by Anne Cushman
“Those you can get at the pharmacy around the corner, the one where you bought your toothpaste the other day.”
“Oh, great. It was bad enough going in there to buy tampons. The guy behind the counter couldn’t stop smirking at me, like we had a fabulous one-night stand that I’m pretending didn’t happen. Now I have to go in and buy a pregnancy test? He’ll think we’re married.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll buy it for you, as soon as we finish our dosa.”
“Okay.” I looked down, poked at my own dosa some more. It had gotten cold; the edges shone with oil.
He looked at me. “On second thought, we’re not that hungry. We’ll go get it right away.”
“Thanks.” I almost burst into tears, I was so grateful. Watching him head out into the street, I wondered how often sadhus walked into Indian pharmacies to buy pregnancy tests. Would this be a first for this country? Probably not.
MATT HAD ALWAYS been very clear that he didn’t want to have children. “I don’t get how anyone could even consider it, with the planet in the state it’s in,” he used to say. Americans already gobbled up the lion’s share of the world’s resources. How could I even consider adding another person who in the course of a lifetime would consume acres of trees and rivers of fossil fuel, add clouds of greenhouse gases to the already toxic atmosphere? “Look at that,” he whispered in my ear one evening as we were pushing a cart through the produce aisle at Whole Foods. He pointed to a mom maneuvering a double stroller past a huge heap of bananas. “What do you see?”
I looked: two red-haired toddlers in corduroy overalls. One of them was gnawing a bagel. The other sucked a purple smoothie through a plastic straw. The mom was talking on her cell phone. “They don’t have the wild salmon, just the farm raised,” she was saying. “Do you still want it, or should we go with the sea bass instead?”
“I see a pretty normal family,” I said. We were planning a stir-fry for dinner; I put a handful of shiitake mushrooms in a plastic bag. “A lot like the ones I used to nanny for, in fact.”
“I don’t. I see three big fat mindless consumption units. How many cell phones do you think she’s already put in landfills? Not to mention that she probably spent a fortune on fertility drugs.” He put on a falsetto voice, held an imaginary phone to his ear. “‘Honey, we can’t have any wild children, because while I was busy kissing my boss’s ass at a multinational finance company, all my eggs went bad. Shall we just farm-raise them instead?”
“You have a cell phone, too.” I picked up a Japanese eggplant, put it in our basket. “I suppose if it were up to you, you’d adopt.”
“Yeah, adopt, there’s an idea. You forget to have kids until you’re in your forties, then you go off to Ukraine and buy one for forty thousand dollars.” He put on the falsetto again. “‘Honey, let’s get a Chinese one, that’s where the smartest kids are coming from these days.’”
I looked into the shopping cart. Suddenly, none of the food looked appetizing any more. “Why are you being so nasty about this? It’s not like anyone’s asking you to have a baby.”
“And why are you so touchy all of a sudden? It’s not like anyone’s asking you to, either.”
I let go of the cart and began walking away from him. “You know what? I don’t know if I feel like cooking dinner with you after all. Maybe I’ll just head over to Joe and Lori’s house.”
He caught up with me in front of the vitamin counter, pushing the cart with one hand. “Hey Amanda—look. I’m sorry if I got a little edgy. It’s just—sometimes when you talk about kids in the abstract, I get the feeling that you’re actually talking about your kids. Yours and mine.” The woman behind the counter looked up at us then down at her fingernails; clearly, this wasn’t a situation where nutritional supplements would be helpful. “And you really, really have to get this about me. I don’t want kids. I feel like I barely survived my own childhood. I don’t want to be responsible for screwing up someone else’s.”
I nodded. I looked at our basket. Shiitakes, red peppers, spinach, tofu. We’d make a nice stir-fry together. We’d have great sex. Maybe he’d spend the night; maybe he’d even stay for breakfast. But by lunch, he’d be gone. “Don’t worry. I understand.”
MY DOSA STILL sat in front of me, cold and greasy. Devi Das sat down across the table from me and handed me a flimsy plastic bag.
