by Josa Young
Padme did not have a rebellious streak. She was too soft, too loved and spoiled, to risk it all for love. She liked all her berries far too much: Mulberry, Burberry and Blackberry.
Padme and Leeta had often discussed the emotional mess in which many of their British schoolfriends lived, with bitterly divorced parents, all ‘Mum’s boyfriends’, dismal weekends with Dad, and microwaved ready-meals.
‘It’s just not worth it,’ wailed Padme. ‘It’s OK for my brothers. They had lots of English girlfriends before they married, and the parents never said a thing.’
Leeta sat curled up in Damson’s chair remembering Padme’s look of naked fear. She was quite sure that the same terrible rejection, or worse, would have happened to her if she had confessed to this shameful pregnancy and thrown herself on her parents’ mercy. How could she have been so stupid as to get drunk and go upstairs with that boy? Afterwards she had huddled her clothes on and run from the house.
Damson would be home soon to find her there. Presumably giving her up as a baby had been painful. She remembered how Damson had clutched her arms in the consulting room and the wild look on her face before she visibly controlled herself and let go.
Was she going to hurt her birth mother by flitting into her life, using her as a solution to a problem, and then leaving? She wasn’t sure she cared, as she herself had been abandoned. Fenning was just a refuge while she sorted out the consequences of her mistake. Damson was someone who would potentially help. It was as simple as that. She would have to stay with this strange woman who was her real mother, who looked like a lesbian. Perhaps she was a lesbian, and that was why she had given her up. But that would be an odd reason.
As for Padme, presumably her parents had decided to overlook the Pill incident and carry on as normal. She had heard that Padme was engaged now, to a dentist. She wondered if a discreet visit to Harley Street to restore certain torn membranes had been arranged as well.
Leeta wasn’t even wholly Indian. She panicked as she imagined Papa, who was always so kind, proud and encouraging, flinging cruel words at her, as Padme’s father had, about ‘your slut of an English mother’ and ‘bad blood showing up as soon as it could’. She couldn’t trust them to understand. Padme was at least the real child of her parents, and taking the Pill had prevented her foolish lapse from ending in pregnancy.
Damson had shown herself trustful and willing at least in the short term when she gave Leeta the key. With any luck there would be no trace of this stupid pregnancy on her perfect body. Her thick creamy skin was resilient and there were no stretch marks. Youth and the gym had seen to that. She shied away from the word ‘baby’ in her own mind.
She remembered with crystal clarity what had happened earlier in the year. Hearing Dadima’s cold words, first she’d flung open the sitting room door and stared at them all. Then she’d run up to her room, turning the key in the door and flinging herself on the bed, too stunned to do anything but stare at the ceiling.
‘Leeta, let me in.’
It was her mother at the bedroom door. But not her ‘mother’. No, some stranger now. Great sobs shook her.
‘Leeta, meri jaan. Mummy is here. I am so sorry that you should have heard like that. Please let me in. Your Dadima was very wrong to blurt it out where you were likely to hear.’
Leeta was so lonely in that moment. All that was sure and certain had splintered and crashed away from her, leaving her standing on the brink of a void. ‘Who am I?’ she said, out loud. But she loved Mira, her soft, sweet-smelling, practical mother, so she got up and unlocked the door, going back to lie down without looking at her. The bed dipped as Mira sat down. They were silent for a bit. Leeta wanted to do something dramatic, like sob loudly or kick her mother off the bed. Treat her as she had never treated her before. Because she had never had any reason to do anything but love her mother. Her mother? Stunned, she continued to look at the ceiling.
‘I wanted to tell you years ago.’
‘Why didn’t you then?’ Leeta didn’t care that she sounded rude.
‘Papa said not. And he had been so good about having you in our family when his mother didn’t want us to adopt. I didn’t want to go against him again.’
Leeta knew how chilly her Dadima could be.
‘You should have told me. I had a right to know.’
