“Fuck me,” Jezmeen said. Rajni flinched as Tom Hanks’s ears perked up at the swear word. “Sorry!” Jezmeen called to him. He waved back to show that he wasn’t offended. “Rajni, what the hell?”
Rajni wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. “He’s forgoing university and everything we’ve worked for, so he can start a family with this woman.”
“I mean, why didn’t you say something?” Jezmeen asked. “You’ve known this the entire trip?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I was really admitting it to myself.”
“It’s a lot to come to terms with,” Jezmeen said.
“I don’t think I listened to what Anil really wanted,” Rajni said. “He’s completely locked me out of his life now.”
“There you go again, blaming yourself,” Jezmeen said. “Listen, if Anil’s cutting you out, that’s his choice. You didn’t push him to do that. You didn’t push him to make any of his choices. I guess . . . the thing is, does he seem happy with the way things are turning out? Are you okay with that?”
“No,” Rajni said. “How can I be okay with Anil throwing his life away?”
“He might not see it that way,” Jezmeen pointed out. “It’s not the life you imagined for him—that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong way to live.”
“But—”
“Look, Raj. You just said you’re sorry for breathing down my neck, and for being such an uptight, morally righteous prig. You deeply regret wasting all those opportunities to be a cool big sister because of that massive stick lodged up your bum.”
Not quite how Rajni would have phrased it, but she let Jezmeen continue.
“It hurt when Mum forced convention on you, didn’t it? Wasn’t it infuriating to have to live up to her standards? What mattered more to Mum than your safety that night was how it looked to other people. Don’t tell me that this isn’t the same thing.”
“It’s not,” Rajni said. “I don’t care what people think.”
Jezmeen snorted. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck,” she suddenly sang aloud. Tom Hanks looked up in amusement.
“Stop it,” Rajni hissed. “What will Tom Hanks thi—” She stopped when she noticed the smirk on Jezmeen’s face. “It’s not the same thing, Jezmeen. He’s my only child.”
“So this is about Anil being your only chance at parenting?”
“. . . Maybe,” Rajni said.
“Would it be different if you had more children, then? If you had a daughter?”
If I had a daughter. It wasn’t the first time Rajni was pondering what life would be like if that sibling for Anil had materialized. She didn’t have an answer for Jezmeen. What she knew was that all of this felt terribly unfair, but so did Dad’s death, and the land being taken away, and Mum’s cancer and Mum dying. It was unfair that Shirina was in Chandigarh right now, doing something she thought was necessary to save her marriage. Looking out the window, Rajni saw that they were still deep in farmland and it was impossible to avoid thinking of what they had lost.
But maybe Rajni could avoid losing anything else. “Excuse me, Tom Hanks?” she asked.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Tom Hanks said. Rajni only addressed him to chastise him for speeding.
“Can you go faster, please?” she asked. “We need to get to Chandigarh urgently.”
“Ma’am, you’re asking me . . . ?”
“To hurry up,” Rajni said. “Get us there as fast as you can.”
With that, Tom Hanks slammed his foot on the accelerator and the farmland around them stretched into an infinite green blur.
Chapter Twenty
There was a close-up photograph of a blossoming pink orchid in the waiting room. It looked identical to the one that was mounted on the wall of the clinic that Shirina had been to in Melbourne five months ago. Surely that was a bizarre coincidence. It wasn’t as if one flower photographer had a monopoly on obstetrician clinics around the world. But it was a comfort to know that Sehaj had taken some care to find a clinic of the standards she was accustomed to—the leather-upholstered couches and the lilac-scented air freshener were also consistent with the atmosphere of the Melbourne practice. Not one of those Third World clinics she had in her imagination, with a dim low-hanging bulb over bare steel tables, where blank-faced women waited for their turn to reverse time.
