The House of Hidden Mothers

by Meera Syal

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, ‘I don’t know what she’s put in that facial, but my skin feels like a baby’s arse … a few more of these and I can stop the Botox. And that lotion! Feel my arm, it’s like I’ve drunk the blood of a virgin. I’ve got virgin-girl glow everywhere!’

  Shyama, struggling with several boxes of gram flour and organic honey, declined the offer, managing to place the boxes on the counter before groaning as she stretched out her back.

  ‘Oooh, you need Surya Spa Ginger and Pepper Massage Oil rubbed into that, preferably by that hunky farmhand of yours,’ purred Priya.

  ‘Hunky farmhand has, I think, got a bad case of Couvade syndrome. He thinks he’s pregnant,’ winced Shyama, beckoning Priya into her small office at the back.

  ‘Is he getting a sympathy pot belly and piles?’ asked Priya, flumping into Shyama’s chair. She always took Shyama’s chair.

  ‘Kind of. It seems to be more of a general hormonal grumpiness with Toby,’ sighed Shyama. ‘I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not even the pregnant one.’

  ‘Oh, he’s probably getting the whole cold-feet-I’m-gonna-be-a-daddy shivers. Women worry about the pain, men get all weird about the responsibility. Am I going to be a good enough role model, provider, that sort of stuff. It’s a good sign, though, shows he’s really invested in the baby, no?’

  Shyama didn’t answer for a while. She wanted to tell Priya more, but she couldn’t put it into words, this heavy sense of unease that had been seeping into her over the past few weeks. It wasn’t just the lack of action in the bedroom – these things went in phases, she knew that, and in any case most nights she collapsed into bed wanting nothing more than to be held while she tried to breathe away the worries cobwebbing the far corners of her mind. If anything, she should be feeling lighter, more reassured. Mala was settled, in fine health, busy and happy with her new hobby. Toby seemed to be getting over his initial stiffness with Mala, and at least Tara was civil towards her now. After a long time, she could see that they could be a family, an oh-so-modern, blended, rainbow-hued, outsourced, chucked-together temporary family, but one nevertheless, who could just get on with life together. So why did she feel so tired all the time? Why did the sight of her parents, silver-haired, walking up the garden hand-in-hand, bring a lump to her throat? Why did the discovery of a bundle of Tara’s baby photos in the back of a drawer make her weep so much that she had to lock herself in the bathroom and sob into a towel? Maybe she was having a sympathy pregnancy too, although the one person she really felt sorry for was, bizarrely, herself.

  ‘You have to get this stuff out there …’ Priya was talking and probably had been for some time as she took a selfie and began tapping buttons on her phone.

  ‘Right, I’ve just tweeted about Mala’s stuff to a couple of journalists I know, they’ll come sniffing round … What does she put in there? Can’t just be what it says on the bottles …’

  ‘It is, I think … I mean, I buy all the stuff, it’s all natural … I suppose it’s the way she puts it together, I’m not sure,’ Shyama replied, distracted by the now constant buzzing of Priya’s phone.

  ‘Aha, wants to keep the magic to herself, eh? Wise woman. Which, of course, is just another name for a witch …’

  And that was that. After Priya’s social-media campaign, everything seemed to happen at breakneck speed. Shyama quickly had to train up a couple of extra girls to handle the swell of clientele for the new Surya Spa range and suddenly they had a waiting list on a daily basis for Mala’s cottage industry. She also had to employ someone full time on the reception desk and get used to having her kitchen taken over every night by Mala, supervising her bowls, mortars and jars of unmarked liquids and granules like a corpulent conjuror, muttering incantations to herself.

  Shyama was worried that all the extra work would put a strain on Mala’s ever-advancing pregnancy, but if anything, she seemed to be thriving on the pressure and bustle of activity. Now Shyama understood why it was called the bloom of motherhood; Mala’s face, her whole body, gave off a warm sensuality, open and inviting as unfolded petals. Heads turned, like sunflowers following the light, when she walked down the street or through the salon with that Indian-woman wiggle that Shyama had never been able to perfect. ‘They will always know that you are a foreigner,’ her mother had told her in India when Shyama’s attempt to haggle down a trader had been laughingly dismissed. ‘Your hips give you away, you walk like you only walk on concrete.’ Shyama had wanted to say that she had seen plenty of hard-stepping women on the streets of Delhi, striding their way to their offices, that only women who had nothing much to do or laboured in sweltering heat ambled with that somnolent sway, but that would have shattered the myth of how all dusky maidens balance the Kama Sutra between their thighs.