‘I know you did. But you don’t understand. We just don’t adopt like people do in the West. Or if we do, we keep very quiet about it. Living in England it’s easier, because you can just go to India, adopt there and then come back with a baby. We would have gone to India ourselves if you hadn’t become available so quickly after we were approved.’
Leeta digested the idea of ‘becoming available’ after a lifetime of believing she had ‘been born’.
‘What do you know about my birth mother?’
‘We know she was clever like you. She was studying to be a doctor, again like you – and us.’
‘Oh, I suppose her family wanted a cover-up, and made her have me adopted so she could get married respectably. Is she here or in India?’
‘I think she’s here but I don’t know.’ Mira stopped, looking confused. Leeta, who was trying to get used to this new idea, was so desperate for comfort that she snuggled into her mother’s armpit where she was safe, breathing in the warm familiar scent of her skin.
She didn’t say anything else, just wrapped her arms around her daughter. Leeta pulled away slightly and looked at her, sensing her hesitation. Mira looked down.
‘What happened to her? Is she dead?’
‘As far as I know she’s fine, nothing out of the ordinary. The thing is that she is not Indian, she’s English.’
Leeta fell back on to the bed. Mira bent over her anxiously.
‘It’s OK, meri jaan. She was clever, from a good family, not just anybody.’
Leeta stared at the ceiling, still dotted with plastic luminous stars from when she was little and would watch them dim until she slept. Safe with Papa and Mummy downstairs, and smells of cooking wafting under the door.
Leeta rolled slowly on to her side with her back to Mira, drawing her knees to her chest to take up as little space as possible in this house which was no longer home.
She examined her long, shapely hands, her bony wrists. Then she sat up again, taking Mira’s hands in hers: small hands with soft palms and wrists rounded like smooth pipes, no bones or tendons visible. Had she ever wondered why she was so much taller and lankier, and – she had to accept this – paler than her parents?
‘As soon as I saw you, I fell in love with you, my darling little Leeta. Let Mummy hug you, come on.’
Leeta could not resist, and crept, tall though she was, back into her mother’s embrace. Making herself small to fit. They sat quietly, each absorbing comfort from the other’s breath going in and out, in and out, as if nothing had happened.
‘Your Dadima’s always been a bitch,’ said Mira, unexpectedly. Mira, whom Leeta had seen touching her mother-in-law’s feet, always so respectful.
‘It was such a relief when we came to practise in London, and I didn’t have to live with her in Jaipur and be submissive. I never liked her, and she was so jealous of me. So spiteful and critical all the time. Who can blame her? I had studied medicine at university, she had just been a housewife. Papa is her only son. As you know, ours was a love marriage, and she was a widow, and had had no say. Perfectly suitable, but not arranged by her. She didn’t like that at all.’
‘How did she work out that you’d adopted me?’
‘I think she wondered repeatedly out loud why you were so pale and had grey eyes, and in the end Papa told her. But he also told her to keep it a secret. As if that would work, but men always have a rose-tinted view of their mothers. She’s come storming over to interfere and talk about arranging a marriage for you. I think she was afraid you might meet and marry an English doctor. Of course it would have been different if you had been a boy. She simply could not understand why we had adopted a little gir
l who wasn’t even properly Indian.’
‘Why did you?’
‘Because it turned out to be quite easy. Few Indians were adopting in the Eighties, and the whole idea was for mixed-race babies’ – Leeta winced – ‘to go to Indian parents. I couldn’t conceive, you see.’
Leeta was listening hard, though her face was hidden from Mira’s.
‘We went through the business of having a social worker round to ask all sorts of awkward questions. Papa played his part, although he was so embarrassed by the intrusion. Then they told us they had a baby on the way we might be interested in. It all happened much more quickly than I expected.’
‘You had me from birth?’
‘Pretty well. You were a week old. We picked you up from the social services contact centre. Your mother had brought you there from the hospital.’
‘You mean you met her?’
‘Oh no, that wasn’t allowed. But she had said goodbye to you in the room from which we collected you.’
Leeta uncurled herself. She’d put an arm around her mother. ‘What else do you know about the birth parents?’
