by Meera Syal
‘So you know, then. Is that why you’ve done this? A bit bloody late to feel bad about it, if you don’t mind me saying.’
Tania cleared her throat which hurt quite considerably. Her voice came out as a whisper. ‘Has something happened to Chila’s baby?’
Prem paused mid-wipe. ‘You have definitely taken something illegal, haven’t you? I want to say for the record I have never approved of your lifestyle, but I thought at least you had a bit of common sense.’ Prem was big on common sense. He had begun a pension scheme at twenty-two, had almost paid off the mortgage on a five-bedroom house and had established trust funds for his children before they were potty trained. The fact that he had not had any contact with his sister for almost a year did not prevent him from having opinions about her behaviour. And now, what did it matter? He was virtually the head of the family and, as such, he had to begin as he meant to go on. He may have disliked Tania, but he had a duty to allow her back into the fold, given the circumstances.
‘Get dressed. And bring some plasters.’
Tania stood up automatically. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked timidly.
Prem stared at her bewildered. ‘You don’t know, then? To the hospital. It’s Daddy.’
Chila jerked up from her bed at the sound of muted snuffling. She leaned over the portable cot at her side, licked her finger and placed it in the tiny space between the nose and mouth of her son. Satisfied he was still breathing, she relaxed back into her pillows. Even though he had slept almost constantly since the birth, she had not managed more than a few snatched minutes’ sleep, afraid to doze off in case he needed her.
She shifted her body around trying to get comfortable. She registered pain, but mildly, from a distance; she knew there were savaged areas that were in need of urgent repair, but they could wait. Overwhelming every other sensation was a profound sense of completion. She, Chila, catalogue-cutting dumbo and mistress of the faux pas, had done something wonderful, had produced a piece of heaven, a morsel of perfection.
She looked around at the other new mothers on her ward and could not understand why they were not letting off party poppers and hanging fairy lights and swinging from the buzzing fluorescent bars in joy, in acknowledgement of the amazing thing they had all done. She wanted to be garlanded with necklaces of jasmine, offered silver trays of Turkish delight, have liveried maids brushing coconut oil into her hair, someone to push her drip for her when she made that long and terrible journey to the lavatory. Instead, the ward was suffused with somnolence, sighed with the heavy, lazy air of a stable of cows. Her mother had told her, when she had visited her with boxes of sweetmeats and the smug expression that grandmothers of newly born boys always wore, that in India, she would be treated like a princess.
‘You see, a new mother is made to stay in her bed for forty days. No getting up, only eating the finest food, full of sugar and butter, nothing to do but wait for blessings and feed your son.’
‘That’s nice, Mum,’ Chila replied, ‘but I’ll probably have to do the Tescos run as as soon as I get back.’
‘No no no!’ her mother gasped. ‘You will get a chill in your womb and your milk will dry up! Bed rest only! You get your husband to do it. This is the one time he can’t say no.’
‘And if I asked you to do it, Mum?’
Her mother squeezed her hand. ‘I am always here. But it is not good for anyone to come between a new baby and his parents. Now you are a family. You don’t need me any more.’
Chila had wisely decided not to tell her mother that Deepak had not even seen his son. She had received several visitors on her first day; Sunita of course, at every visiting hour, bearing gifts of fruit and magazines and stupidly large balloons. Her parents, a few of her parents’ friends, a couple of girls from the supermarket where she used to work and some of her ladies’ luncheon group, all ooohing over the baby and remarking on how much he looked like his daddy.
Chila watched the fathers come and go to the other beds in her small ward. The African woman opposite poured tea for her quiet tall man every visit. They didn’t speak much. He would hold the baby, she would watch him, they would smile at each other occasionally and nibble companionably on biscuits. There was a jolly red-haired woman who had produced an almost bald baby with a dusting of hair like paprika. Her husband would bound in with three flame-haired children who would fight over their new sibling and eat all their mother’s chocolates. There were two women who did not seem to have partners. One was a young girl, no more than a teenager, who would hold her baby for hours, gazing at her with a kind of bewildered amusement. And the other was a much older woman, maybe in her early forties, who had been on the ward for two weeks following complications after a Caesarean. Every item she had for her baby was designer made and colour co-ordinated, and she was visited by groups of smart laughing women who took over her bed and took turns reading out the horoscopes from glossy magazines.