She wondered how long Sehaj had taken to research options and find this place—maybe his family was connected to the doctor in some way? He had handed her the card so quickly at the airport that there wasn’t time for questions. They had only ever discussed this procedure in abstract terms. Going through with it. Doing what’s necessary. Handling the situation. There was no chance for nuance when every conversation escalated and ended with sharp words, and then a lengthy silence during which all the other sounds of the house became amplified—water slipping down the pipes, windows shuddering against the chill.
The receptionist called her name. The weight pulled at Shirina’s center as she pushed herself to her feet. There was no need to pretend she wasn’t pregnant here, but out of habit, she took casual strides, as if unencumbered by the bump. It was still carefully concealed—thank goodness she was one of those women who could reach the second trimester without it being too obvious.
At the counter, she gave her name and was asked to select a method of payment. “Visa,” she said, handing over the credit card that she and Sehaj shared. The receptionist handed her a clipboard with a stack of forms to fill out. Details of your medical history. She ticked the boxes mechanically. No, no, no to nearly everything. A couple walked into the waiting room and sat down across from her. The woman was much further along, her belly a swollen moon under a long and elegant turquoise kurti. She complained to her husband about her ankles—“Just look at them,” she muttered, pointing out two blocky feet. “It doesn’t go away right away either. Drima told me that her feet went up two sizes and remained that way. That’s why she stopped at one.” The husband said something inaudible and the woman gave him a playful shove on the shoulder.
Shirina handed the clipboard back to the receptionist, who gave it a quick glance and nodded. Out here, they were still doing something proper and completely legal. She was an expectant mother going in for a routine checkup—like the couple in the waiting room, who were too cheerful to be here for any other reason. Behind closed doors, she would wait for the doctor to tell her that there were options. They would have to keep their voices low, and the doctor might even ask her to turn off her phone, to make sure she wasn’t recording the conversation. Shirina had read a CNN exposé where a journalist posing as a pregnant woman visited a clinic like this in an upscale Mumbai suburb. She had placed her iPhone on the table to gain the doctor’s trust but sneaked another one in the seam of her purse.
It was ironic, doing this procedure in India, where sex-selective abortions were illegal. Doctors here weren’t even allowed to notify women of the sex of the baby. But there was nothing that money couldn’t buy, of course, and Shirina wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t delayed it so long, if she had just admitted the truth to Sehaj and Mother when she first found out she was having a girl. She thought about Mum setting the date for the pilgrimage in the summer holidays to make travel more convenient for Rajni. She wouldn’t have known that this trip would also coincide with the cutoff date for Shirina to terminate her pregnancy. Maybe on some level, Shirina kept putting off telling the truth to Sehaj in Melbourne, thinking that the trip would save her. She’d go to India, return to Melbourne and say, “Whoops, too late.” How naive she was, to think that it would be so easy.
The pregnancy test instructions stated a wait time of five minutes for an accurate reading but Shirina was too excited to wait. They had been trying for a few months, but this time felt different: her period was a week late and she felt the strong undertow of fatigue. Only a minute after she peed on the stick and placed it on the edge of the sink, she returned to it. The pink control line appeared and darkened right away. As Shirina impatiently drummed her fing
ertips and stared at the stick, another line appeared. “Sehaj!” she squealed, rushing out of the bathroom. It was a Sunday morning, and he was lazing in bed. “You’re going to be a father.”
Sehaj’s expression. Shirina wished she’d had a camera. His eyes lit up and a grin spread across his face. Shirina crawled back into bed and gave him a kiss. She knew she had carried her sadness around each time another test came up negative. Still recovering from Mum’s death and the ugliness of her sisters’ fighting, becoming pregnant was an attempt to replace her loss with some hope. Now she and Sehaj were going to start their own perfect family.
“If we’re having a boy, we’ll name it after your father, and if we’re having a girl, we can name it after my mum,” Shirina said. The hormones made her feel sentimental. She had fantasies of Sehaj being the kind of doting father who fought back tears when his child went off to school. As a child, Shirina sometimes daydreamed that her own dad was still alive, and he made up for all of Mum’s shortcomings. He was protective and attentive. He didn’t let her feel forgotten.
