JUST MARRIED, PLEASE EXCUSE

by Yashodhara Lal

  I plopped into the offered chair and was immediately bombarded by questions. ‘Are you sure about this? How do you feel? Have you been throwing up? Would you like something to eat?’

  Not knowing which question to answer first, I just looked at him for a minute. Eventually I decided to go in chronological order and said, ‘Well, that’s what this test says. I’m a bit shocked. I haven’t been puking, and no, I don’t want anything to eat.’

  ‘But you should! You should eat something. You should eat lots! We’ll go to some lab right away and reconfirm. We’ll …’ He then appeared to be assailed by a sudden doubt and said more carefully, ‘Honey? We are going to have this baby, right?’

  I was surprised by this question, and also surprised that the thought of not having the baby hadn’t even occurred to me. But most of all, I was surprised at the conviction in my voice when the words came out of my mouth: ‘Of course we are!’

  If there had been any doubt in my mind about the decision, it was wiped away by the grin of pure happiness that my husband flashed at me. I recalled the many instances when he had subtly and not-so-subtly conveyed his readiness to be a father. Now, he said it slowly, savouring the sound of the words on his tongue, ‘A real little baby of our own.’

  He squeezed my hand in excitement and as he got a wondering and faraway look in his eyes, I sensed it was a good time to put down a few practical conditions. ‘So we’ll do it this way. The first nine months are mine, you handle the next nine …’

  We reconfirmed through the laboratory test later in the day that I was indeed pregnant. Over the next few days, I proceeded to start with my research and preparation.

  I viewed this as my most important personal project to date and was determined to do a thorough job in terms of gathering the requisite information. I eyed with some satisfaction my thick, shiny, new copy of the pregnancy bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I had caught Vijay giving it what appeared to be a sceptical look and had immediately pounced on him, informing him that ‘If you’ve got to do something, you better do it right.’ He said something about going with the flow, being a natural with kids, and relying on the knowledge in the family about this kind of thing. But when I looked at him thoughtfully and suggested that perhaps we should get him his own copy to read, he beat a hasty retreat and left me to it.

  The internet opened up a whole new world of pregnancy-related information, and I signed up on multiple websites to get weekly updates as to how my baby was developing in the womb.

  Almost immediately, I found myself developing all sorts of uncomfortable symptoms. The more I read, the more I realized how awful I was feeling. I went through the checklist of the various problems I had.

  Nausea: Naturally.

  Dizziness: But of course.

  Back Pain: Indubitably.

  Gum-bleeding: You betcha

  Pre-eclampsia: I wasn’t sure what this one was but when I found out, I was going to have it.

  But above all, it was the nausea that really took everything I had out of me. Quite literally.

  The worst part of these early days of my pregnancy was that I was simply unable to keep any form of food down. Everything tasted awful, whether on the way down or on the way up. This, combined with the kind of exhaustion that I had never known before, made me crabbier than ever before. And this was probably saying something.

  Vijay was bearing it all with great fortitude. He was also trying various tactics to help me get through this phase, but none of them was really working.

  He tried humour. He watched me rush to the bathroom for the fourth time in a day and while I was puking, he called out to me through the door, ‘Y, it may be easier if you stop eating and just throw all your meals directly into the toilet. What do you say?’ His grin faded when I opened the door, leaned against the doorway with one hand on my hip and fixed him with my most malevolent stare.

  He tried empathy. ‘Look, I can only imagine what you’re going through …’ He was interrupted by my snapping, ‘Of course you can only imagine it. After all, your part is over. Don’t you ever kid yourself into believing that you can even in your wildest imagination remotely hope to know how it feels to …’ and I went on for about half an hour while he retired, hurt, after a few attempts at ‘But honey …’ and ‘Suno toh …’

  As a last resort, he even tried to get me to snap out of it. A few weeks into the pregnancy, when he saw me lying about in a depressed manner after work, he adopted a stern tone. ‘Now listen. Enough is enough. Do you really think you’re doing anybody any good by moping around like this? You need to snap out of it now. You can’t just …’ He paused in alarm when he saw my eyes welling up and I started bawling, ‘I knew it! You don’t love me any more. First you impregnate me and then, when I’m getting fat and unattractive, you turn on me like this.’ He immediately backtracked. ‘Oh honey, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry … I was so mean to you …’ And the next two hours went by with him trying to pacify me for his behaviour while I wept inconsolably.