The apparently single mothers did not disturb Chila as much as the Indian woman in the bed near the window. She was small and mouse-like, and spent much of the day huddled in a nest of blankets, snacking on obviously home-made food from Tupperware containers. But fifteen minutes before visiting time began, she would carefully sponge down her face, apply powder and lipstick, vigorously brush her hair and plait it expertly, put on a small red bindi, and await her husband and young daughter. Maybe it was the way she prepared herself, with such anticipation, or the way in which her plain face was transformed into a flower, opening petal by petal when her family entered the room, or simply the fact that she was Indian, but Chila found it unbearably fascinating to watch. It was the normality, the ease of their connection, that rendered her an observer. Chila felt at times she was watching a movie, a replay of her happy family ideal. When she had seen herself in Tania’s film, she had felt a similar jolt of disassociation.
After the screening, she had felt adrift, powerless; she felt she deserved to be exposed. But now, something was different. Now she could watch the mouse and her brood with a kind of curious detachment, nostalgia even, a longing layered with sadness.
‘You know,’ her mother had said to her before leaving, ‘at home we say, when a woman gives birth, she has one foot in death. It is a dangerous time. But when she has given birth, she gives birth to two new people, the baby and herself.’
Sunita had agreed with this. ‘In psychological terms, that’s pretty damn accurate,’ she had nodded wisely, helping herself to another handful of jelly babies (Sunita was big on playground sweeties at the moment). ‘For a woman, your whole sense of identity is transformed when you become a mother. The I becomes a We, for ever, and of course that has profound implications for your primary relationship. It’s amazing really, how much truth there is in our mums’ witchy sayings.’
‘Like never leave the house if you have just sneezed,’ added Chila sharply, ‘or don’t wash your hair on a Thursday.’
‘Um, yeah,’ Sunita replied hesitantly.
‘Or don’t step over anyone on the floor or you’ll stunt their growth,’ Chila rushed on. ‘A woman with a second toe bigger than her first will dominate her husband, left-handed people bring bad luck, never count the number of chapattis anyone eats, keep away from widows because they’re cursed, aren’t they?’ Chila’s voice wobbled as she finished the sentence and she lay back, exhausted.
Sunita stopped in mid-chew, the severed head of a small green mannequin in her hand. ‘That’s going a bit far, Chila. Some things are common sense, others are just silly superstitions. In fact, when India was a matriarchal society—’
‘Oh, stop it!’ Chila shouted, her voice bouncing off the white high walls. ‘No more sodding fairy tales! No more stuff you’ve picked up in books! It doesn’t help when it’s really happening!’
A couple of the other mothers looked up sharply. Their visitors paused their conversation, throwing curious glances over their shoulders. Chila’s son stirred milkily in his cot.
‘Chila . . . I’m sorry,’ Sunit
a began.
Chila threw Sunita’s hand off hers and leaned forward. Sunita shrank from her. She could never remember seeing anger or bitterness shadow her friend’s face, but there they were, contorting her features, expelling her voice as an unfamiliar hiss.
‘I’m glad for you, Sunny. You’ve got it all and a side helping as well when it suits you. But don’t tell me what I’m feeling. Don’t pretend what’s happened is part of some big plan to make me into a superwoman or crap like that. You’ve got choices. I only had one and he’s shat on me. And our baby. When you can feel it, feel something even like it, then you can talk. Otherwise, shut it.’
Chila lay back and turned her face into her pillow. A plump, quizzical nurse appeared, hovering at the end of the bed.
‘Is she OK?’ she asked chirpily.
Sunita shook her head.
‘I think maybe she’s tired. Are you tired, dear?’ she said unnecessarily loudly near Chila’s ear.
Chila’s response was muffled by pillow but audible nevertheless: ‘Sod off.’
The nurse ushered Sunita apologetically off the bed and drew the curtains around it in one smooth gesture.
