Absolutely nothing had prepared me for what I had just been through. I’d had no idea how uncomfortable it would be to have that horrible thing called an enema. How disconcerting it would be to be all trussed up in preparation for pushing the baby out, feet trapped in metallic stirrups. And above all, of course, nothing had prepared me for the actual pain, oh the pain of labour.
Through all this, Vijay had been by my side every step of the way, holding my hand and diligently noting the timing of my contractions on a piece of paper that he seemed to keep losing every few minutes. In keeping with his usual reaction to stressful situations, he had also lost his command over English and kept referring to them as my ‘contraptions’. This, along with various other things, had made me want to hit him over the head with a blunt object, but I had refrained, largely because there had been none handy.
Now Peanut was out, and I lay back, with Vijay still holding my hand. He was saying, ‘She’s so pretty … I told you it would be a girl.’
I wanted to tell him that this wasn’t the best moment for I Told You So’s, but I was too exhausted to speak.
He held out his hands eagerly for the baby, and someone batted them away, saying, ‘She has to be cleaned first, of course.’
He took my hand again and squeezed it in excitement. Then something occurred to him. ‘She isn’t crying. Why isn’t she crying?’ He was now squeezing my hand so hard that despite just having gone through the pain of labour, it made me wince.
‘Relax, relax,’ said Dr Gouri. She held the baby upside down and thwacked her bottom, and sure enough, a series of indignant, piercing wails rang out through the delivery room.
‘Okay, are you ready to get the placenta out?’
I gritted my teeth and gave one last push. ‘Very good,’ said the doctor. It was finally over. My husband leaned over me and ran his hands through my sweaty tousled hair. I smiled up weakly at him, and our eyes locked. I could see that he was thinking exactly what I was thinking – about how miraculous it was that a whole little person that we had created was now here and how incredibly beautiful she was.
He murmured lovingly in my ear, ‘Honey, you know what? That placenta is one of the yuckiest things I have ever seen in my life.’
It had finally happened. Vijay was in love with another woman.
We had read that newborns were supposed to be ugly, conical-headed creatures and had steeled ourselves for this, but Peanut was a beauty. Head perfectly round and covered with black hair; fair skin and large dark brown eyes; a cute snub nose which I reluctantly let Vijay take the credit for; and the most perfect little pink lips, the lower of which would quiver heartbreakingly when she cried. Yes, the lips were definitely mine.
Vijay was completely obsessed with Peanut and insisted on being the one to handle her as much as possible. We were to be in the hospital for four days before going home, while I recuperated and recovered my strength. Vijay happily took complete care of the baby – changing Peanut’s diaper, patting her, cooing over her and only handing her over to me for breast-feeding sessions, and that too with the utmost reluctance.
I watched him with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I knew it was a wonderful thing that he was bonding so well with our new little daughter. I was mystified by how he seemed to instinctively know exactly what to do, even though I was fairly certain he hadn’t been going around fathering and raising children all over the place. His confidence in most matters regarding the baby made me feel like an inadequate parent, despite all the research that I had done.
But above all, it was like he suddenly just didn’t see me any more. I tried to push away the thought that it was only while the baby had been inside of me that I had been the centre of attention, and now, I was being ignored in a way I didn’t see myself getting used to in a hurry.
On the second night, Peanut started crying uncontrollably and none of Vijay’s attempts to soothe her by patting, rocking and singing were working. I woke up and asked him to give her to me – thankfully, breastfeeding was one thing that had come naturally and with great success to me. The baby was clearly hungry, and once I fed her, she calmed down.
But Vijay was having none of it. He was sure that there was something seriously wrong with Peanut. The crying, he said, was not due to hunger, he said, but pain. I asked him how the hell he could possibly know that, and he replied enigmatically that he just knew. I then asked him, how come she had stopped crying after the feed. He looked at me like I was from another planet and explained that it was clearly only a matter of coincidence that the pain stopped when she started feeding.
