THE IMMIGRANT

by Manju Kapur

  The questions began. Menstruation, contraception, abortion, pap smear history, sexual activity, sexual disease history, general health, pelvic surgery history, maternal gynaecological history, parental disease history, alcohol, nicotine and weight history.

  Then followed a discussion of insurance coverage, diagnosis and treatment costs, drug costs, procedures concerning correction of possible defects and the time they took. Of course, the full plan of action could only be decided upon once the husband had his tests done. One third of all infertility cases stemmed from male causes, of which the majority centred around abnormalities in the sperm.

  Here, here was a pamphlet answering some commonly asked questions, with details of various support groups. This was a trying time for couples, and it helped to meet other people who were going through similar problems.

  Thank you doctor.

  Now for the examination. The pap smear, the checking of fibroids, the general health. Immediately she felt tense.

  The nurse came. ‘Come along, dear.’

  She was shown into a tiny cubicle.

  ‘Just slip off your pants and lie down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So the doctor can look at you.’

  ‘In my country we don’t do this.’

  ‘Really? Then how do they examine you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’ll be over in a minute. Lie down.’

  It was a horrid little windowless room, fluorescent lights set in the ceiling, tiny, with just one high bed covered with a white sheet and a large lamp near it. She stood irresolutely by the bed.

  ‘You’ll have to do this many times, dear,’ said the nurse. ‘Might as well get used to it.’

  It was with a sense of shame that she slid off her pants and panties and lay down on the table. ‘Put your feet here,’ said the nurse. Now her legs were spread wide open, facing the door, the world coming through. And there the doctor, squirting gel on his glove clad fingers, inserting a metal contraption into her vagina, aiming the light between her legs, peering inside, scraping some tissue off, pressing on her stomach, feeling around and around.

  ‘You can get dressed now,’ he said, and left.

  There were two other closed doors, she had noticed, two other women lying on tables, waiting for the doctor.

  Dr Abbot was a pervert, decided Nina, as she stood in the outer waiting room; why else would he, a male, want to specialise in this branch of medicine?

  ‘When would you like your next appointment?’ asked the receptionist.

  Could she phone and let her know?

  She didn’t care so much about having a child now. These walls, this room, was inimical to it. She wanted to be outside, she had had enough of inside. Slowly she left the apartment block and started walking. The sky was grey, a few brown leaves still clung to trees otherwise bare.

  Would she ever have a child? She had not thought beyond a visit to a doctor, that had seemed a big enough issue. Now she realised there was a world stretching beyond; a preliminary check up didn’t even begin to scratch the surface. And after all that time, trouble and expense, it wasn’t even guaranteed that a baby would be the result.

  ‘What’s up,’ said Ananda that evening, ‘why are you acting so strange?’

  They had still not resumed friendly relations, but this was an olive branch of sorts. Nina mashed her dal in her rice, scooped yoghurt from the carton and jabbed viciously at a Five Seas imported slice of mango pickle.

  It was easy to blame him for all she was feeling, so easy, she was frightened at how quickly she fell into that trap. She tried to control herself. Babies did not come through accusations.

  ‘You didn’t feel it necessary to see a doctor,’ she said as neutrally as she could, ‘about why we weren’t getting pregnant, so I went myself.’

  Now his turn to be silent. What had driven her to take this step, he would have gone, he wasn’t saying no, he just wanted time. But that, it seemed, was impossible.

  He hid his feelings. ‘Well, did anything come of it?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He didn’t think I was being alarmist.’

  Of course he wouldn’t. This was a culture that visited the doctor after one cough, after one degree of temperature, after one twinge in a tooth. He knew the next step in this process would be that he too go to the doctor. Then would follow his own testing, then reports, specialists, sex at specified times. Nina would become more demanding. As she recounted details of the visit, he could just see the shape of the future and he didn’t like it. He was not ready for so much invasion of his privacy, not ready for all this effort to try for a child when he barely felt married.

  ‘What about the costs?’ he asked cunningly. ‘Insurance doesn’t cover it.’