‘Nap time for Mummy, I think.’ She winked and waited by the bed until Sunita had left the ward.
It was the smell that broke Tania’s stupor, that familiar mingled odour of floor polish, disinfectant and distant over-boiled vegetables. It brought back childhood days spent in out patients with her mother, who would wring Tania’s hand as she pulled anxiously on her inhaler. Tania had more reason than most to hate hospitals, but it was not the nearness of death or illness that bothered her, it was the impotence, the handing over of control to an army of well-meaning cogs in a slowly fragmenting machine.
‘This hospital will kill me,’ her mother used to moan paradoxically, always aghast at the amount of time she had to spend climbing steep Victorian stairs, queuing for tickets ‘like in a supermarket at the meat counter’ in the chest X-ray department, flicking through ancient magazines, waiting. Sometimes, in desperation, her mother would collar anyone in a uniform with an Indian face and plead with them in Punjabi, hoping the old school connection would hasten her appointment. There were usually apologies, sometimes a friendly chat, but never any favours. And strangely, her mother never seemed surprised at the constant rejection; indeed, she seemed to expect it, another test from the gods which she would accept with grace and a large amount of coughing.
Following her brother along the echoing corridor, Tania slowed down instinctively, half-expecting to hear her mother’s steps behind her, a slow, heavy shuffle, the swish of material around her legs, her familiar refrain, mock-scolding, ‘Always too fast, Tania. Too fast you are.’
‘This is it,’ Prem said, assuming an important dramatic pose which annoyed Tania intensely. ‘Don’t be shocked by all the wires and stuff. They’re trying to find out how much damage the stroke actually did. Oh and Tania—’
‘What?’ Tania spat, expecting a lecture.
‘He’s completely unresponsive, at the moment. Just to warn you, you know . . .’
Tania opened the door carefully. Her father was lying poker straight on the bed, hooked up to a battery of bleeping machines which flashed intermittently, green darts piercing the gloom of the room. Tania sat down uncertainly on the plastic chair next to the bed. It had been a long time since she had been this close to her father. She wondered how she could have ever been frightened of this soft, sagging face. Unconsciousness had erased every crease of disappointment, every angle of anger. Only one small part of her memory of her father remained, resting in the deep vertical line that bisected his bushy greying eyebrows, an exclamation mark of bitter triumph. Even like this, he seemed to be whispering, Told you!
Tania carefully placed her hand on his, shocked to find the skin warm, jolted by the contact. It seemed days rather than hours since she had touched another body, and the intimacy of skin on skin brought her up sharply with an almost physical pain. Fragments of the previous evening came back to her, sharp mosaic pieces, a possessive arm over a pristine sheet, the shrill alarm of the telephone obscene in the darkness, her nakedness against a chilling wall. She suppressed a sob and felt a prick of shame as Prem laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, because she did not know for whom she wept.
‘The doctor says he can probably hear us.’
Tania sniffed and nodded as she fumbled for a tissue.
‘We found him like this in the morning, so we don’t know when . . . we don’t know how long he’s been like this . . .’
Tania had seen her father’s room in Prem’s house in the days when she still paid the occasional visit. It was tucked away in the corner at the end of a corridor, almost shouting distance away from the other bedrooms and the downstairs family rooms. ‘He wants to be self-sufficient,’ Prem had explained, and obligingly fitted an en-suite bathroom at considerable cost; after all, he had argued, it would ultimately add value to the house. No-one in Prem’s family had objected when her father chose to take his meals in his room on a tray, babysat by satellite television. No-one had thought it odd that her father would lock his door for hours on end and could be heard clearly from the kitchen below, pacing the room with his regular military steps. ‘Dad’s funny ways!’ Prem would grin, knowing Tania could not argue this point. Her father had always been, at the very least, prickly and eccentric. But ultimately, she knew she had no right to criticize Prem, to question her father’s position in his son’s house, because she had never been involved, never taken an interest in their arrangements.
‘Tania is always so . . . busy,’ her mother’s surviving friends would mutter, making it sound like her diary was filled with baby-strangling appointments. Their meaning was clear and understood by everyone. As a daughter, she had failed. Oh, she may be top dog, big boots in that far off TV land, but here, where it mattered, she was nobody.