  Mala was young, that was most of her appeal, and the joy of gaining her independence and having the best of care would make any woman happy. And if Shyama occasionally suspected Mala of playing to the crowd somewhat, tossing her now unbound and styled hair so it tumbled around her shoulders like a shampoo ad, embroidering her ever-evolving village anecdotes with more scandal so the girls in the salon gasped and covered their mouths in wonder, stretching her back whilst she held court so her stomach rose proudly before the world to take centre stage, undeniable proof of the life force surging within her, well, all was forgiven. Whilst she carried her child – their child – Shyama had no choice but to smile and let it go.

  Her tolerance levels, however, had been severely tested at their last scan. Their obstetrician had called Mala in at thirty weeks, wanting to keep a check on the baby’s weight. Nothing to worry about, he had assured them, but given they were private patients, why not pay to stop the worry? So this time Toby had eagerly accompanied the women and he and Shyama had walked in hand-in-hand like a proud couple, Toby offering his arm for Mala to lean on as she lowered herself on to the sonographer’s couch. Even for a man like him, used to the mundane stages of animal procreation, it seemed to be overwhelming. He stared at the neon-blue screen for some time, his jaw working steadily to keep control. For Shyama, it was a shock, seeing how much the baby now looked like a little person – the toes, the eyelashes, the softly sucking mouth.

  ‘He’s amazing,’ Toby said finally, and then, ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to say “he”. It just came out …’

  ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ Shyama murmured. ‘We don’t really want to know. We’re just grateful that—’

  ‘He is a boy,’ Mala interrupted. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I know.’

  Shyama stared at Mala, who smiled back at her, innocence itself. She wavered under Shyama’s questioning gaze, looked at Toby for reassurance.

  ‘Sorry, Shyama Madam, should I not say …?’

  ‘No, it’s fine, Mala,’ Toby soothed her. ‘You’d know better than us, that’s for sure. Is she right, by the way?’

  Shyama stiffened, glancing at the sonographer, who looked from her to Toby to Mala, assessing what must have been an unusual situation for her. She must know, she must realize that Shyama and Toby were the ones who counted here.

  ‘She is spot on,’ the sonographer beamed back at Toby. ‘It’s a boy.’

  Toby would never admit it, but this was the moment that he fell in love. Not the hearts-and-flowers kind, the dizzying rush that had flung him headlong into Shyama’s arms six years ago, but the kind of love that enables a parent to lift a car off a child or rush into a burning building. Neither would he admit that the primal surge he felt flooding his veins had anything to do with the fact that he was going to be the father of a boy-child. But it was there, the thrill pulsing through him every time he said to himself, ‘That’s my son. My son.’

  Shyama didn’t have the expected altercation with Toby when they returned home, somehow the fight had gone out of her, and his delight was so tangible it brought them together. They made love, they talked into the night, old times buoyed up by new news. Good news – a boy meant Tara would still be the only daughter, her
place intact. Still, they both decided not to share the information with her or Shyama’s parents, not yet.

  ‘Won’t they guess when we paint the nursery blue?’ Shyama teased Toby, running her hands over his stubble, so fair you would only know it was there by touch.

  ‘The nursery?’ Toby asked.

  ‘Well, once Mala’s gone, that’s the obvious room for our boy.’

  She listened to Toby breathing in the silence.

  ‘Well, that makes it sound very … stark,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Stark? She’s only got ten weeks until she has the baby, and then—’

  ‘What, we just shove her back on a plane?’

  ‘Well … obviously she’ll need to recover first … but her visa’s only for six months, and anyway, if we’d stayed in India …’

  ‘But we’re not in India, are we?’

