by Meera Syal
Mala saw Ram doing complex calculations in his head: so now you’re thinking how many meals you will have to find on your own, how many evenings you will have to sit and gup-shup with your boring mother, how many nights you will have to lie alone with nothing for company but your own twisting desire, just like I had to. Mala saw herself reclining on a soft bed, leafing through a filmi magazine and eating cake off a china plate, just like Seema’s, balanced on her proudly pregnant belly. To be paid to rest and eat well, it would be her first-ever holiday – and in Delhi itself. Maybe she could even slip away to do some shopping, maybe they could give her some of the fee in advance? Wait until she met the couple, who knows what they would do for her? Mala held tightly on to her growing excitement, reining it in, whispering quietly to it like a skittery animal – bas, we are so close now, just wait. And aware, underneath the anticipation, of a bittersweet tang: if she had been treated this well during her own pregnancy, maybe her own baby would be sitting on her lap right now.
Ram signed the form, throwing the pen down afterwards and abruptly rising from his seat. Dr Passi held up her hand, motioning for him to wait. She told them she had some good news, that this was very unusual, but actually, she thought she had already found a suitable match for them. Of course, they would only sign a contract once Mala’s tests had all come back normal, but as they had travelled all this way, why not meet the intended parents right now?
In the few minutes she left them alone to decide, Mala stroked Ram’s head, whispering to him about all the things they could afford by the end of the year if it all went OK, coaxing him from the present of this cool, anonymous office to a time when they could buy and plan, not plod from day to day like oxen at a wheel. How strange to think it had been Ram whose idea this was, Ram who had had to whisper the same things to Mala all those weeks ago, and now it was his wife leading him by his clenched fist into the next room to meet their future.
Mala’s first reaction was, she is older than I thought, too old for him. The red flames in her hair cover up the grey, and when she smiles I see worries around her eyes. But at least she smiles.
Neither of the men say much at all. Ram nods at different times, his eyes mostly on the floor, sometimes looking up at the blond man, trying to banish from his head the image of the meaty-muscled gora thrusting his seed into his wife. Oh, he knows it is all done with tubes and instruments, but still, he wishes he had not had to meet the man in person. A photo would have been fine. The women cannot stop looking at each other, two sides of the see-saw but perfectly balanced, knowing each has something the other wants very badly.
She is looking at me like Ram looks at livestock before he buys, Mala thinks. How she lingers on my face, my hips. Maybe I should walk over to her and open my mouth so she can count my teeth.
Shyama is struck by how unexpectedly beautiful this woman is: not just the achingly perfect bloom of youth she wears so blithely, but the wide intelligent eyes, the long proud nose winking with a tiny jewel, the full, almost sulky mouth. The colour of her – brown too dull a word for the dark-golden skin, and that hair, oiled and twisted into a thick plait, blue-black like a raven’s wing, the hair of a well-behaved woman. Her English, though heavily accented, is surprisingly good. It’s certainly no worse than Shyama’s atrocious Hindi, which she attempts in greeting, making Mala cock her head first in polite anticipation and then let out a throaty laugh. Her husband digs her in the ribs, a swift possessive gesture which bothers Shyama, but she lets it go, joins in with Mala’s giggling, encourages it with more badly pronounced pleasantries until the two women are locked in conspiratorial smiles and further stop-start chatter.
Toby, already feeling like a pale-skinned spare part, attempts an encouraging smile at Ram. He has to wait a while before Ram looks up from the floor, expecting suspicion, hostility, but instead seeing a keen curiosity in Toby’s eyes, a man-to-man look that asks, how did we get here?
Ram looks over at his wife suddenly, hearing Shyama ask about their other children. Will they mind their mother spending so long away from them? Will they see her regularly? Mala answers smoothly in a mixture of Hindi and English, explaining that her mother-in-law and her friend Seema will both help Ram out, and that he will, of course, come every weekend if he can.
Toby takes his first good look at Mala, the economy of her hand movements at odds with the vitality of her presence. There is something ripening about her: the about-to-turn ear of wheat, the almost-bursting bud. She reminds him of late spring, when the land and shrubs seem to vibrate with suppressed sap, life waiting to be unleashed. She catches his eye and it pierces him somewhere deep. He looks away, embarrassed and slightly afraid.