The next day, he insisted on asking the pediatrician, when he came by on his round, what was wrong with Peanut. I tried not to roll my eyes when Dr Bhardwaj said categorically, ‘Nothing.’ Vijay impressed upon him that her cries the previous night had been most heartrending. The doctor indulgently smiled and told him not to worry so much – all babies tended to cry – and if it was colic, it would have been for more than the described ‘three continuous minutes, doc, from eleven fifty-three to eleven fifty-six p.m.’
I could tell that Vijay was on the verge of imitating the cries for the doctor’s benefit, so I hurriedly jumped in to explain she had been fine after the feeding. Dr Bhardwaj rolled his eyes to the ceiling and asked Vijay not to observe the baby so closely. Later, Vijay muttered darkly to himself, ‘I think we need to get a second opinion, I don’t believe this doctor knows much about babies.’ He only stopped worrying when he found something else to worry about.
He worried about whether she was feeling too cold, and added another blanket. When I tucked it around her, he decided she was feeling too hot and removed it. He made her wear gloves so that she would stay warm and not scratch herself – when she started putting her hands in her mouth, he removed them. He made her wear a hat as recommended by the doctor, but when I did the same, he decided that she didn’t like it much, so he removed it. He lamented her long nails and got a pair of nail clippers with a magnifying glass, but didn’t have the heart to cut them – after one attempt, he gave up and put the gloves back on again. He would jerk awake at the slightest noise, while the baby slept on peacefully – one late night, he rushed over from the sofa at the other end of the room to check if she was safe, almost tripping and falling on her. I irritatedly asked him how he could confuse the sound of a distant slamming door with that of a baby’s cry but he had already tripped his way back to the sofa and fallen asleep again. He was worried about each temporary rash, the little bandages left where they had taken her blood for testing, her umbilical stump, and each bout of sneezing and hiccups.
I found myself becoming increasingly resentful about the fact that all we seemed to be doing now was arguing, with Vijay seemingly oblivious to my discomfort – I was feeling completely out of sorts, in pain from the stitches from the episiotomy and still dazed by the overall experience of childbirth. I also found that all my earlier doubts – about our joint capability to bring up a child – had returned in one big flood. She was so tiny and helpless and she cried so much and the two of us could never see eye-to-eye on how to comfort her. It was overwhelming.
As a result of these feelings, the third day after the delivery, I darkly decided that I was suffering from post partum depression. However, when I informed Vijay about this, he didn’t even turn towards me – he only continued to gaze adoringly at Peanut and absently remarked to me, ‘But she is so beautiful. Why would you think about being depressed at a time like this? This is what happens when you read too much.’
My shrieks were apparently heard by Dr Gouri all the way from the other ward, and she practically ran over to see what the matter was, while I heaped curses upon every aspect of Vijay’s manhood. While Vijay shrank further into his corner, I blubbered incoherently to her about his being such a man. She suggested that perhaps a little sedative might be in order, adding reassuringly to him that there was no need to worry, such emotional reactions were normal after the trauma of childbirth and that everything would s
ettle down soon. Neither of us really believed her.
On the plus side, Vijay changed Peanut’s diapers with the expertise of someone who did it for a living. A nurse would come by to change her every couple of hours, but he would go along with her to the changing station and do it himself. He would then return with Peanut in his arms, half asleep himself, and inform me, ‘Her enconium is still coming out,’ before nodding off briefly on the sofa. I deciphered this to mean her meconium, or first bowel movements after birth. Icky dark green stuff. For the moment, I decided to try and enjoy the side benefits of his obsessive behaviour, and be thankful that he wanted to be the one soaking the meconium up.
Besides, I hoped that once things settled down a little, everything would automatically get better between the two of us. This was just a phase. Right?
7
New Parents
On the fourth day, I was finally discharged from the hospital. Actually, it wasn’t so much a discharge as it was being kicked out. I had shown no signs of wanting to leave – in fact, I was trying to delay our exit as much as possible because the last time I had checked, there were no nurses at my mother’s home in Delhi where I would be spending the first few weeks with the baby, and this would mean handling the baby myself. But Dr Gouri finally put her foot down, saying, ‘Go home now, please – it’s time to take care of her on your own.’