  ‘No, but if we were, she would have just handed him over and we would have got on a plane. Would that have made it any worse?’

  ‘Not for us, Shyama, no.’

  Disorientated for a moment, Shyama disentangled herself. She could hear Tara talking loudly in Hindi up in her room – she must be on Skype again. She was getting good. The conversation sounded intense; once Tara was on a roll, she was unstoppable. Shyama wished she was down here now, next to her, on her side. Though she wasn’t sure when the sides had actually appeared.

  ‘I think you’re forgetting whose idea it was to bring Mala over here,’ she cautioned Toby.

  ‘No I’m not, I’m just—’

  ‘Who set her up in a job? Which she’s making a success of, by the way.’

  ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that, Shyams …’

  Shyama sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Toby blinked in the unexpected glare, his eyes briefly dropping to her naked, exposed body before he turned away, reaching for a glass of water. But not before Shyama had seen something on his face. What? Disappointment? Embarrassment? She’d stopped going to Pilates ages ago, had let her gym membership lapse last month. There was so much to do and she’d thought all the running around heaving boxes and managing the rush at the salon would keep her fitness levels up. But she’d noticed it herself, the slackening of her muscle tone, especially on her upper arms. She had wings, but not ones that would fly her anywhere nice. She’d even neglected her red highlights, despite the fact that Gita kept trying to push her into a chair every time she passed, to redo them. Now they had all but grown out, just the ends of her hair were tipped with colour like the last embers of a slowly dying fire. And with Mala’s delicious curries on offer every night or lurking in the fridge, she hadn’t been surprised by the extra roll of flesh on her stomach. She quite liked the feel of it, squidging against her waistband – it felt like protection. During her marriage to Tara’s father she had been numb from the neck down for most of the time. With Toby, spring had invaded her every pore, the rebirth spectacular after a long winter. And now this: reaching self-consciously for the sheet before he turned around again, an adolescent covering-up for a woman of her age. The absurdity of it. Surely they weren’t going to sink into that tired cliché: young man wearies of old flesh. She knew him better than that. And he must know that if she sniffed any scent of that on him, she would fight it with every ageing tooth and nail.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to tell Mala to give it up.’

  ‘Quite the opposite.’ Toby drained his glass. ‘I’m assuming her products are good for business.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Shyama admitted. ‘We’ve never done better, not over such a short period …’

  ‘So you will be giving her a share of the profits, obviously?’

  It should have been obvious but it hadn’t crossed her mind. Shyama had been too focused on the practicalities to think about long-term division of the spoils.

  ‘I haven’t discussed it with Mala yet …’ she began.

  ‘Of course she wouldn’t have asked, she doesn’t think that way,’ Toby interrupted. ‘But it’s only fair – it will set her up for the future. So sending her back won’t feel like we’re just … you know – thanks for your womb, see you later …’

  ‘Of course not, no. I mean, yes, that’s fair.’

  She wasn’t sure if she found it stupid or just touchingly naïve that Toby assumed Mala would not already be thinking that way. Poverty had brought her into their lives – she was an economic migrant, not a charity-giver. Of course she would have asked about her share of the profits eventually. Of course, eventually, Shyama would have offered. To engage in any kind of prolonged discussion with Toby now, she knew, would make her seem mean, exploitative even. They swiftly agreed that once their costs were covered, Mala should get three-quarters of any profits made, Shyama keeping the rest for backing and housing the project, and hopefully continuing it in some form after Mala returned to India. It wasn’t what happened on Dragons’ Den – the entrepreneurs who took on some beginner’s bright idea often took at least half of the profits – but as Toby pointed out, Mala was their fairy godmother too. Without her, their son would still be a beautiful idea waiting to happen.

  With the increase in orders, Shyama offered to help Mala with the nightly preparations, but she refused, in the sweetest manner possible.

  ‘Thank you, Shyama Madam, but I can do it fine. I like to be alone. It is good relaxing for me, hena?’