‘No problem for us,’ Mala says carefully to Shyama, her head tilting from side to side in that maybe-yes,-maybe-no,-who-knows universal Indian punctuation, and then more quietly, ‘We like to help you.’
This simple sentence almost undoes Shyama, but she clears her throat and reminds herself there is much still to discuss. But they get through the remaining practicalities surprisingly swiftly, and agree that once Mala’s tests confirm she is healthy, she will start undergoing hormone treatment straight away. It will take a month or so to prepare her body for implantation of the embryo, created by a donor egg from the clinic’s bank and Toby’s sperm.
‘So you are choosing gestational surrogacy, meaning there will be no genetic link between the surrogate and the baby, which is what most people prefer?’ asks Dr Passi.
Shyama and Toby confirm this is indeed their choice. Toby’s contribution, when needed, will be much quicker and more private, in a back room with some outdated magazines. Dr Passi shakes hands with all of them and smiles.
‘If all goes well, this young lady could be pregnant within the next two months!’
Later that evening, Shyama and Toby sat on their balcony with their celebratory cocktails, the night crickets competing with the distant car horns. Below them the small hotel swimming pool was as still as a mirror, its underwater lights bright and unblinking as lizards’ eyes. Behind the glass doors leading to the pool, a wedding reception seemed to be in full swing.
‘Look – down there.’ She nudged Toby.
Below them the bride and groom, garlanded with marigolds, were greeting their guests beside a chocolate fountain bubbling away like a mini Vesuvius.
Shyama thought back ruefully to her own extravagant nuptials over twenty years ago, held in a five-star hotel just off the A1. Her parents must have nearly bankrupted themselves to lay on an all-day affair for six hundred guests, most of whom Shyama didn’t know and never saw again. She knew the drill, she was the only child and a daughter to boot, and even though she had threatened to call the whole thing off if anyone suggested giving Shiv any kind of dowry, the expectation that her parents would foot the entire bill could not be argued with or avoided. Shyama’s anti-dowry stance could not be allowed to tip over into full-scale rebellion and possibly scare Shiv’s parents into retreat. Furthermore, Prem and Sita had to invite everyone who had invited them to their kids’ weddings over the last few decades, for fear of offence, and the same applied to Shiv’s parents. That added up to an awful lot of people. But this kind of obligatory bulk invitation just made the day itself feel like a corporate team-building exercise with loud Bhangra dancing at the end. Shyama had worn a traditional red-and-gold sari bought in five minutes flat in Southall, a garment so heavily embroidered that it had left her covered in little red welts afterwards, as if a squadron of mosquitoes had enjoyed their own all-day buffet. She remembered actually feeling grateful that Shiv had waived any dowry gifts, proof that she had married a modern, compassionate man. Yet despite earning well himself, there had never been any offer to pay for one penny of the wedding. All this she found out later, which made the collapse of her marriage even more ironically pathetic.
The couple through the glass looked relaxed, easy with each other. Even their clothes reflected a new comfortable twist on tradition – her sophisticated lengha in pale gold, his desig
ner-cut Nehru jacket. They were drinking champagne, for God’s sake, not having to take sneaky swigs in a locked toilet with a bridesmaid on Auntie-alert outside. Shyama’s wedding now seemed from a different era.
‘You didn’t like Mala?’ she murmured, taking an overenthusiastic sip of her passion-fruit-and-vodka cooler, feeling it burn as it went down.
‘No, she was … It’s just that … Well, we didn’t meet anyone else, so …’ Toby hazarded, already knowing it was too late to change their minds.
‘Oh, you think we should have shopped around?’ teased Shyama. ‘Gone for the friskiest filly with the childbearing hips?’
Toby reckoned Mala was frisky enough for all their needs, but he saw Shyama’s point, understood their shared discomfort at the place they found themselves in, picking their brood mare of choice. Somehow making a quick decision based on human compatibility took some of the starkness away. As a dispassionate observer, but with his farming background, Toby would have chosen Mala too. The ones with the fighting spirit always came out top. Nice manners and a daft smile usually got you eaten first.
