Healthiest fucking babies in the world. Rishi examined each word on his screen as if it held an answer to a greater question. Healthy babies were what Kavya wanted. Healthy babies were all anyone wanted, in the end, whether they knew it or not. A healthy baby was what he wanted.
When parents gave birth, Rishi realized, they got to picture their child before it arrived. They could try on the possibilities, pairing a mother’s eyes to a father’s nose, hoping for the father’s height but not his eyebrows. When Rishi tried to picture the adopted child, the child Kavya seemed already to feel with such conviction, he came up with nothing. When he imagined a boy with black hair, he could see only a blank plain of face. When he imagined a girl with blue eyes, they floated in nebulous flesh. His theoretical children lined up like a row of unfinished dolls, in turns hairless, eyeless, mouthless. And race—he hadn’t even begun to chip away at race. So instead of eyes and mouth and hair, he imagined a presence that came to his knees, a well of desire, a spike of ambition. He imagined chatter in a child-high voice, the clammy grip of a hand across his neck.
Rishi was the first to bring up the race question. He was still in the tentative phase of this adventure, but to his credit, he spoke of it often in the days since Kavya decided she wanted to adopt. All his questions bore the conditional tense. The if roamed liberally, while the when stood staidly by. The idea of adopting hadn’t appealed to him at first—had in fact come with the cold shock of a slap. Most unattractive ideas he tucked into a mental recess until they were forgotten. But this idea wouldn’t stay in its corner. And so, the thought took up residence. He spoke of it with Kavya most nights, sitting on the sofa after dinner.
“Would it be an Indian baby?” he asked. (Would it even be a baby? he wondered. The possibility of an actual, sharp-elbowed child only arose on the tails of this question.)
“Why would they have to be Indian?”
“Well, it wouldn’t. I guess.”
He knew that Kavya was ignoring race, that she would have already concocted a corny truism that she’d be too embarrassed to say aloud, but strongly believed, something to the effect of love not having a color. So it was Rishi’s job to draw her to the pool of reality and ease her into its cold waters.
“Are there Indian babies to adopt around here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If an Indian teenager got pregnant. It happens, right?”
“Yes. I think. I mean, it must, and it’s not like an Indian teenager’s going to keep her baby.”
“Not with the SATs coming up.”
“Ha.”
Kavya chewed the corner of her lip. “Would you want to adopt from India?”
Rishi lay back on the sofa. The thought of adopting from India—from anywhere outside of Alameda County—was overwhelming. Just the thought of parking near the social services office in downtown Oakland had nearly put him off the project.
Rishi shook his head.
“You’re right,” Kavya said. “It’s way too expensive, right? Even in India. I mean, I don’t actually know. Gold is cheaper there, so maybe adoptions—”
“We’re not adopting from India.” This was the first time Rishi had said anything definite about their adoption. And in the silence that followed, a new understanding gelled.
“Okay,” Kavya said.
“There are kids who need help in this country,” Rishi said.
Kavya beamed, and laced her fingers into his.
Rishi was not one to forget a line of questioning. “So what about race?” he asked. “How would that work?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s mostly black kids who need to be adopted, right?”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’m probably right.”
“I would be honored to adopt an African American child,” Kavya said.
“And what would your parents say?”
“My parents would hate me adopting, anyway. They’d probably have a problem with an Indian baby.”
There was too much they didn’t know. They would have to pursue actual channels of information, which, Rishi was very aware, could plunge them into a real-life adoption. Going to an agency meant they couldn’t turn back. Even if they decided not to adopt, they would find themselves at a frightening new level of certitude. Rishi missed already the nebulous world of maybe being a father. His thoughts flitted to couples gleefully bonking and finding themselves pregnant. As he took Kavya’s hand in his and said, “Let’s make some calls in the morning,” he knew that the life he’d known was falling into shadow. A new life would begin—possibly a very good or even a better life—but before it did, he and Kavya would have to journey there; they would cross a no-man’s-land of uncertainty, parched and dark and crawling with vigilantes. The possibility of emerging unscathed felt slim. The search for a child would take them through stifling obscurity, and already Rishi was finding it hard to breathe.
• • •
FEW INSTANCES IN Kavya’s family life had proceeded according to her wishes. Her childhood was happy enough. Her parents paid for violin lessons, and read stories to her at night. But like all well-fed middle-class children of professionals, there were things she could—if she put the rest of the world out of mind—manage to complain about. Like the time she’d begged and hoped for a Cabbage Patch Kid, only to be handed a knockoff, a waxy-faced creature that smelled of gasoline, its face a crude assimilation of the adorably pintucked real thing, its butt cheek a blank. This, she’d overcome. Even the revelation that Santa Claus was a fake—spat at her by her overtired mother who couldn’t stomach the idea of making Christmas Eve cookies for an already overweight Christian deity—was tolerable. And later in life, the sixteenth-birthday party that ended at 9 p.m.; the quiver of disappointment in her parents’ smiles when Kavya proudly announced she’d been accepted to Berkeley, but not to Stanford or Harvard or Yale; the wedding ceremony—her wedding ceremony—that had to start at 7 a.m. on a Thursday because her parents’ temple priest had determined that this was the only Vedically appointed time that would save her marriage from ending in death and disaster (only later did it occur to Kavya that every marriage ended in either death or disaster). This series of parent-child deflations had prepared her for this moment. She picked up the phone and dialed.