Her father moaned suddenly, making her jump and momentarily let go of his hand, which fell lifelessly onto the bed.
‘He does that sometimes,’ Prem said almost fondly. ‘It doesn’t mean anything apparently.’
‘How do you know?’ Tania flashed him a look. ‘How do you know he isn’t in pain?’
‘It’s just a muscle thing . . . or something. The doctor said—’
‘The doctors say whatever will stop us from getting upset. He might be trying to tell us something,’ Tania almost shouted.
‘Look,’ whispered Prem, his voice suddenly hard, ‘he’s been saying quite a lot over the last nine months since you’ve seen him, and that was only for half an hour.’
‘Stop it!’ hissed Tania, getting up, away from him.
‘Oh, yeah, you don’t want to hear it but you know as well as I do you’ve not exactly kept in touch, have you? And now you’re having a go at me? Who’s been looking after him?’
‘I wondered how long it would be before that came up.’
‘Who’s been putting up with the cantankerous sod while you’ve been gadding about with your arty-farty friends, eh?’ spat Prem, ‘Not to mention what else you’ve been up to,’ he added pointedly.
Tania’s ears pricked in alarm. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Prem deflated suddenly. He rubbed his hands through his hair and brought them over his face, trying to drag away the tension with his fingers. ‘It’s a very small world, Tania, our world,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t know what you’re after. I’ve never known, really. I hope it’s been worth it, Tans.’
Tania watched him leave the room. She stood staring at the door for a long time afterwards.
The receptionist greeted Sunita like an old friend. Simone had noticed, like everyone else on the desk, how often the attractive Indian woman with the funky haircut called in for Dr Bedi. There wasn’t much she missed: certainly not the new clothes, the spring in her step, the wedding ring. Of course, it was none of her business and besides, nothing new. Nothing like proximity to death to get the old hormones going. She had stumbled across more sec
ret assignations in store rooms and offices than she cared to recall. People would do the strangest things in the name of passion. They had all been at the desk on those occasions when a sheepish man would be admitted with something unmentionable stuck in a cavity. ‘I was having a shower when I slipped and fell backwards onto the Hoover.’ ‘I jumped out of bed naked and tripped, impaling myself on this frozen chicken.’ ‘I thought the hamster was back in its cage.’ Simone never judged anyone. Firstly, she was too damn busy. Secondly, she had seen too many damaged bodies wheeled into here. The affordable pleasures, however momentary, were all anyone could hope for.
She told Sunita, ‘You’re in luck today, he’s just gone on a break.’ And away she went, wings on her heels. Simone returned to her computer screen and treated herself to another digestive.
After a couple of knocks, Sunita pushed the door open hesitantly and peeped around it. Krishan was sleeping awkwardly on the small two-seater sofa, his calves and head dangling from either end. Asleep he looked even younger. Sunita had an urge to brush some hair from his forehead. This wasn’t right, feeling so maternal, or maybe it was, given what she’d just experienced. She knelt down near his head and he immediately opened his eyes.
‘You’re early.’
‘Chila’s had her baby.’
He sat up now, alert. From dead sleep to wide awake in two seconds, a requisite for a junior doctor. ‘Everything OK?’
Sunita hesitated. There was no point mentioning Chila’s outburst. No doubt it could be explained away by a thousand different hormonal reasons, but at this point, that was no consolation.
‘Yeah, fine. A boy, seven pounds two ounces, no forceps, slight tear, went to the breast straight away.’ Sunita felt herself gabbling.
Krishan grinned. ‘Well, thank you for the medical precision, but is she feeling OK? Are you?’
Sunita wasn’t sure how it happened, but one minute she was describing how they took turns at the gas and the next she was howling like a banshee into his chest. She was frightened at the sound of her own wailing, an old animal sound that did not belong to her body, dragging with it from the sludge glimpses of yellow wallpaper, a descending gas mask, a beer can ring on her finger, waking from a numbing night on a trolley, feeling emptied and bereft, blood flaking from her thighs like dead petals.