“What did the guy say when you bought it?” I asked.
“He asked, ‘She is American? Or German?’” Devi Das eyed my dosa. “Would you like us to finish that for you?”
“Go ahead.” I stood up. “I’m going to go pee.”
The bathroom was tiny and reeked of urine. The toilet was Indian-style, a stained porcelain hole in the floor. Maybe I should wait until I got back to my hotel. But I couldn’t bear the thought. I had to know what was going on. Maybe everything would be fine, and I could go back out and order another lunch.
The pregnancy test came in a pink box with a radiant Indian woman on it, holding a giggling baby. Her girl, her pearl. I tore off the plastic wrapper and stared at the contents: a flat stick shaped like a thermometer, with a blank square on one end like a window into my future.
I squatted over the toilet and peed messily onto the stick. Then I pulled up my pants and waited, holding the stick behind my back.
Three minutes, the instructions said. I had no watch. Most songs, I’d read once, are somewhere between two and four minutes long. So I tried to do the chant we did at the start of yoga class—Vande gurunam, charanara vinde—but the familiar words had slithered out of my mind. Instead, I shut my eyes tight and began to sing the first song that popped into my head: Well, shake it up, baby, now (shake it up, baby) / Twist and shout (twist and shout…).My mother had been a big Beatles fan when I was a kid. I’d ride in the backseat of the car on the way to preschool, sucking juice from a sippy cup and eating graham crackers, listening to The White Album, feeling the car awash in music and my mother’s vast, unexplainable sorrow.
The door rattled and someone outside shouted something in Hindi. “In a minute,” I called. “I’ll be out in just a minute.”
I took a long, deep breath. I pulled my hand out from behind my back and looked at the stick.
“JUST REMEMBER, AMANDA,” said Devi Das. “You do have options.”
We were walking back to our hut hotel, down a crowded back alley jammed with tiny shops, their wares heaped on carts and tables protruding into the road: batteries, bananas, fabrics, mangoes, magazines, cookies, small unidentifiable electronic parts, a partially disassembled ham radio set.
“Yeah, I know. I have great options.” I stepped sideways to skirt a pig that was rooting around in the gutter, eating a wadded up athletic sock. “I can bail out on my book and go home and have a baby. Go back to waitressing, since I’ll never get another assignment again. Or I can stay in India, get an abortion, and write my book on finding enlightenment and the perfection of every waking moment. Fabulous choices.” The word abortion was jagged in my mouth. I wondered how often abortion and enlightenment got said in the same sentence.
Devi Das stopped by a fruit stand and began turning over the papayas, lightly squeezing each one. “Or you could stay in India, finish your research, and have your baby here.”
“What, have a baby in India?” I reflexively picked up a papaya, too, although I didn’t want one. It was firm and orange, streaked with green; the end gave slightly when I pressed it, a sign of perfect ripeness.
“Well, clearly some people do manage to do it.” Devi Das handed a few rupees to the girl behind the fruit stand; she took them, eyeing me curiously. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. But her forehead was already marked with the turmeric powder that indicated she was married.
Another wave of nausea washed through me. I was sick of Devi Das, sick of India, sick of never being clean. My knee throbbed. “I’ve got to go lie down,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.” I set the papaya down and turned away. Our hotel was just a block away. I hoped I
could make it without throwing up.
“Amanda,” he said as I started to step into the street. “Just know that whatever you decide, we will be there for you.”
I looked back at him, holding a papaya in each hand, his face grimy and damp, his red dreadlocks hanging past his shoulders. “Great,” I said bitterly. “I’m sure you’ll be a huge help.”
INSIDE THE HUT, I lay on my back on the mattress on the floor. The ceiling fan hummed and buzzed, swirling the dust motes through the shafts of light from the window, but creating no discernible coolness. My breasts felt swollen and sore. Now that I knew what was going on with my body, I was astonished that I hadn’t suspected before.