‘No, listen, she … they both seemed like decent people.’
‘And she’s … open, you know? Some of the women don’t have any contact with the intended parents, but she seemed keen to stay in touch once she’s … you know, a lady-in-waiting at the clinic. Dr Passi says a few of the other surrogates Skype, so there should be no problem teaching her. She seems really bright. That’s if you’re OK with it? With her?’
Toby kissed her briefly by way of a reply. But later, in bed, he took ages to fall asleep. There was a brief moment when their companiable spooning could have tipped into something more energetic, but eventually both of them decided to pat each other reassuringly and turn away, ready for sleep, which in Toby’s case hadn’t yet come.
He and Shyama had talked for some time in the darkness, both tipsy on those unbelievably potent cocktails and their shared wonder that they had found someone so quickly, that they might even be back at home in England when, five thousand miles away, their child was being created. Created – was that the right word? Manufactured. Magicked. Whilst Shyama turned to poetry, imagining a plump-faced baby curled up on itself, a beatific smile on its face, Toby could only picture a single cell dividing and subdividing in a bland white Petri dish. He tried not to see a flotilla of tadpoles, each bearing his facial features, swimming aggressively towards a soft spongy egg. He had never resented Shyama for being the one with the problem, even today when, as part of his Intended Parent health check, he’d gone through the whole ‘making a donation’ ritual again. The only difference being that, this time, he hadn’t needed any visual aids. He’d simply imagined a woman, dark-skinned, faintly spiced, slowly unhooking her sari blouse, her eyes dark and calm as a night ocean.
Dr Passi saw them both the next day in her office to discuss the results of the various tests. The whole room was decorated in gradations of beige: creamy-brown flooring and blinds, abstract prints on the wall chosen for their shade rather than content, a tan leather swivel chair behind an old-fashioned wooden writing desk at odds with the large wafer-thin computer screen which took up most of its surface. The only splashes of individuality came from the large metal natraj mounted on one wall – Shyama had a smaller version back home, the Hindu god Shiva with one foot raised in joyful dance – and on the wall behind the desk, Dr Passi’s gallery of success: a noticeboard covered with photographs of tearful, beaming parents holding aloft their newly born babies. From a distance they all looked remarkably similar. Maybe this was the official clinic portrait taken after every birth, the tiny mouths making Os of astonishment or protest, the small fists clenched against the shock of arrival, the two ecstatic adults cradling their future. And almost all of them, Shyama noted with interest, were European.
Beside her, Toby sat ramrod-straight in his wingback chair, feeling slightly seasick – the combination of lack of sleep, a slight hangover and embarrassment at having to discuss his bodily fluids with this woman, just a day after being left in a cubicle with his sample jar and soothing piped music. As Dr Passi rummaged around under her desk making clucking sounds of irritation, he thought for one awful moment that she was going to produce the container and use it as a visual aid. Instead she brought out a single sheet of A4 and quickly scanned it before confirming that Toby’s sperm was ‘not only A1 but your motility is tip-top’ and she didn’t foresee any problems.
‘So we are in a good situation, Mr and Mrs Shaw. Healthy sperm, healthy surrogate. Now all you have to do is choose who will provide your donor egg. Obviously this is a very important decision, as whoever you select will be providing half your child’s genetic make-up. We have a comprehensive database here online.’
Dr Passi clicked her mouse and paused a moment before swinging the computer screen round to face them. ‘It’s very straightforward, as you can see.’ She smiled, navigating the menu with practised ease. ‘So you put in your requirements – ethnicity, age … and as you make each choice the options narrow down your wish list, and then you go into Profile, for example …’
She clicked on the name ‘KAMALA’ and her details revealed themselves: height, weight, religion, skin tone, education, the briefest of family backgrounds: ‘Housewife, married to labourer, three healthy children.’
‘Is that all we will know?’ Shyama asked eventually, realizing how meeting Mala in person, being able to watch her animated face, hear the curiosity and warmth in her voice, had made a difficult choice so easy.