We headed to my mother’s home. Mum accosted us at the doorstep and did the aarti-and-teeka to make sure we had all the blessings we needed. Then we finally got to step in.
I was delighted to find that my mother and sister had done up the guest bedroom nicely, keeping it free from all possible clutter, as per the advice of Dr Bhardwaj. There was even a little picture of Peanut on the wall with the words, ‘Welcome Home, Peanut.’
Everyone was delighted to see Peanut, but no one appeared more taken with her than our old-time help. Kajal had been with the family for almost a quarter century, and she had taken care of my sister when she was a child. Even now, the fondness that Kajal felt for Gitanjali was unparalleled, but to her slight resentment, my sister had grown up and no longer needed to be chased around with a spoonful of food. So she kept blinking in total adoration at Peanut and kept saying, over and over, ‘Kitna shona baby hain.’
Vijay and I spent a couple of sleepless days at home tending to Peanut, and spent our leisure time mostly bickering about how to handle her. I was slowly getting accustomed to being treated like a prop in the play of life starring little Peanut, which Vijay seemed to think he was directing, but that still didn’t mean I had to like it. So when he asked me when I planned to move back with her to Mumbai, I replied coldly that she wasn’t even forty days old and they said that a child should not be taken out of the house until it was forty days old. He asked me since when I had cared about what ‘they said’, but I just haughtily turned away.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘Why are you acting like this?’
I told him that if he didn’t know already, there was no point in my telling him, to which he just shook his head a few times. He then repeated his question: ‘So when are you going to move back then? After forty days?’
I was unsure about this. Somehow, I was in no hurry to move back to Mumbai. It was comfortable here, in my childhood home. I thought of our Bandstand flat as claustrophobically small now. Vijay and I seemed unable to agree on anything to do with Peanut and there would be no referee in Mumbai. Besides, I suspected that my mother knew something about bringing up children and it would help me to be around her. After all, she had raised me and my siblings – and I, at least, had turned out just fine. Of course, it was another matter altogether that every time she tried to give me any advice about Peanut, I snapped at her.
Out loud, I told Vijay, ‘Why don’t you just find good full-time help over there, and when that’s in place, we’ll move back.’ He agreed reluctantly that we would definitely need a full-timer and that he would have to begin the search. Nicely done, Y, I thought with great satisfaction, that’s putting the onus on him.
Vijay’s paternity leave of about two weeks was drawing to a close and he had to go back to Mumbai. He became very morose while leaving, saying, ‘She will forget all about me.’ He had been valiantly trying to teach Peanut to say ‘Papa’ although she was only ten days old, and made me promise to keep up the efforts.
He left reluctantly, and after his first day of work, he rushed home and insisted on trying to do a video chat with us. I finally managed to get the computer set up and he started goo-ing and ga-ing at her. There was some problem with the webcam at his end, however, so I couldn’t see him. I figured this would be okay because the point was for him to see the baby but to my surprise, he was very disappointed. He explained that he had wanted Peanut to see him so that she wouldn’t forget what he looked like over the next seven days.
I gently tried to explain that as per my research, a ten-day-old baby could barely focus on a hand placed right in front of its face, so it was unreasonable to expect her to look at the computer screen and recognize him on a fuzzy pop-up window. Vijay was unconvinced by this logic. He seemed to think it was all part of a conspiracy to keep them apart.
I realized that while Vijay was away, I would have to learn to change the baby’s diapers. I wasn’t too confident about doing it myself the first time, so I solicited the help of my sister. Gitanjali firmly held up Peanut’s chubby legs, while I did the wiping and the actual cleaning. It took us about ten minutes, but it went smoothly. We were surprised at our proficiency in this exercise, and congratulated ourselves.