  Her face fell. ‘I believe they cover the diagnosis.’

  ‘But the tests? Some of them are quite expensive—believe me, there is no end to testing. First tests, then treatment, then more tests, then treatment, and as I said only the basic ones are insured. Are we ready for all that? I still haven’t recovered from the expense of the wedding.’

  She could think of nothing to say to this. Dr Abbot had said very clearly, they both had to be equally committed, otherwise it was not going to work. If Ananda was not as desperate about children, there was little she could do. Already she could see her dreams falling into fragments around the dining table. Tears gathered in her eyes.

  Ananda looked at her. He had not found it so difficult to adjust when he had come, but perhaps he was made of sterner stuff. He drew her onto his lap.

  viii

  Early mornings were the hardest. Often Nina stayed in bed, not happy, not unhappy, scenes from home floating in her mind, jostling next to images of Spring Garden Road, the Halifax Shopping Centre and the Public Library. Sometimes she read, sometimes she put the clock radio on to introduce the sound of human voices.

  One morning as she was twiddling the radio knobs she heard voices in Hindi, background to the commentator’s British accent. Her hand trembled.

  He was reporting the Kumbh Mela, held in Allahabad every twelve years, for the devout Hindu an extremely auspicious event.

  ‘Today is the day of the Maha Kumbh, the day the spiritual blends with the ordinary, when the muted murmur of millions of pilgrims, marching to the Ganga, are matched by the early morning war cries of the Naga sadhus. Two crore faithful will bathe in this river today. The confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythological Saraswati has turned into an ocean of human beings immersing themselves in the holy waters to the chanting of Vedic hymns, blowing of conch shells and beating of drums.

  ‘Now, it is the naked sadhus who are waiting for their dip. It is four thirty in the morning, the auspicious hour started at three. The atmosphere here is simply incredible; as far as the eye can see, there are pilgrims from all four corners of India gathered on the banks of the Sangam, waiting their turn to immerse themselves. There is the Maharajah of Kapurthala, mounted on a horse. Previously he mounted an elephant, but after last time’s stampede elephants have been discouraged. Over there are the akharas, bearing their standard in front of them; on the right has just passed a very colourful procession of village women, balancing sacks on their heads. The naked sadhus are getting restless, they want their turn—oh, now it is their turn, they are descending into the water. It is a bitterly cold morning, there is a mist and the sun has yet to rise, but nothing deters these pilgrims from the icy river.’

  The words reverberated through Nina, though she was as much a stranger to the Kumbh Mela as anyone in Canada. Educated, secular and Westernised, she had never had anything to do with ritual Hinduism. From so far however, the crowds, the pilgrims, the piety, the cold river, the morning mist, the sadhus, all called to her. Somewhere they beat in her blood and now, in a foreign land, she was as guilty of exoticising India as the tourist posters in the Taj Mahal restaurant.

  Over dinner Nina told Ananda about the Kumbh Mela.
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br />   He grunted.

  ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh. Well, hearing about it over the BBC made me realise how special it was.’

  Unlike Nina, Ananda knew firsthand how special it was, because he had gone there as a pilgrim when small. ‘Once my mother insisted on going,’ he offered, willing to share a memory, something he rarely did if it was set in India.

  ‘And?’

  ‘My father didn’t want to brave all those crowds, but my mother was very insistent. She hardly ever asked for anything, but who knew what would happen in twelve years she said, and so we all went. There was certainly not another opportunity in her life, so it turned out she was right.’

  Nina was astonished. She knew no one who went on pilgrimages, not even her pious mother. ‘How was it?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I was only five or six.’

  But he remembered something. Getting up when it was still dark, shivering on the river bank, the sound of conch shells, his father carrying him as he waded into the freezing water, his mother holding his sister’s hand, people, people all around in the growing pale of morning. Then later on the train ride home, the family feeling they had all accomplished something, being light hearted and gay. And still later, the discovery that his sister had lice in her hair.