‘We know that she needed to return to her studies. That’s all. We know nothing about your father, except that he was Hindu.
‘If your Papa had been conservative, he would never have consented to any kind of adoption. In the old days I would have been put aside as a barren wife, useless.’ Mira looked stricken. ‘And your Dadima would have been right behind that, I can tell you! She always wanted a submissive wife she had chosen, whom she could boss around.’
‘Do you know what my birth parents looked like?’
‘We were shown a photograph of her, but we have no idea what your father looked like. He must have been tall I think. She didn’t look very tall and had fair, short hair.’
‘Was she pretty?’
‘It was difficult to tell. Just a snap, and she wasn’t smiling. Her face looked pleasant, I think.’
‘OK.’
Mira had dried up and Leeta was frustrated as an insatiable need to know more opened like a wound inside her. Remembering her manners, and the shocked look on Dadima’s face when she had burst into the sitting room, she said: ‘Do I have to come back downstairs and face Dadima again?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll tell her it’s all been a bit of a shock and that you’ve gone to bed. I’m sure Papa will have been furious with her. It was a mean thing to say.’
Leeta hugged her mother close, nuzzling into her neck. Mira smiled, pushing her gently away. ‘You always did that, you little pussy cat.’
She sighed.
‘Now let me go to bed, Mummy, I’m so tired.’
Mira went back downstairs. Leeta threw off her clothes and climbed into bed naked, rebelliously. Who the hell was she, if she wasn’t Leeta Delapi? An English mother? Why had she given her baby away? What would she herself have done if she had found herself pregnant at university? An abortion probably – anything to get rid of the shame. Well, her unknown mother hadn’t got rid of her at least, she’d allowed her to grow in her reluctant body, and then given her to Papa and Mummy, who’d loved her. She tried telling herself it wasn’t all bad.
She had drifted off to sleep that night not sure she would ever want to meet the oddity of an English birth mother. She’d worried that Mira would feel hurt and rejected if she did. But this unknown woman would hold the key to the pale skin, the bony wrists, the grey eyes, the very size of her in comparison to Mira. She used to think there was something wrong with her, but Mira reassured her and just said that a lot of second-generation Indian babies in the UK were much bigger than their parents had been, it must be something to do with the food. Many of her Indian immigrant patients had had to have caesareans because the babies were too big to be born naturally.
‘Did you have a caesarean, Mummy?’ she now remembered asking.
‘No, darling. I didn’t.’
Thirty
Damson
October 2008
A young mother picked up her toddler and made for the door clutching a prescription for Amoxicillin for his swollen tonsils, and Damson pushed the buzzer on her desk.
‘Is that it, Tina?’
‘Yup.’
‘OK, you can go. I’ll lock up. Thanks.’
All the other doctors in the practice had gone home an hour ago, as usual pleading family responsibilities. Damson was late due to the double shift, and anyway she was always last, not having any family to take responsibility for. But what now? She wondered if she should have pleaded illness earlier and gone home with Leeta, but with Dr Symes off sick it would have been impossible. And she had needed a little time to think, away from the overwhelming physical presence of Leeta.
She had been distracted all day by the knowledge that Leeta was waiting at Swine Cottage, while patient after patient filed through her consulting room. She had tried to concentrate, refer, prescribe, diagnose, sympathise, while her mind flitted back and back to the tall, slender, pregnant girl who had burst into her well-ordered life that morning.
A very small part of her considered it was some kind of psychotic episode brought on by her recent mid-life broodiness, and that she’d hallucinated the whole encounter. She had rung her own home number mid-afternoon, and there had been no answer. Now she dialled again, shaking with anxiety. She realised she had seldom or never rung her own landline in all the years she had lived at Fenning. There had been nobody there to answer it before.
‘Hello?’ It was that voice, somehow familiar.
‘Leeta? Damson here. How are you?’
‘I had a rest, and I went out to the shop to get some food as there didn’t seem to be much here. I’m making some supper. What time will you be home?’