Sehaj’s reply surprised her. “The first one has to be a boy.” Shirina had smiled at his definiteness but she was also unnerved. Has to be? It was one of his mother’s views, of course. Since joining the family, she had heard Mother use the same tone when explaining the way she liked the house to be run. Dinner had to be ready by seven, it didn’t matter if Shirina’s boss kept her back late or the tram was delayed. Shirina had to take time off work to look after Mother during her recovery from hip surgery, and then she had to take more time, until it made more sense to quit. Shirina had avoided thinking of these obligations as anything but duties, the sorts of things daughters did for mothers, and wives did for husbands—but the sex of the baby was a different thing altogether. “What do you mean, it has to be a boy?” she had asked, laughing. “I can’t control these things.”
After a beat, Sehaj laughed as well. He told her he was kidding, doing a bad impression of a more conservative man. “We’ll see anyway,” he said. It wasn’t exactly what Shirina expected to hear from him but she pushed her fears out of her mind. Surely nowadays nobody insisted that a woman was responsible for determining the sex of her baby, or that a girl baby should be terminated. Maybe in villages, but not in Melbourne or London. Out of curiosity, Shirina searched for the topic on her bridal forum. The number of posts that came up stunned her. “In-laws prefer a girl!” “Am pregnant with first and it’s a girl, anyone been through this?”
Shirina thought it was ridiculous, but she also found herself hoping she could avoid the conflict altogether. Please be a boy, please be a boy, she found herself thinking as she lay down on the table for the sonogram three months later. She was so distracted by her wishing that when the ultrasound technician asked where her husband was, she simply said, “No.” The technician smiled and repeated the question. “Oh, sorry. He’s got an important work meeting, so I’m here on my own,” Shirina said.
“Baby brain,” the technician said knowingly. “I had it with all three of my kids. I put the laundry in the fridge instead of the cupboard one day!”
She nodded along impatiently as the technician chattered away and began running the probe along her belly. “You might be one of the lucky ones, like my best friend,” she continued, nodding at Shirina’s flat belly. “She only started showing after six months—before that, nobody would believe she was pregnant.” Shirina kept her eyes trained on the black screen. There was a flicker of movement, and the underwater sounds of an echoing heartbeat. Shirina bit her lip to hold back tears. The technician continued to guide the probe along her belly, and pointed out the wobbly vision of the baby’s arms and legs, the scanner showing a tiny reptilian spine, the nose and chin briefly visible in profile as the baby turned. The technician paused for the big announcement. “Would you like to know what you’re having?” she asked with a smile. Shirina began to cry as soon as she found out she was having a daughter. The technician thought they were tears of happiness, and gave her an extra tissue to wipe her eyes.
Driving home from the hospital, Shirina wished that the scan had been inconclusive. The technician had warned her before the scan that this could happen sometimes, if the baby’s legs were crossed. It would be out of Shirina’s hands, then, for the time being. When she walked in the door and saw Mother’s expectant face, Shirina felt a fierce sense of protection over the baby. “They couldn’t tell,” she said. She wasn’t usually a very convincing liar, but she found herself re-creating the scene for Mother—the screen showing the spine, the nose, the chin, but those legs firmly crossed, revealing nothing.
Mother accepted the answer. “You can find out at the next test, then,” she said. “But you can’t wait too long, hanh? When is the next one?”
“In a few weeks,” Shirina said. Thankfully, Mother was unaware that there were blood tests that could determine the sex of the baby too, or she would have sent her right back to the hospital to do that.
That evening, Shirina looked through her wedding album. It had become a habit since Mum died because the best photographs of her were there—her face glowed with happiness and health. Sehaj walked in the door at 7 P.M., and came upstairs to freshen up before dinner. He was greeted with the sight of Shirina poring over the pictures. “Remember this?” she asked, pointing to a surreptitious look between them that the photographer had managed to capture. Their smiles were mirror images of each other. As Sehaj crouched on the floor next to the bed and kissed Shirina in that tender spot behind her ear, she wished she didn’t have to lie to him.