‘Well, for obvious reasons, we cannot show pictures of our donors …’ Dr Passi was still smiling patiently. ‘But I can assure you, we screen them thoroughly, medically, psychologically. Many of the Indian ones I have met myself, and by the way, most of them are very educated, more graduates than housewives, and I can tell you more about them should you wish. Naturally we have more Indian donors here … you did say that you wanted …?’
‘Yes, yes, we did, it’s in our—’ Shyama began.
‘Ah yes, I have your details up now. Of course, it makes sense. To match the child as closely as possible to your own …’ and here Dr Passi searched for the appropriate word, ‘family.’
She then stood up abruptly, her cell phone beeping in her hand.
‘I do apologize, I’m being paged … please feel free to stay here and keep browsing. I won’t be long.’
Only after the door swung smoothly shut behind her did Toby dare to speak, his voice scratchy in his throat.
‘Did she really say “browse”? Like we’re going shopping?’
‘Yup.’ Shyama sighed, already surfing the Indian Donor section and wondering if ticking the Graduate Only option made her a fascist or a realist.
‘It’s a bit bloody clinical, this bit …’ mumbled Toby.
‘Well, we are in a clinic, not entwined under the stars hoping for a baby made of love,’ Shyama muttered back. She felt Toby go quiet behind her. She turned round. He was looking at her strangely, arms folded across his chest. Behind him a water cooler gurgled impolitely.
‘What do you mean? What does that … mean?’
‘Nothing. I … I’m sorry. It’s just … this bit should have been my job, shouldn’t it?’
Toby came over then and sat next to her, his arm resting on her shoulder. They stayed like that for some time until they made their decision together: ‘Sonia – Hindu Punjabi, 25, five feet three, 112 pounds, fair to wheatish complexion, Arts graduate, two children.’
After they had informed Dr Passi of their choice, of which she heartily approved – ‘I know her very well, a lovely warm woman, very bright, very decent family’ – she reiterated that there was no need for them to stay on. With Toby’s sample safely frozen and the donor eggs chosen, she herself would oversee the fertilization of the embryo, and once Mala was at the optimum stage in her cycle, she would undergo implantation. And then, ‘We cross our fingers, chant, pray, whatever is your chosen method, and wait for the good news that I am confident
Science will provide.’
Shyama and Toby reiterated that they would stay on for the duration of their six weeks’ leave, regardless. This was their first trip to India together – why not pretend it was a holiday too? They had vague discussions about flying down to Kerala and booking a houseboat, or staying in the famous ayurvedic hotel that offered yoga sessions and detoxifying massages, or maybe going west to Rajasthan, having a couple of nights at the Lake Palace Hotel, camel rides in the desert, buying one of those hand-painted Jaipuri cabinets Shyama had always wanted. But despite the box of treasures now open to them, they felt unable to leave Delhi yet, just in case some news or complication called them back to the clinic.
So they spent the next week or so rambling around the city, often hooking up with Prem and Sita for some sightseeing, some of the venues doubling as a wander down memory lane for Shyama’s parents. They showed Shyama and Toby the derelict single-storey building that had been their first home together, tucked away in a gulley in one of the most expensive areas of the city, surrounded by huge colonial bungalows and fortified palatial embassies on wide, tree-fringed avenues.
‘Back then these were government-owned quarters,’ Prem told them, taking in the lush foliage bursting out of the eyeless sockets of the window frames, the group of wild boar that skittered in and out of the surrounding woods. Toby did a double-take when he saw their hairy muzzles snuffling suspiciously at them from the edge of the bushes, continually delighted by how in this country Nature was aggressively, proudly ever-present, even in the centre of the capital. Wild, whipped-looking dogs roamed the streets; noisy birds flew unmolested in and out of the malls themselves; monkeys sat on walls, spitting out fruit seeds as if waiting for a bus; white humped cows chewed thoughtfully in the middle of dual carriageways. He had even seen a rheumy-eyed elephant swaying down a main road, on his back his mahout on a cell phone whilst he gently poked his gigantic steed with a forked steel stick. The animals here had attitude, he liked that. Prem had explained that all true Hindus were vegetarian, ‘As the theory is, all life forms are respected equally,’ after which Sita let out what sounded like a derisory snort.