This was just a careless error, like a bounced check. If I had been a little more careful, it never would have happened. This was just a slip of the pencil drawing the picture of my life. It could easily be erased. One little side tour on my journey to enlightenment. No one would ever know.
Just a clump of cells.
Had my mother felt this way when she first found out she was pregnant with me? It was something I had never discussed with her. It was my father whom I had wondered about as I lay awake at night, watching the bars of light pass over the ceiling. But my mother—she must have had moments like this, lying in her bed, thinking, I could erase it like it never happened.
My mother, who never finished what she started, whose life had gone off the tracks and stayed there. I had always sworn that I would never end up like her. It was part of why I had come to India to write this book—to prove to the world, and to myself, that I was not a failure. That I was someone who could not only dream about great projects, but actually complete them.
My thoughts were becoming fuzzy. I remembered the pleading eyes of the stray dog, the desperate joy with which it had gobbled the cookies from the dirt. The heat pulled me down into a deep pool of sleep, and the room dissolved into dreams.
I AM DOING poses I have never done before: dropping into effortless splits; balancing on my hands as my toes drop back to the crown of my head. The energy in my body is getting more and more intense; the yoga room is glowing with a brilliant light. I am on the verge of breaking through to something big, I can tell. But there is a baby crying in the next room, louder and louder. I try to focus on my breath, but the baby is crying so hard I can’t concentrate. Finally, I get off my mat and go looking for it, anxious and annoyed—why is its mother not taking care of it? The baby is lying in a crib in a smelly diaper. I pull off the diaper but the child is still filthy—a baby girl, covered in poop. I begin giving her a bath in a sink. She is giggling, waving pink arms and legs. But she begins shrinking, growing smaller, smaller, smaller. She is slipping through my fingers, the size of a bug. I try to pick her up without squishing her, but she slips through my fingers and disappears down the drain. I am weeping.
Mr. Kapoor is in the room with me. He pushes his face close to mine. “You understand nothing,” he roars. “Without a body, how can you touch God?”
WHEN I woke up, smoke was drifting up through the floor again. I reached for the belt that held my passport and money, fumbled around inside, and drew out the business card the Indian man on the plane had given me. It was already a little tattered around the edges. A. J. Rao, 159 Mahatma Marg, Bangalore.
His wife was a doctor, he’d said. She ran a women’s health clinic. “If you get into any trouble…”
When I pushed open the door to Devi Das’s room, he was meditating in the corner. He opened his eyes to look at me and smiled a beatific, gap-toothed smile.
“Guess what,” I said. “I think I’m having a baby.”
“Cool! We always wanted to be a daddy. Are we going back to California?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not yet, anyway. Tomorrow we’re going to Bangalore.”
Headstand
(Sirsasana)
Interlace your fingers and place your forearms on the floor, touching the crown of your head to the ground as you cup your skull in your palms. Walk your feet toward your face, stacking hips over shoulders. Then float your feet to the sky, entrusting the weight of your body to the fragile stem of your neck.
Headstand stimulates the production of amrita, the drink of the gods—the nectar of immortality that drips from your third eye. In ancient times, the gods teamed up with the dark demons they most feared to churn this ambrosial beverage from the oceans. To drink it yourself, you too must be willing to befriend your demons, churn your soul, and turn your world upside down.
Be good, see good, do good.
—Sathya Sai Baba (1926–)
CHAPTER 11
OF COURSE, it’s entirely your decision whether you want to go home or not,” said Devi Das, swaying next to me on the hard wooden seat as our train rattled toward Bangalore. “But honestly, we don’t see what the big deal is. We’ll just take the baby with us to all the ashrams. We’ll paint stripes on its forehead. It will be our little sadhu baby.”
We were rattling through countryside straight from a Kipling story: banana plantations with thatched A-frame huts scattered amid the trees, the delicate green of rice paddies broken with red earth and silver pools of water. Occasional giant rocky hills loomed up, craggy and red, like irregular teeth. The motion of the train was making me queasy. I looked out the window, then down at the floor, trying to find a place to rest my eyes so I wouldn’t throw up. “Devi Das? Have you actually ever seen a newborn baby?”