  Eventually, he cracked the only formula that would work for the first few, difficult months of my pregnancy. He would respectfully stand back and allow me to rush past him to the loo. He refrained from offering me food directly after I came out pale-faced and red-eyed. He avoided eye contact with me and generally stayed out of the way for at least half an hour before approaching me with a plate, and he came fully prepared to have his head bitten off.

  It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

  No, it was really only the worst of times.

  Just Married, Please Excuse

  4

  What’s Up, Doc?

  Being pregnant was turning out to mean plenty of visits to the doctor to make sure everything was coming along just fine.

  We had been recommended the name of Dr Kiran Kapoor, who was conveniently located at a large hospital just a few minutes away from our home.

  Dr Kapoor turned out to be a jolly, fat lady who charged a jolly fat fee. She was a thorough professional, very experienced, highly regarded in the field and well-known across Mumbai – as a result of which, she saw, on average, twenty patients in an hour. While this should give one an average time of three minutes per visit, somehow Vijay and I were always being shortchanged down to two minutes and we always felt cheated of our third minute.

  Dr Kapoor had a disconcerting habit of ushering us out of her room almost before we sat down. My third month check-up with her was typical of how each visit was turning out to be.

  We entered her office, tired but triumphant after an hour’s wait, and said, ‘Hi, doc.’

  Dr Kiran said, ‘Oh hulloo …’ she checked her appointment book for my name, ‘… ooo, Yashodhara. How are you?’

  I jumped at this outlet being given to me. ‘Well, not so good nowadays, doc. I’ve got terrible acidity …’

  Dr Kiran cut me off with a reassuring, ‘Oh, that’s normal.’

  A bit disappointed, I began, ‘Also the nausea is just not letting up …’

  Dr Kiran said, ‘Don’t worry, that’s normal.’

  After a tiny pause, I continued, ‘I’ve developed this strange stiffness in my calves …’

  Dr Kiran didn’t seem to think it was strange. Almost before I had finished speaking, she was smiling reassuringly and saying, ‘That’s completely normal.’

  I gave it one more shot and said, ‘Okay, doc, but what about my insomnia? Anything I can take for that?’

  Dr Kiran said, ‘Ya, that’s normal.’

  After a respectful pause, Vijay said tentatively, ‘So, anything she can take for the insomnia, doctor?’

  Dr Kiran didn’t seem to like this cross-questioning, but she flashed him a fake bright smile and said, ‘No, not allowed during pregnancy.’

  She then seemed to take our dumbfounded silence as quiet satisfaction with the consultation, and dismissed us with an ‘Okay? Good. See me after three weeks. Okay? Bye.’

  At this point, we found ourselves standing outside
her room, the nurse impatiently waiting to collect the consultation fee. Vijay handed over the money reluctantly, muttering to himself, ‘Doctor, I want to kill you … Oh yes, that’s normal.’

  The only time we did get to spend more than two minutes in Dr Kiran’s office was when she got a phone call in the middle of the consultation. We had already noted that she answered her phone every single time it rang. We could understand this – after all, she was a doctor. It could be an emergency.

  We waited patiently for her to get off the phone during the fifth-month visit. She finally turned back to us after finishing a fifteen-minute conversation with Sushila, her interior decorator and said, ‘Am having the whole house redone, you see. It’s such a nightmare. Sushila is really so argumentative. Ha, ha. Okayyyyyy …’ she glanced down at her appointment book ‘… yyyy … Yashodhara? So see me after three weeks.’