It was only later, when I decided to change her diaper again, daring to try it alone this time, that I discovered our self-congratulations had been a tad premature. During the earlier round, we had omitted to dispose of the changed diaper, and had instead wrapped it up tightly along with Peanut in her blanket. Consequently, she had been lying peacefully, bundled up with an extra dirty diaper for the last few hours.
I quietly tossed the diaper into the bin. I was going to be the worst mother ever.
Vijay locked eyes with Peanut and said in his best Amitabh Bachchan voice, ‘Rishtey mein toh hum tumhare baap lagte hain. Naam hain Vijay. Deenanath. Chauhan. Maalum?’
He was happy to be back in Delhi for the weekend so that he could bond with Peanut. The good thing was that during his visits, I could relax a bit since I only had to feed her and Vijay would do the rest. However, any attempt at adult conversation between the two of us still resulted in bickering and unpleasantness. He had a point of view on everything to do with Peanut – ranging from a detailed interpretation of her cries and facial expressions to the diet I should be adopting as a feeding mother. My temper, exhaustion and hormones were getting the better of me, and I completely lost it when he tried to give me tips on the most appropriate breastfeeding positions.
We made up only when it was time for the naming ceremony for Peanut. Over the last two weeks, we’d had a series of acrimonious discussions about her name. Every name that one of us came up with was vetoed vehemently by the other. He wanted to go for a ‘different’ sounding name, whereas I wanted something simple. I had read in an old Reader’s Digest once about how when you’re naming a kid, just stand at the backdoor and yell it out because that’s how you’re going to be using it for years. It seemed like sound, practical advice to me, and I could now see why Vijay’s family’s choice of ‘Rama-Shyama-Ajay-Vijay’ was eminently sensible, compared to ‘Abhimanyu-Yashodhara-Gitanjali’. No wonder my mother had decided to go to work and leave us to the mercy of the maids all though our childhood.
After rejecting many names – including my top contender ‘Sunaina’, which he said was too old ‘and sounds like an aunty’s name’ and several of his options which he got out of the Great Book of Hindu Names, we had finally arrived at a name that we both liked – ‘Anoushka’. The daughter of the main character in Chocolat was named Anouska, and I loved the short version, Anouk; it sounded Indian enough.
My mo
ther had organized a rather sweet little naming ceremony at home but towards the end, the pundit announced that the most auspicious name for Peanut would begin with the sound ‘bh’. As the conclusion to the ceremony, Vijay and I were to lean over together and whisper her new name into her ear. All around us, the family was throwing options at us like ‘Bhagyashree’ and ‘Bheemeshwari’. The pressure was on, but a split second before we were to decide, our eyes locked, and in a rare display of complete unity, we leaned over and whispered in a low voice so that only the two of us and the sleeping Peanut could hear: ‘Bheemanoushka’.
I was still having sleepless nights. While Vijay had been up almost every night while we were in the hospital with Peanut, at home he lapsed into his usual state of near-comatose sleep. This appeared to have evolved as a self-defense mechanism over the nine months of my pregnancy, when the only way for him to get sleep during my most whiny, miserable nights had been to turn his back on me, fall asleep, and refuse to wake up despite all my attempts to rouse him.
This deep sleep proved useful to him now, as Peanut woke up almost every two hours, wailing for a feed, a nappy change, or just to be rocked back to sleep. Being a light sleeper, I would get up and handle her needs. In the mornings, I would be bleary-eyed and grumpy while Vijay would be as fresh as a daisy, and seemingly unable to fathom why I wasn’t all charged up and ready to play with Peanut like he was.
One night, I was awoken by Peanut squirming around and chomping angrily on her fist. I got up and tried to position her properly to feed her before she started wailing and woke up the whole house. She started fussing, crying and wriggling fiercely. I couldn’t help but imagine a trifle darkly that she had been some sort of predator in her last life and that’s why she didn’t let me breastfeed her peacefully – she seemed accustomed to attacking, wrestling and killing her food first.
JUST MARRIED, PLEASE EXCUSE Page 14