“So how was it? All the fingers and toes present and correct? And does my boy take after his father?” He puffed out his chest.
“It was great,” she said, wincing inside. “But the gender bit was inconclusive.” She closed the wedding album. “But it doesn’t really matter, right? Whether it’s a girl or a boy? Why do we even need to know?”
Sehaj’s body tensed beside her.
“Aren’t you just happy that we’re going to have a baby?” Shirina pressed.
Sehaj sighed and kissed her forehead, and said, “It’s not necessarily about what I want. It’s what my mother—”
“But she’d adjust, wouldn’t she? You’ve said that about her before, that there are some things she just has to get used to.” Like marrying me, Shirina thought. Mother didn’t think much of the girl from a working-class family in England, but Sehaj had put his foot down. He could do it again. Mother didn’t need to have her own way in everything.
“Think about how much happier we’d be if you just listened to her once in a while,” Sehaj said.
“I do listen,” Shirina said, feeling a lump rising in her throat. Mum had told her to listen to her in-laws, to do as they pleased, and she had tried so hard to obey. How much harder did she need to try to appease them? When was it going to be enough?
The moment Sehaj noticed Shirina’s voice wobbling, he reached out and clasped her hand. She thought he’d say something to comfort her. Instead he said: “I’ve got a lot of stress at work these days, Shirina. You have no idea what it’s like.”
“No, of course I don’t. I left my job, didn’t I?” Shirina snapped. She pulled her hand away like he had scalded her.
Sehaj stood and walked out of the room. Shirina stayed in the room that night and skipped dinner. The nausea that was supposed to abate by the end of the first trimester was still persisting, and she didn’t feel like facing Sehaj and Mother anyway. She was angry with herself, although it wasn’t clear why. In the pit of her stomach, perhaps bred into her for years, was the secret shame of having done something wrong.
The silence that followed that evening was the worst Shirina had experienced since marrying Sehaj. Every creak in the floorboards and hiss from the vents became trumpet-loud in the absence of conversation. It followed her everywhere—breakfast, the car ride, the waiting room—and even when Sehaj did begin speaking to Shirina again the next morning, his words were measured and terse. Every sentence containe
d the same obvious message: If you’re going to question things around here, you’re alone. It recalled the clawing anxiety of those days after Mother found her on the doorstep leaning against the taxi driver’s shoulder—but this time Mother didn’t just willfully ignore her; she behaved as if Shirina had never existed in the first place. It was chilling, feeling like a ghost, and it was disturbingly resonant of Shirina’s own childhood. She couldn’t live like that again.
Things eventually thawed with Sehaj, and Shirina worked hard to maintain the peace. Although she still had questions about what she was expected to do if they found out the baby was a girl, she buried them. They wouldn’t order her to terminate the pregnancy . . . would they? Sometimes Shirina found herself looking at Sehaj across the table and wondering if he would come right out and say it. This was also something she didn’t want to think about, so she decided to just wait. It wasn’t a problem yet because as far as everybody knew, she could be having a boy. The ultrasound technician had given her an estimated due date, and from a quick calculation, Shirina realized that her trip to India with her sisters would end at the twenty-four-week mark, when it would be too late to have an abortion.
Why did she call Lauren, then? Shirina wasn’t in any trouble. Was she just hoping that somebody would sympathize with her? Or was Lauren her only friend? Maybe it was because she was afraid of the thoughts that ran through her mind late at night while Sehaj snored lightly next to her. Thoughts about just telling Sehaj and Mother the truth, and doing what she had to do to restore peace. You’re young. You can try again. People make sacrifices for their families all the time. At one point, she considered calling Rajni or Jezmeen, but the embarrassment stopped her. After fleeing her family in London for greener pastures with Sehaj, she couldn’t face her sisters knowing that things weren’t ideal. She could barely admit it to herself.
The first thing Shirina blurted out when Lauren answered the phone was, “I miss work.” Not even “Hello,” or “Help,” but Lauren heard what she was saying right away.
The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters Page 28