“Not up close,” he admitted. “But we’ve seen some cute pictures of them.”
“They cry,” I said. “They pee. They poop a lot. Then they cry some more. They can’t even hold their necks up. They’re actually a whole lot of trouble.”
“Taking care of ourselves is also a whole lot of trouble,” he said cheerfully. “But we have gotten used to it over the years.”
The train pulled into a tiny station and paused, huffing, as if it were just catching its breath before heading on. “Just a minute,” said Devi Das, and jumped out onto the platform. My stomach tightened in a moment of primal fear: Don’t leave me! I’m pregnant! But two minutes later he was back, holding two masala dosas wrapped in a large banana leaf.
“Look,” he said as we pulled out of the station. He handed me a dosa. “There he is again.” On a wall by the tracks was a life-sized poster of a dark, immensely fat man in an orange robe, his bald head gleaming, his hand raised in benediction.
“I know. He’s stalking us.” I took a bite of hot crispy crepe wrapped around spicy coconut chutney. “If this were a dream, I’d be thinking that it meant something.” The ticket seller in the train station had been wearing that man’s picture on a locket around his neck. His image had been painted on the side of a bus that had careened down the road next to the tracks. His name was Hari Baba, Devi Das had told me; he had millions of devotees around the world, who came by the tens of thousands to visit his ashram in a village about a two-hour train ride from Bangalore. He cured the lame, gave sight to the blind, and manifested objects from thin air with a wave of his hand: pens, statues of Hindu deities, Star Wars action figures, showers of flower petals. He appeared in visions to his devotees and told them what to do with their lives, their careers, their savings accounts.
“His followers believe that Hari Baba is an avatar,” Devi Das said now.
I licked my fingers. “Isn’t that something in a computer game?” In college, I’d briefly dated a guy who was fanatically involved in an online game called Lord of the Dance—a scrawny engineering major with dandruff flakes on his shoulders. His avatar, he’d told me, was a superhero with the ability to melt iron with his gaze.
“In Hindu mythology, avatars are human incarnations of the Divine. According to his devotees, Hari Baba can look into your heart and see your destiny. And then, if he chooses, he can change it.”
“Do you really believe that?” I looked out the window at a group of women in jewel-colored saris, walking along a path by the train tracks, rag-wrapped bundles piled high on the tops of th
eir heads.
“When we are in the United States, we don’t believe anything. But in India, we believe everything. Things seem to work out better that way.” He pulled out his Swiss Army knife from his cloth bag and pried the top off a virulently orange soda in a dirty glass bottle. He wiped the top on his shirt, then handed it to me. “So. How do you know so much about kids?”
“I used to work as a nanny.”
“Wow. Was that before you worked as a dog walker? Or after?”
“During.” I took a swig of the soda, shockingly sweet, and tried not to think about what kind of dye was in it. My mom once told me that when she was pregnant with me she survived on Slurpees and nachos. That would be a comforting thought, if only I felt like I basically came out all right. “That’s how I got into it, in fact. The same people who didn’t have time to take care of their dogs also didn’t have time to take care of their kids, as it turned out. One thing led to another and pretty soon there I was, taking care of everyone.”
“We don’t understand that at all. Why have dogs and kids, if you don’t want to take care of them?”
“For some people, kids are just an accessory. Dot-com orphans, the nannies at the park used to call them.”
“So how long did you do it for?”
“Just for six months or so. I couldn’t handle it. Both parents were lawyers downtown. They had a five-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl.” The carbonated bubbles tickled my nose as I drank; my eyes started to water. “I’d get to their house in Pacific Heights at six thirty in the morning to help make the kids breakfast. I wouldn’t leave until the parents got home in the evening—around seven thirty, on a good night.”
“What did you do with them all day?”
“Sam was in kindergarten all morning, so I’d just take Tamara to the park. Then, in the afternoon, we’d all go on adventures together. You know, the beach. The zoo. Sometimes, when it rained, we’d just stay in and bake.”