After a few minutes of stilted small talk: “And this is why you called?”
Kavya tried to read her mother’s mood, acutely aware of the confessional cliff on which she perched. “No.”
The voice grew tender. “What is it, Kavya? Why you’re sounding so sad?”
“Well, I’m not sad. Not anymore. I don’t think.”
Her mother waited.
“We’re thinking about adopting.”
Her mother remained silent. The phone line crackled.
“Mom? Are you there?”
“You know what I think, Kavya?”
“What.”
“Don’t get mad when I say this. I think you are putting too much pressure.”
“On who?”
“On yourself. On Rishi. On your body. Too much, Kavya. You are working too hard, isn’t it? Try to go easy.”
“Try to go easy?” This was a phrase Uma Mahendra had never used. Uma Mahendra was not a woman who liked to go easy. “What do you think of us adopting?”
“I think it’s a stupid idea.”
This was the Uma she knew.
“Adopting is okay, Kavya. It is a good thing to do. But not for us, no?”
“Why not?”
“You don’t know the kind of problems, Kavya. This baby could have any kind of problem. Drug addiction. AIDS. Psychotic behavior.”
“Mom.”
“Mom, pom. Listen to me. When you and Rishi have a baby, when you have your baby, you will know what’s coming. You’ll know this baby comes from good family, with smart brains, with goo
d healthy body, no alcohol, no drugs . . .”
Kavya began to imagine how this might have gone for another woman, one with parents whose outlook wasn’t rooted in the absolute necessity of genetic reproduction. She imagined a mother with white-blond hair, feathered—Florence Henderson, specifically—weeping with joy into the phone, weeping with pride, that her child would give of herself so deeply and nobly, that her child would pledge her heart to the child of another.
“You know Moti Uncle’s sister? She lives in Michigan. She is doctor. She worked too much and couldn’t have children. You know what happened to her?”
Kavya braced herself for whatever travesty had befallen Moti Uncle’s sister.
“She adopted one child, some child, I don’t know who. And now? You know what is happening? He is doing drug, he is not studying. She kicked him out, and he comes to the house and yells from the driveway. Why, Kavya? Why you want to do this to yourself?”
“You’re right, Mom. That’s precisely what’s going to happen to me. Thank you.”
“Don’t be fresh.”
“Well, I’m doing this, okay? And Rishi wants it, too.”
“That Rishi. Put him on the phone.”
“We can talk about this later. But it would be nice to have your support.” Her nose stung with impending tears. “This is a big thing for me, you know?”
Uma’s voice grew high and tight, a sign that she too was close to tears: “You talk like I don’t support you. I have only supported you. That is all I have done in my life, supporting you, and this is my reward? This is what I get?”
“Well. I don’t know what to say.” Kavya was crying quietly now.
In the long silence that followed grew a mutual realization that this was one battle neither woman had prepared for.
“I have to go,” Kavya whispered.
Uma hung up.
When she married Rishi and fell into the forgiving rhythms of her adult life, Kavya assumed all this—the aggressive molding of an identity, the repeated questioning of her choices—would come to an end. But now that she’d decided to adopt, she felt them coming again, the people who believed she was doing something wrong, the people with their questions and doubts and scrutiny, and she bristled. Kavya felt a fight, and in response, her spiny old shell began to emerge.
She curled into the crook of Rishi’s arm.
“Well, of course she doesn’t like it,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it, Kavya. Indians. They’re, like, crazy for eugenics, right? Think of how much time and energy they put into finding the right matches for their kids. And for what?”
“For money and social status.”
“And for offspring. Why do you think Brahmins are so bent on marrying Brahmins? So they don’t have some other caste’s genetic code souring the batter, right?”
“I guess.”
“So, if our families put that much effort into choosing spouses for their kids, they’re not going to be cool with an interloper loping in from who knows where and calling themselves family.”
“And this interloper would be the innocent child we’re adopting. Correct? This would be your interloper?”
“I’m just telling you what they’re thinking.”
“You’re talking to me like I’m either stupid or not Indian.”
He smiled. “I know you know.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Fuck ’em.”
“Well, look,” she said, softening now. She raised their conjoined hands. “There’s been so much inbreeding in India that you and I are probably cousins and don’t even know it. I mean, you have what, like four knuckles on this middle finger?”
“Yeah.”
“We could use a little fresh air in our gene pool.”
He pulled her close and she dug her face into the crook of his shoulder, where he smelled of sweat and skin and waxy soap.
16.
Solimar was doomed. And here’s why. Normally, when we fall in love, it feels at first very much like we’re falling, like we’re plummeting down a well shaft of desire. But as time passes and we come to know our lovers, we see that there are things about them that are less than dreamlike. Okay, we say, so he spits his rice when he talks. So she snores like a tractor. So he wears a mouthguard at night. These are things, we tell ourselves, that we can live with. And these are things that slow the fall, that bring us to a nice comfortable drift, where we can love without aching, and shift our gaze from the abyss below to the road ahead.
