by Meera Syal
‘My husband can’t work it yet.’ Seema sniffed as she pushed another sugar-coated snack at Mala.
Mala ate it in one gulp and, finally satisfied, licked her glittered fingertips and settled back into her chair. The room looked odd, overstuffed with Seema’s new purchases which seemed to be pushing against the uneven walls. There was no space to breathe properly, emphasized by Seema’s snatched, shuddering breaths, which were finally beginning to subside. Bas, no more nicey small talk, Mala decided. When a woman opens her door and weeps a monsoon before a namaste has left anyone’s lips, it is best to be blunt.
‘So you went to Delhi and they took your baby away?’
The shock of Mala’s question finally stopped Seema in mid flow. She opened her mouth, closed it, then nodded her head, her tears threatening to start all over again.
‘Either cry or speak, you can’t do both,’ Mala snapped.
Seema wiped her nose on her sari. ‘How … Who told you?’
‘Bas, no one had to tell anyone anything. Everyone saw you were pregnant, you went to Delhi, you came back with no baby and a new handbag.’
‘He told me not to tell anyone.’ No need to say who he was, the he was the same in everybody’s lives. ‘It was his idea, the whole thing. But then I said yes also. I mean, he didn’t force me.’
Mala made one of those all-purpose non-committal hai-haa noises that might encourage Seema to spill some more details. Especially the most important one: where all the look-at-me presents had come from.
Seema emitted a gentle watery burp before continuing, ‘Afterwards, I felt glad. But also too sad, crying all the time. Stupid, hah? I should be happy … with all this.’ She waved a limp hand around the room. ‘And now we can send the children to the proper school in Bessian. And college also, if they work hard at their studies. And we can give my Babbli a good wedding when the time comes.’
Mala’s toes curled with curiosity. Just how much money did this mouse-quiet mumbly couple have?
‘I know people must be saying dirty things about me,’ Seema said softly. ‘It is a strange thing to understand. Even for me, sometimes.’
‘What is not to understand?’ Mala retorted. ‘It happens all the time.’
‘Does it?’ Seema asked, her eyes wide with disbelief.
‘Hah, of course! It is just you did it with a proper doctor. At least this way you won’t bleed to death like a halal chicken afterwards, like poor Jassi in my old village.’
Seema looked confused. She was one of life’s lalloos, Mala observed – one of those sweet fools who drift on the wind, never making their own luck but letting it settle on them, good or bad; never prepared, always a little bewildered. Now if this kind of luck had blown my way, thought Mala, this room would look completely different. In fact, I would not even be living in this room. I would have bought a flat in Delhi itself with a balcony and a dining table on a ledge, a room attached to the main room but only to be reached by two-three steps. And this leaky long-face spends it all on electrical goods. What a waste! Mala would have gone on spending the money in her imagination for some time, but then something Seema said made her sit up and listen properly.
‘What? What did you say?’
Seema looked up at Mala, eyes tinged with wonder. ‘It was a girl. With blue eyes. So bright blue, like a peacock’s neck.’
‘But how could you—’
‘When I was crying afterwards, my husband said, you are just the nest, not the egg. The bird gets strong and then flies away. What is there to be upset about? Especially when these people are giving us so much paisa. But how would he understand? He did not feel her knees making bumps in my belly. He did not see his skin jump like the river when the rain falls on to it, when she got hiccups. He did not feel her flip like a fish under my ribs whenever Pogle sahib sang one of his loud wedding songs. He did not have to push her out with legs so far apart that one foot is in life and the other in death, did he?’
Mala nodded, her lips clamped shut, fireworks blooming noiselessly in her head. Five minutes later she had the whole picture, every detail. Once uncorked, Seema could not be stopped, so Mala had to do little else but listen. And as she listened, she began to understand, finally, why her husband had been spending so much friendly-time with Seema’s husband, why he would not touch her any more, why he looked at her the way he did, not seeing her breasts and belly as his, but as valuable treasures for hire.
‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ Seema pleaded with Mala as she hovered at the gate.
‘Oh-foh, woman! Even if I did, they would not believe me, would they?’
