to shame.
2. The fertility of the Deol family – they reproduced faster than any other species known to mankind.
It’s been four years since their wedding, and Mona and Ramit have done the unthinkable – they’ve remained childless. Of course, that also means that they’ve battled that one question day in and day out: ‘Koi good news?’
Now, the truth is, Ramit and Mona had been trying to conceive for the past one year. But having a baby isn’t as easy as it’s made out to be. Finally, aided by the wine at their highly glamorous neighbours’ party, Mona gets pregnant. And so begins a crazy journey – complete with interfering relatives, nosy neighbours, disapproving doctors, and absolutely no privacy!
Honest, relevant and thoroughly irreverent, Koi Good News? is the funniest book you’ll read this year.
About the Auhtor
After working for Pepsi, Hindustan Times and ACNielsen for ten years, Zarreen Khan decided to take a break and raise two children, who are sometimes kind enough to let her role-play as a marketing consultant. She lives in Delhi with her husband, dealing with the craziness of being half-Muslim and half-Punjabi, which is detrimental to her weight, sanity and sense of humour. Zarreen’s first book, I Quit, Now What?, was published in 2017. This is her second book.
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First published in India by
HarperCollins Publishers in 2018
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
www.harpercollins.co.in
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Copyright © Zarreen Khan 2018
P-ISBN: 978-93-5277-905-5
Epub Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 978-93-5277-906-2
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Zarreen Khan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover design: Saffron Design
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