  On the way home, Vijay and I imagined how Dr Kiran might be in the delivery room.

  The vision that we conjured up together was of her chatting away on her cellphone against a background of screaming and ‘push … breathe … push!’ saying, ‘Ya, Sushila? I’m in the middle of a delivery. But don’t worry, tell me? The drawing room wall? No, no …’

  It didn’t take too much deliberation for us to arrive at the firm decision that when the time came, we would have the baby delivered by a family doctor in Delhi.

  There was one particular type of regular appointment that we looked forward to eagerly. It was the ultrasound.

  Vivi, who from the beginning had displayed far higher levels of enthusiasm over my pregnancy than I did, was always full of advice on all matters, including the proper ultrasound procedure.

  ‘Tell them to check properly in the ultrasound,’ she said knowledgably. ‘From all sides. They don’t do that sometimes, you know. They have these special high-tech machines, tell them to use those and not the old ones …’ She went on to say something else, but I had stopped listening.

  We didn’t have to worry about it. The lady who did the ultrasound was a very competent young doctor named Dr Pallavi. She was friendly, she didn’t keep us waiting, and she answered all our questions. It was sad to think that someday she might turn into someone like Dr Kiran.

  At the eight-week ultrasound, we got the first glimpse of our baby. It didn’t look like anything much, but since it was shaped like a peanut, that was how we started to refer to it, and the name stuck.

  Far more impressive than the first glimpse was the first sound. Dr Pallavi nonchalantly pressed a button and a loud, quick thumping sound filled the room. We looked around in confusion, until the doctor smiled and said, ‘And that is your baby’s heartbeat.’

  Thump-thump-thump-thump, it went, and my heartbeat quickened in response. Something so concrete, so steady and so real, from a tiny peanut-shaped being who weighed barely a hundred grams. Vijay and I exchanged a look and I knew his expression, with its delighted and rather silly grin, mirrored mine.

  It was confirmed. There really was a baby in there.

  Over the next few months, Peanut started to look less and less like a peanut – and more and more like an alien. I was feeling much better and had decided that maybe this pregnancy thing was not all that bad, and was finally beginning to visualize a cute baby as the product of all this effort. So I was waiting for the next ultrasound with great anticipation because this was apparently the time when the little creature inside would start to look like a real baby. This was also the time we could hope to go home with a CD with our very first picture of the baby. However, the baby was not in a cooperative mood that day. First, it kept its hand shyly over its face, only allowing us to get a tantalizing glimpse of a cute button nose. After Dr Pallavi had tried and failed to get a good shot for about half an hour, she sent us off for a while, asking me to come back after eating something sweet. Vijay and I had an icecream and a fight about whose nose the baby’s resembled more. It got acrimonious, with Vijay resorting to the use of some unkind words to describe my nose. ‘Look, I have the cuter nose and you knows it, I mean know it. Don’t giggle, it was just a slip of the tongue.’ Annoyed by my continued laugher, he spat out a rather needless and hurtful ‘By the way, your nose looks like a pakoda.’

  When we returned, Dr Pallavi said ‘Aha. The baby has changed position.’ We were happy about this and waited eagerly to see the face. She then informed us that while the baby had changed position, it was now facing my back and this along with the fact that it now appeared to have fallen asleep made it impossible to get the much-anticipated mug shot.

  We went home disappointed. I was in a particularly foul mood. After all, I was suffering to make this baby, the least it could do was to oblige us by striking a pose.

  Vijay tried to console me. ‘Come on, Y. Let’s keep things in perspective, shall we? After all, isn’t it far more important that this ultrasound showed that the baby is healthy and growing well? Everything is completely normal with your pregnancy and that is something that we should be thankful for. Also, you know there’s going to be plenty of time for baby pictures once the baby arrives. So it’s really not that bad, is it?’

  This earned him a one-minute long cold stare from me, my eyes narrowed into slits.

  He phoned to make another appointment for the next day.