It all sounded so normal and practical that Damson was invaded by a sudden onrush of joy. She paused to let it sink in, that her Mellita had grown into a complete woman without any help from her. Now, as Leeta, she did need her help. Damson was ready and willing. But she was frightened of what the immense gap in time, space and natural expectation had done to any potential mother-daughter relationship. They probably could not have one, but even being in the same house would be beyond anything she had expected.
‘Sounds lovely. I’d like to do a bit more here, can dinner wait about forty minutes? Do we need anything else?’
‘There isn’t much milk.’
‘OK, I’ll pick some up on the way home.’ The conversation was as if Mellita had been in the habit of dropping in on her mother regularly ever since she went away to university.
When she had registered for contact, for weeks afterwards she had checked repeatedly to see if her child wanted to know her. It hadn’t occurred to her that the child didn’t know she was adopted. It had been a blow when no message arrived. It didn’t matter in the slightest that Leeta had now been driven to her by desperate need, rather than a desire to meet her birth mother. Any crumb was good enough for Damson.
She also knew perfectly well she must find out for sure that Leeta was Mellita, and not some imposter preying upon a lonely woman, however unlikely that seemed. She had considered just trusting Leeta, whoever she was. Using the stored-up love that had never had a channel along which to flow to carry her to whatever safe place seemed right for her. The idea of checking up on her baby seemed so intrusive.
She knew in principle what DNA testing entailed, but it too seemed intrusive. In a small town in the depths of Derbyshire, DNA testing was a closed book. No one had consulted her on whether she thought their babies had been swapped in hospital or their embryos in an IVF clinic, and no father had ever wanted her confirmation that the child he was supporting was his blood and bone. It seemed the stuff of tabloid nightmares.
Leeta had, with great daring no doubt, tracked her down – easy enough with a unique name like Damson. She knew she wanted very much to believe she was who she said she was, but Damson wasn’t stupid or gullible either.
DNA testing was easily accessible these days. If she had neede
d to find out about Leeta even ten years ago, it wouldn’t have been nearly so simple. She typed ‘dna testing maternity’ into Google, and what confronted her came straight from the worst bits of CSI Miami. She read about the need to freeze faecal matter, about the benefits of Juicy Fruit chewing gum over other flavours for DNA collection, about making sure the person whose used handkerchiefs you were filching did not have an infection.
It was like some twenty-first century witch’s recipe: dried umbilical cords, teeth and bone, refrigerated condoms, ear wax on cotton buds, exhumed tissue from deep within the thigh, ‘properly collected blood stains’. The site seemed to expect everyone to be wading in the murky waters of disputed inheritance, child support and infidelity, even murder. And the home page was decorated with five jaunty three-dimensional stars – the right-hand points very slightly clipped – to demonstrate very nearly five-star customer satisfaction with this sinister service.
Damson shook her head and applied herself to finding a UK service. There were several advertised, each claiming to be the best in the country. The difference in the tone was stark. The UK sites went into none of the details of what samples were most useful and in what form. On the ‘maternity testing’ page there was a nice picture of a (potential) mother hugging her pretty little (potential) daughter and only three conceivable reasons why anyone might want such a test: adopted children reunited with their mothers (Leeta and her), IVF mix-ups and swapped babies. For the ‘peace of mind’ option it was only £140, as opposed to the legal one which was more like £500.
The tone was far less alarming too. It discreetly talked about ‘in-home testing characterised by the self-collection process’ – no midnight grave-robbing horrors here. She noticed there was a ‘free testing kit’ which, it was promised, would arrive in twenty-four hours, by which time she should be ready to use it. Then she clicked around the site a bit more. Even if she wanted to, the UK sites did not allow for the sneaky stealing of a hair complete with follicle that the US sites advocated. You had to get permission from both parties, and anyway she was not at all sure how she would finesse the taking of swabs from inside Leeta’s cheeks without an explanation. Leeta was a medical student, she would know exactly what Damson was up to.