Seema placed a tentative hand on Mala’s shoulder, afraid it might be swatted away.
‘They were so happy, the American parents, they wept like babies themselves. Even though I gave them a girl. That’s what the doctor told me. They felt blessed.’
‘How much did they give you?’ Mala asked gently. Several eddies of emotion scudded across Seema’s watery face, suspicion ebbing into childish vulnerability, a trickle of shame halted by the dam of Mala’s hardening stare. Seema’s breath was warm and pickle-scented at Mala’s ear as she whispered a sum of money which made Mala inhale the night air in one astonished gasp that left her dizzy, overwhelmed by the layered odours of night jasmine, open fires and baked manure.
Seema’s face, when Mala returned to it, was almost kindly, as if she felt sorry for the bitter knowledge she had passed on. It was an old look, one Mala recalled seeing in her mother’s limpid eyes when Mala had left her childhood home to follow her husband to his, not knowing if and when she might return; a look of yearning, of bittersweet joy for what is to come and will not stay long, and guarded grief for what must be endured. A shared sense of sweet corruption when women see their fears, their frailties and perhaps their futures mirrored back at them.
As Mala swayed back towards her house, the moon hung low and heavy, a blood-orange earring pulling down on the night’s taut skin. Fireflies flitted amongst the peepul-tree boughs, leaving luminous trails behind them which burned sharp and bright before slowly fading away, like the fleeing remnants of a vivid dream. In the distance, the slow pulse of the river throbbed through the darkness. Mala could feel it as she heard it, as if she and the coursing waters were one, being pulled towards the ocean, where she would disappear into its vastness, the speck of her life swallowed up as if she had never even existed.
She entered the house without announcing herself, startling Ram, who stood up too quickly from the charpoy, his metal cup of spiced tea spilling on the floor and absorbed hungrily by the pressed red earth it anointed. Mala began to untie her sari, unwrapping herself slowly like an unexpected present.
‘What are you doing?’ Ram stuttered, backing off as his eyes devoured each inch of flesh deliciously revealed, layer by layer. ‘Mamaji might come in.’
‘Let her,’ Mala said calmly, the night air greeting her flesh with a warm sigh, her skin rising up, swelling to meet its embrace. She felt dizzy with power, intoxicated by this body that had brought her so much shame. Tch, a girl! A burden to be carried and disposed of as quickly as possible, whose curves had to be disguised or hidden to keep away the predators and silence the gossips. But now, she breathed into Ram’s ear, now I am a goddess, hena? I hold worlds within my womb and now, you trembling, wet-mouthed, dry-throated, knee-shaky man, now you need me more than I ever needed you. The groan she tore from his throat as she placed his hand over her breast made her smile, a smile that he ate from her lips like a starving dog.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ON THE THIRD morning in their hotel in New Delhi, Shyama opened the glass doors leading on to their small balcony and came face to face with a plump brown monkey, which looked up from the oversized brassiere it held in its paws. It barely reacted to Shyama’s cry of surprise; in fact, it looked somewhat annoyed at the interruption. Toby wanted to feed it some banana from the modest fruit bowl they had found in their room, but Shyama snatched it out of his reach.
‘T
hey’re vicious, these street monkeys, and they’re crawling with rabies.’
‘You don’t crawl with rabies.’ Toby smiled, making a lunge for an apple. ‘That’s fleas. Besides, he’s holding a bra. How tough can he be? Not yours, is it?’
‘Since when have I gone for purple nylon underwear, Toby? Back off! It’s like going to hug a hoodie – he’ll mug you for your fruit and probably chew your shoes off for good measure.’
Toby backed down and, at Shyama’s insistence, tried to shoo the monkey away with loud claps and noisy stamps. The monkey scratched its bottom, threw the bra at Toby’s head and leaped into a nearby tree with a yawn.
Shyama and Toby stood on their balcony for a while. Five floors up, they could see pockets of South Delhi in between the treetops and office blocks: dual carriageways and flyovers snaking around a mossy ruin of an old religious site; students streaming out of a nearby college with backpacks and bicycles; a sports stadium of some kind, its long-necked spotlights craning at each other in a perfect circle.