  He remembered the sharp smelling kerosene oil his mother repeatedly massaged into Alka’s scalp, the long, wooden, fine-toothed comb used to drag the dead lice out of her hair, the tick of his mother’s finger nail as she squashed the eggs on an old newspaper. The tears of humiliation in his sister’s eyes—she would rather die than go to the Kumbh Mela again.

  ‘Did your mother feel something special?’ asked Nina wondering, as she always did, whether to break into memories that might be painful.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your mother. It must have been a big thing for her.’

  ‘Must have. She was quite religious. Maybe she got what she wished for. Certainly she didn’t have to live without my father.’

  Nina’s heart ached for her husband. After her father died, she and her mother had spent long bitter years reconciling themselves to the full scale emptiness in their lives. In addition to the man they adored, they had lost status, housing, security and their future. In a moment, Ananda too had plunged from everything to nothing. She reached for his hand.

  ‘Maybe one day we can go,’ she said, trying to make up for the losses in his life.

  ‘Naw—once is enough. Bathing in a river full of other people’s germs can’t cleanse you. Now I know better.’

  ‘The Ganga is supposed to be naturally pure. My mother even drinks the water. Nothing happens to her.’

  ‘But not the river that has two crore people splashing about. How hygienic do you think that is?’ snorted Ananda and thus concluded the conversation about their mothers.

  During her long sojourn in bed, next morning, Nina thought about the Kumbh Mela. Something that had barely crossed her consciousness for thirty two years had become the subject of two days’ reflection.

  Yearning for home did strange things to the mind. Even though she despised cheap nostalgia, the way she had reacted to the Kumbh Mela was proof that living in a different country you became a different person. Here she drew comfort from caressing her breasts, imagining them in a wet sari in the waters of the Sangam. From there her mind wandered to all the soaked heroines she had seen in Hindi cinema and how very buxom they had looked.

  There she was, doing it again. At home, wet sari clad heroines were ignored as part of the blatant devices of commercial cinema, certainly never identified with.

  Misery such as hers could have no immediate end, she decided, as she stroked herself into another morning in Canada.

  Her interest in going to the library waned. It was hard to sustain the same passion for books when they served as appetizer, main course and dessert as well. It seemed another lifetime when, as a teacher, she had read for her profession, when she had thought for a living.

  The children, among whom she had once seen her daughter’s bright eyes, became noxious to her, their thin high voices pierced her skin. Already the prediction at the LLL was coming true; the very sight of them made her sad. When would the hatred of her body start, she wondered gloomily, the next item on the agenda.

  She changed the direction of her walks, turning to the book of nature, perusing it in Point Pleasant Park. If it was windy or drizzly, she walked in a long waterproof coat of Ananda’s, the material flapping around her knees, a silk scarf tied around her ears, her nose, running slightly from the cold, wiped frequently by a tissue clutched in her hand.

  I am in a place, five hundred or was it six hundred–seven hundred million of my countrymen would give their eye teeth to be in. I have a Saab, a General Electric fridge, a washing machine, a dishwasher, running hot water, I can eat and drink whatever I like. Don’t look at the bad side, her mother used to say. Look at the good.

  But just having to tell herself this seemed so pathetic. Did the people who lived in these houses with the blank windows ever count their washing machines? She could see two, three cars parked in the driveways of the houses on Young Avenue; did the inmates look at them every morning and think how lucky they were? Then why should she?

  Because she was brown? Third world?

  And the answer echoed through the quiet, tree covered atmosphere of Point Pleasant Park—yes, yes, yes. Now be grateful for the rest of your life.

  She was trying. If she started telling Ananda how miserable she sometimes felt, cause unknown, he told her to be positive. Who can argue with positive thinking? No one. She was the culprit.

  Her mind wandered back to the astrologer. Was it only two years ago that he had predicted her life would be transformed? His words had been seen as words of promise. They didn’t convey how much stress she would undergo while assaulted by changes, changes so thorough that she felt rootless, branchless, just a body floating upon the cold surface of this particular piece of earth.