But Soli. Poor Soli. Soli met and loved and lost her man in a matter of seven days, and before she could learn that he had a villainous mother or waxy ears or an insurmountable fear of bees, he was gone. She fell in love with the pure essence of Checo the train rider, Checo the pioneer. And before she could settle into the normalcy of their attachment, he had vanished among dust clouds and a spray of bullets. Whether he’d made it to safety or fallen there on the valley floor, Soli could not know.
She had fallen for Checo and was still falling down and down and down. Most days, she could lose herself in the dusting of shelves, the washing of dishes and making of beds. The love that should have cushioned her was black and fathomless. But it was love. She’d felt it when she was crammed in a truck. She felt it when her baby kicked. She’d even felt it that day, when the three men had taken her, had battered her from the inside. Not even those animals had rid her of her love. When they had torn her panties off and pushed her down, she’d lost herself down that black hole. And that time, for the first time, she felt the darkness catch her.
The day after she’d held Killian Cassidy’s glasses, Soli encountered Señora Cassidy in the kitchen. The señora stood before her, a tower of certainty, a hefty book in her hands. “This,” she’d said, “is for you. Read it.” It was a book on pregnancy and childbirth, written in Spanish. Soli studied it that night, and was stunned to find a list of things she shouldn’t have been eating, and even more stunned to find that papayas weren’t on the list. What she remembered most clearly about pregnancy in Popocalco was that pregnant women were never, ever to eat papayas. The señora had also teased from Soli a few worrying truths: that she hadn’t been to a doctor, that she hadn’t found health insurance, that she had no semblance of what the señora called a “birth plan.” Soli didn’t want to tell the señora that she was being a silly gabacha and that no one in the history of Santa Clara Popocalco had come up with a birth plan, and still managed to give birth just fine. Soli’s birth plan was to wail and curse herself and lament her womanly burden until the baby found its own way out. So, “No, thank you, señora,” she said. “For me, no birth plan.” She did let the señora give her a number, jotted on a piece of paper.
“I’m not sure exactly what your situation is, Soli,” she’d said. “But this place will treat you very affordably. Promise me you’ll go?”
La Clínica, the señora had written.
“I don’t know . . .” Soli trailed off. “My cousin, she can’t drive me. . . .”
“It’s right by BART! Have you been on BART?”
And so, one evening, Soli found herself outside a clinic splashed with color, a mural on its front wall, bright lights within. She waited in a chair for two hours. She was learning that being rich in this country meant never having to wait. And being poor, even just a little poor like she was, meant steeping in impatience.
Eventually, she was taken to an exam room by a nurse with tired eyes and a young voice. She lay down, and for the first time, a human hand touched her belly. No one had touched this part of her, not with her baby inside. The nurse’s fingers, soft and firm, found the baby’s elbow and his knees. She rubbed an uneven curve and said, “Here. This is the head. Baby’s facing out into the world, Soli.” Soli placed her own hand where the nurse’s was and felt, undeniably, the curve of her baby’s head. She pressed down, just slightly, and it was like
pressing a button. She cupped her fingers to his head and gave in to sudden, deflating sobs. “Oh,” the nurse murmured, and rested a hand on Soli’s shoulder. Soli had noticed this mound before, but had no idea it could be a specific portion of a body. She wept at this small and silver slip of knowledge. She wept for all that she didn’t know.
“This is the forehead, I think,” the nurse said quietly. “The head is up still, but that’s no reason to worry. Baby’ll find its way down, soon. It’ll be ready when the time comes.”
And the nurse said to her, “You’ll have to go to social services. For the baby. Understand? Not for yourself.” She stared good and hard into Soli’s eyes. There was a message in there.
The message came to light the following Monday when Soli rushed from the Cassidys’ to the social services building. She’d found the office on her own; her ability to navigate tall gray buildings was making her feel like a sharp and wily woman of the city. She met with a social worker who said, “Come back when the baby’s born, okay? With his birth certificate. We’ll need to know his or her status. Not yours. It’s the baby we’re talking about here. The baby’s status. Not yours. Got it? I don’t need to know where you’re from or whether you’re a citizen.” She gave Soli the same look the nurse had given her. Soli rode that look back to Berkeley, back to Silvia’s apartment. It seemed she was carrying precious cargo now, an entity with its own status. It had become an asset of this country, and Soli merely its vessel.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, SHE RETURNED to the Cassidys’ filled with the pride of her bureaucratic triumph, for this was how it felt, to have officially declared her unborn child. He was only a fetus, but now he was a fetus with status. She set to cleaning the kitchen and said goodbye to the señor and señora, who left in separate cars, one with Saoirse. When she finished there, she moved to the bedrooms, and finally to the study. The room sat as she’d left it the day before. Soli liked to maintain, among the señor’s paper stacks, a few rectangles of absence, spaces on the wooden desk that stayed polished and empty. No pens, no sticky notes. Just a field of smooth brown wood. But today. Today.
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