Later on, lying on the bed under the revolving ceiling fan, the air-conditioning unit thrumming at full blast, Shyama told him how a group of these frisky rhesus monkeys had broken into the Indian Ministry of Defence offices some years back and had thrown about top-secret papers whilst looking for food. They’d even broken into the Lok Sabha itself and run amok, terrorizing MPs, inevitably inspiring reams of column inches inviting readers to ‘Spot the Real Monkeys!’ Plus raising more serious questions about national security and the dignity of government.
‘They’re a real problem in this city. They attack people, break into houses; they can open fridges and everything, run off with kids’ packed lunches. I remember the last time I came here, my auntie kept a pointy stick on the porch, she called it her bander dhi lukurd.’
‘Which means?’ Toby stroked Shyama’s damp hair away from her eyes.
‘Monkey stick.’
‘Does what it says on the tin.’ Toby snuggled into Shyama and rested his chin on her shoulder.
‘It got so bad in the area around parliament, they hired these other monkeys, bigger ones, to chase away the smaller ones. Langurs, I think. Scary-looking, huge teeth.’
‘Like Planet of the Apes.’
‘Well, not really … I don’t think the monkeys are going to rise up any time soon and enslave the good citizens of Delhi.’
‘No, I mean in the film there’s a pecking order. Amongst the apes. Or rather, the apes are at the bottom, they’re treated like the dumb strong workers, and the brainy chimps are in all the managerial jobs. And the orang-utans are the professor types.’
Shyama raised herself up on one elbow. ‘You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?’
‘I was imagining the last scene, you know, where Charlton Heston finds the head of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand and realizes he’s not on some freaky faraway planet, he’s actually on Earth. But in the future. That somewhere along the way, human beings have messed up and it’s too late to do anything about it. Except in our version, he’d find the top of the Taj Mahal, wouldn’t he?’
‘Now I’m worried. Must be the heat. Mad Dogs and Englishmen.’
Shyama kissed the tip of Toby’s already sunburnt nose. She had warned him before they left that a natural blond like him who had never been anywhere hotter than Devon was going to suffer in the sun. And yet what surprised her was how easily Toby had adapted to the chaotic swell of her mother country.
The first time she had visited India with English friends, way back in her college days, she had underestimated or maybe just forgotten how even stepping out of the plane was like being slapped in the face – emotionally, physically, sometimes literally, if you got caught in the pack of passengers determined to get ahead in the passport queue. Somewhere over the Middle East, these fellow travellers, who had stood politely and patiently in line at Heathrow, had shrugged off the stiff jackets of their angrezi manners and slipped back into their desi dhotis, louder, loose-limbed, ready to push their way through any barrier, as queueing was strictly for foreigners now. Shyama still remembered the fear on her friends’ faces as they realized that no amount of ‘excuse me’s and pursed lips would help them. It carried on as they left the airport, immediately besieged by taxi drivers and porters fighting for their luggage, which they clung to like driftwood in a sweaty storm of cheerful humanity. It got worse as they sat in the back of an incense-filled cab, its dashboard adorned with beatific smiling deities, who seemed to mock their terror as they swung in and out of the suicidal traffic, gaping as whole families perched on one moped cut them up on one side, articulated lorries decorated like wedding carriages on the other. It was when the begging children appeared at their cab windows, tapping on the glass, pointing to their mouths, that they finally cracked.
‘Sister … Mummy … hungry … please …’
Shyama had looked up to see both her friends crying, one of them with her purse already out, the whole of her spending money on show.
‘Don’t!’ Shyama said instinctively.
She hadn’t meant, don’t give money. Rather she was warning them to hide their money in case the beggar boss around the corner decided to send one of these children to their hotel later on. She had wanted to advise her friends not to give hard cash, which would be snatched away from those little hands the minute they rounded the corner. Rather they should get out of the cab and take the kids for something to eat, fill their bellies and then give them enough to keep them from being beaten up later. But she didn’t have time to say any of this. The taxi had zoomed away, leaving the children coughing in a dustcloud, their hands still outstretched and her friends staring at her with undisguised contempt.