  And yet often Shyama would come downstairs and find Toby – and, more often, Tara – sitting in the kitchen with Mala, helping to bottle and jar up the freshly made cosmetics or taking them to the extra fridge they had bought for storage which now sat in the garden shed. Whilst she was always welcomed in, she felt like a gatecrasher. They seemed to have more fun without her. When she mentioned this to Toby, he looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘It’s your kitchen, Shyams. You can come in any time you want. I mean, she never asks us to help, we just end up hanging out.’

  Shyama tried it one evening, just sitting with them all at the table. The usual cooking smells of garlic and frying onions had been replaced by heady wafts of jasmine and citrus, mingling with the warmth of the gently heating pans. Fragrant steam filled the space. It felt cosy, female.

  Toby sat filling in paperwork, a chunk of maleness in the corner, lifting his head every so often to listen or throw in a sentence. He reminded her of a full-bellied daddy lion lolling amongst his pride. Shyama’s attempts at conversation were soon edged out by Tara and Mala’s constant stream of chatter, Mala speaking in English, Tara usually responding in Hindi, each of them correcting the other. No wonder they were both getting so proficient, this was their classroom and they were both teacher and pupil. Shyama felt envious and a little redundant. Why hadn’t she paid more attention when Sita had tried to encourage her to speak Punjabi, Hindi? Anything would have been better than the very little she had acquired. How ironic that her daughter would end up practically fluent while she could only speak a halting schoolyard mother tongue.

  But something wonderful had also happened: Tara seemed to be coming back to them, slowly slowly. She was shedding whatever shrivelled and mysterious cocoon she had been wrapped in for months and was emerging scale by scale, feeling her way forward in her sensitive new skin. The dark bags under her eyes had disappeared and she had filled out a little – hadn’t they all? Her hair was still short but less severe now, and her smile reached her eyes, which looked at her mother more often now, shyly, sideways.

  Mala declared she had done enough for this evening; massaging her lower back with one hand, she watched benignly as Toby and Tara cleared away the used utensils and packaging. It seemed to be a well-rehearsed drill. After heating herself a cup of warm milk – she didn’t need to ask permission now, the kitchen was her domain – Toby offered his arm to escort her to bed.

  ‘Someone’s got to help the fat lady up the stairs,’ he joked.

  Shyama tried to ignore the darts of envy jabbing at her ribs. It wasn’t Mala – it was the baby. She must be more exhausted than she thought. She
probably just needed a good night’s sleep.

  And then she was alone in the kitchen with Tara, who was offering her a cup of something herbal.

  ‘It’s ginger and cardamom, one of Mala’s concoctions. In about half an hour, you will do the best burps you’ve ever done in your life …’

  As Shyama took it, she could feel tears welling up again. Good God, maybe this was the menopause or something, she had to get a grip. And yet this small gesture cracked something inside her, opening a fissure in the wall of the dam, and behind it she could glimpse the ocean waiting to rush through. How long had she been waiting for this? All of this? This life in this kitchen with a man and a grown-up child and another child waiting to be born … now it was all so close, and she had to hold on just a little longer.

  ‘So, it’s good news, isn’t it?’ Tara looked up expectantly from her steaming cup. Seeing Shyama’s puzzled face, she said, ‘Gina did call you, didn’t she?’

  ‘I haven’t checked my phone … so they …’

  ‘They’ve decided not to press charges. I thought they wouldn’t. Not with all the footage we had. Good job the crew had my back …’

  Tara didn’t get much else out. Shyama had her arms around her, both their mugs splashing hot liquid.

  ‘Mum!’ Tara said, half annoyed, half laughing, managing to grab the mugs and get them to the table.

  ‘Oh thank God … thank God …’ was all Shyama could manage, muffled against Tara’s neck.

  ‘Thank Gina and social media, actually,’ Tara said chirpily, gently extricating herself, thrown by Shyama’s stricken face. ‘Were you really worried then?’

  ‘What do you think? You could have ended up in prison.’

  ‘Very unlikely, on this charge. First offence and all that.’

  ‘Well, at least you could have ended up with a criminal record, Tara! That would have followed you round all your life! Every time you applied for a job or a visa, or—’

  ‘Mum, if convicted paedophiles and terrorists and celebs with drug convictions can get about as easily as they do, I think I would have been all right, don’t you?’