  Although Vijay had not missed a single ultrasound till then, the next day’s appointment was something he had not planned for and he couldn’t get time off from work to accompany me.

  This visit was more successful. Peanut did a lot of posing, and I got some really nice shots of the baby doing surprisingly human things such as smiling, winking, yawning, digging its nose and punching itself in the face.

  Doctor Pallavi appeared to be taken with the baby’s antics. At one point, she lost her composure and squealed in a manner most unlike her usual calm self, ‘Your son’s a real cheeky one! He just winked at you.’

  I waited for a while and then asked, ‘So when you said “son”, was that random, or …?’

  I hadn’t meant to embarass her with this question, because we both knew that she was not legally allowed to tell me the baby’s gender – the earlier times that Vijay had tried to weasel it out of her, she had said, ‘It’s a healthy baby and that’s all I can tell you.’ But curiosity had now got the better of me, because she had distinctly said ‘your son’ and not her usual neutral ‘your baby’.

  She seemed a bit thrown for just a second, but she quickly recovered and insisted that she had just said it unthinkingly, without checking properly.

  After she finished the rest of the ultrasound, I thanked her profusely and she wished me all the best. And in her typical cool style, she added in a meaningful tone, ‘My mistake, calling it your son. Wouldn’t want you unnecessarily painting the nursery walls blue …’

  Now, what was that supposed to mean? Had she been right the first time about it being a boy, and was she now trying to cover up for her slip? Or was this a subtle helpful hint about it being a girl? I couldn’t figure it out but I didn’t want to push it, so I just let it go.

  Later at home, we discussed it and for some reason, Vijay became convinced that Peanut was a girl. He said he would prove it to me, and started to talk to my belly as I lay on the sofa.

  He called out lovingly, ‘Peea-nut. Are you a boy or a girl?’

  There was a ferocious kick from Peanut in response. Vijay realized he would have to change his method of questioning.

  He tried again. ‘Peanut, are you a boy?’ There was no response.

  He then went ‘Peanut, are you a girl?’ This time there was another hard kick.

  Vijay looked up at me happily, pleased to have been proven right. I looked back at him sceptically and said, ‘Vijay, do you really think Peanut has any concept of what a boy or a girl is? Get real!’

  He murmured, ‘I suppose you’re right.’ Then he brightened up.

  He addressed my belly again. ‘Peanut, can you check and tell me – do you have a pee-pee?’

  There wa
s no response.

  He beamed up at me, his face the picture of quiet triumph.

  The nicest thing about the second trimester was that I was feeling well enough to notice that my husband was pampering me like never before. And since I never said no to a good pampering, this suited me just fine. He carried my bags, offered me chairs, got me the midnight snacks that I requested him for, and even went around the apartment sleepily trying to seal off all possible sources of light when I complained that I couldn’t sleep because the room was too bright.

  He was concerned to the point of being overprotective. One evening, we decided to walk to the nearby shops to pick up some groceries. Happy to be getting some exercise, I was chatting away to Vijay animatedly. He was ignoring whatever I was saying, his shifty, alert eyes scanning the road and darting back and forth warily as he tensely shielded me from the oncoming traffic. He even held my hand as we crossed the road, gracefully swinging me onto the non-traffic side.

  I was still chattering away when it happened – I lost my balance and started to fall. As if in slow motion, I watched the rough, jagged stones on the street rush up to meet me. But suddenly, the ground stopped moving towards me and I was suspended in mid-air.

  For a split second, I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I felt like Lois Lane must have when she was plumetting to certain death from a tall building and Superman decided to intervene and caught her mid-drop.

  I looked up at my own personal friendly neighborhood Superman – my tall, gangly husband towered over me, his face straining with the effort of keeping me semi-upright. He had quickly grabbed my arm and was hanging on with an ‘I-will-save-my-wife-and-baby’ sort of determined expression. Seconds passed as I hung in that awkward position, unable to either regain my balance or lose it fully.