This single incident had overshadowed the whole holiday. Every so often, Shyama would catch her friends giving her a peculiar sideways glance, one that seemed to say, you are not the person we thought you were. She didn’t know how to express what she knew instinctively: that their judgement of her was somehow linked with a whole deep-rooted colonial past, where they were the good guys and she the savage who had reverted to her true primordial nature. She didn’t know how to explain that in order to survive here, as opposed to just passing through, you had to find strategies to preserve your sanity. Otherwise how does anyone get the washing done and work and laugh and dream, unless there is some way to live alongside death, poverty and truly terrible traffic? This was how her relatives had expressed it, in those years when she had visited India every summer, determined not to lose the thread that connected her to her extended family. That was, until the whole issue around her parents’ stolen apartment had arisen.
The hotel phone rang, and Shyama reached over Toby to answer it.
‘Oh, hi Mama … Sorry, did you call before? OK, just let us know. You’ve got my Indian mobile number, haven’t you?’
Shyama replaced the receiver and rested back on Toby’s chest.
‘They’ve got legal stuff most of the day. Mum says she’ll buzz us later if they can make supper.’
‘Didn’t she want to know what we were doing?’ Toby enquired teasingly.
‘Well, she’s still doing the Indian-mother thing; if you don’t mention it, it’s not really there.’
They hadn’t planned on telling Prem and Sita about the purpose of this trip, until it transpired that they would all be in India at the same time, the latest court hearing coinciding with their clinic booking. As Sita and Prem had insisted on travelling on the same flight as Shyama and Toby, and recommended hotels for them near Prem’s older brother’s place, where they would be staying, Shyama realized they would have to confess all. Dry-mouthed, with Toby at her side, she finally sat them down on their first evening in Delhi and announced their surrogacy plans. The first couple of minutes went well – innocuous enough stuff about why they had chosen this particular route, how they had chosen this particular clinic, how they would manage their finances. It was when Shyama came to the actual mechanics of the process that she began to f
alter.
‘So, well … it’s a very common procedure … I mean there are literally hundreds of clinics in India that do this.’
‘Do what exactly?’ Sita had looked up innocently from her cuppatea.
‘Well, they take an egg from another woman – the donor – and they combine it with one of Toby’s …’
Shyama simply could not say the word ‘sperm’ in front of her mother, her mouth refused to move. Toby put his farming head on and manfully took over, running through the explanation with breezy efficiency, even inviting questions from the audience afterwards. Prem said nothing, but puffed at his pipe so vigorously that he sat in a cloud of fug, no doubt thankful for the smoky camouflage.
Sita was silent for a while, then dusted a few crumbs off the table and said, ‘Well, in our day, if you couldn’t have a baby, your sister or brother would give you one of theirs to bring up. No one minded very much. As long as you loved the baby, they grew up fine. But I suppose as Shyama is our only child, now you must pay for that … service.’
‘Yes, exactly!’ Shyama said, relieved. ‘That’s a good way to look at it, Mama.’
‘Except, of course, there was none of this taking a bit from here and a bit from there. Like cooking with leftovers. But if that’s what you both want …’
A small shrug of the maternal shoulders and that, apparently, was all Sita was going say on the matter.
Leaving the salon in the capable hands of Geeta and her team had been the easiest part of Shyama’s to-do list. Toby had so many weeks of holiday owing to him that his sudden sabbatical wasn’t opposed. And now here they all were – all of them bar Tara, who’d declined the offer of a free trip, citing coursework pressure. Shyama was ashamed to admit to herself that she’d been mightily relieved not to be dragging her daughter along too on her let’s-get-pregnant holiday. Particularly as she had been feeling so unsettled since they had arrived in India. Sense memories hijacked her at odd moments: the smell of the rath-ki-rani garlands outside the roadside temples; the cool citric fizz of the nimboo pani she had yearned to drink on her arrival, achingly familiar, buried deep, making her feel both a stranger and a returning exile at the same time. What would they think of her now, her old lefty student friends, coming back as a fertility tourist? Was she now the colonial memsahib? The benevolent bringer of bounty, or the ruthless trader, smiling her way back home?