  Part of that birthday treat had been the scooter ride back home with her mother, which allowed them to be exposed at street level to all the pollutions of the road. Now she longed to breathe the foul air, longed to sit in a scooter rickshaw and have every bone in her body jolted.

  Home. That was what she wanted. The park, the trees, the harbour, the view, everything was so pretty, but it failed to satisfy her heart. Maybe if her mother could share it with her, it would have made a difference. She could imagine her thin worn face, her gnarled hands, happy in her happiness. Happy. The whole planet would be better off not searching for something so ephemeral.

  On the way back she passed a deserted children’s playground. Swings, sand pit, jungle gym, benches, all unused. At home no space, large or small, was ever free of people. She remembered the rows of jhuggis in the nalla near her house, without sanitation, water or toilet facilities. The children there spilled onto the pavement, playing, shitting, begging.

  In her disorientation she could think wistfully of children shitting, when in all her years of living in Delhi, her strongest feelings about jhuggis had been that they were a filthy, ugly nuisance and why didn’t the government do something about them. Every morning on the way to the bus stop, her sari fastidiously lifted, she had stepped around multiple turds and continued on her way, only peripherally registering them and their implications. Now, even those faeces were transported to the playground with their owners, along with other starving children, beggars, the homeless, the brutalised, the charred, the raped. These wide open spaces could provide them with a place of rest too.

  At the corner store she stopped for a long time. The woman who ran it was an Indian, and though she avoided Nina’s gaze, her presence made the store comfortable. There was one of her own kind running the shop, even if she did have a Canadian accent. Up and down the small aisles, looking at products crying out for the money she was dying to part with. Slowly she chose. Corn chips. Salt and vinegar chips. Onion and garlic
dip. Mint and coconut chocolate. Cinnamon sweets. Buttery shortbread biscuits. Then sugarless gum, because her teeth were going to feel yucky. Oh, and they were out of milk and yoghurt, these were needed to weigh the shopping down in the scales of sanity.

  Lugging these things home, Nina couldn’t wait to open those packets and sink her teeth into the soothing stuff. Thank God this stuff was so cheap, or Ananda would notice the amount she spent on rubbish.

  ix

  ‘When should I make the next appointment with the doctor?’

  ‘Which doctor?’

  ‘The gynaecologist said we should go as a couple.’

  ‘What reason did he give?’

  ‘Well, his initial findings were normal so far as I was concerned.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Not good enough. We need to investigate some more.’

  ‘Will you shut up about doctors?’

  ‘Why are you being so rude?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but please don’t go on talking about this. We’ll go when the time is right.’

  Temporarily she gave up on doctors to start nagging him about sex. ‘If we had it frequently, maybe a sperm would make it to an egg.’

  ‘Are you implying it’s my fault we don’t have sex more often? Don’t you know how much I want it? But while you just sit around and relax at home, I am at the clinic working hard to make a living. Unless I get a full night’s rest, I can’t concentrate the next day. Dentistry is very fine work, you know.’

  Dispassionately Nina observed that Ananda got offensive when he felt attacked. This was not a nice trait, but she ignored it for the moment, wondering whether she was wrong in thinking that her appetite for sex was greater than her husband’s. It was true though, he did need to be rested, his hands needed to be absolutely steady and he often complained of pain in his lower back. She wondered whether she needed to be more empathetic, but the state of permanent sexual frustration she was in made it difficult. It grieved her that Ananda had no notion of how she felt. Her idea of matrimony was a husband who was a little more alert to the discreet clues she let drop. Long moments were spent gazing at herself in the mirror, in her underwear or sexy nightie. In the soft glow of the pink tiled bathroom, she looked dazzling. Her bare skin, the curves of her body, her black hair falling over her shoulders, all were delectable. Desire rose in her as she communed with her reflection. She pushed her breasts up, and gazed at the seductive cleavage that would surely drive any man to fondle. Having a husband should not have meant such lonely desperation.