A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel (15 page)

“It’s over for Charu,” Gangamma said enviously when they sat in the TV room that night after dinner. “I have another two months to go, and I can’t wait to be done with this.”

“It’s been six hours; we should have heard something by now,” Keertana said, looking at her wristwatch.

“Remember that woman, what’s her name . . . Meena,” Gita said. “She was in labor for fifteen hours. I hope that doesn’t happen to me. I can’t do fifteen hours of pain for someone else’s baby.”

“You do what you have to do,” Keertana said sternly.

“Easy for you to say,” Gangamma said. “You were in labor for fifteen minutes the first time.”

Keertana grinned proudly. “Some women are just lucky. I’ve never had a long labor, even with my own children.”

“My back is killing me,” Narthaki said. She was five months pregnant like Asha and had moved into the Happy Mothers House as soon as she got pregnant. Her family lived in Kavali, quite far from Srirampuram, so she hadn’t had the choice of staying with her family until her last trimester.

“Sometimes I think this is not worth the money,” Narthaki continued. It was her first time, too. “I’ve had my two children and now I’m doing this. It’s madness.”

“Can’t Doctor Swati help with the back pain?” Asha asked.

“She gets a massage every day,” Keertana piped in. “Narthaki just likes to complain. The food isn’t good, the maid doesn’t clean right, her clothes are never white enough . . . like she was living in a palace before this.”

“I come from a decent family,” Narthaki protested. “We just need some extra money.”

“We all need some extra money,” Gangamma said wearily. “You think that we’d be here if we didn’t?”

“I just keep thinking how strange it will be to give birth to a white baby. They have no hair,” Narthaki said. “My parents are from London. And they keep writing letters to me, and when they call, they want me to put the phone on my belly. They sent me this white machine, which Doctor Swati keeps here, and I have to play the machine—iPod, P-pod, something—with their voices close to my belly. They want to make sure the baby learns English in the womb itself. Crazy people.”

“They gave me one, too,” Asha said. “Doctor Swati plays it when I go for my checkup.”

“What do they say?” Narthaki asked. “Mine say, hello, I love you, their names . . . whatever.”

“The mother says things like that,” Asha said, although she wasn’t sure, because it was always in English. The father spoke in Telugu:

“We live in California, and both the ocean and the mountains are close by.

“My name is Madhu and I’m your father. I love you very much.

“Your room is next to ours, and we will decorate it with butterflies and flowers for you.

“Take care of yourself, little baby.”

Asha liked to hear the father’s voice. He would be a good parent, she was sure. The skinny mother, Asha wasn’t so sure about. She couldn’t even speak Telugu properly; what would she teach this child about where she came from? Nothing. That woman was all American, all foreign. But the father. He seemed like a nice man. A good man. A good Telugu man. And his Telugu was good and clean. He didn’t insert English words in between like so many people had started to do.

“Mine sent CDs,” Keertana said. “Doctor Swati keeps them here and plays them on her computer during my checkup. It’s so stupid. The baby isn’t going to remember anything when it comes out.”

“What about your parents, Asha?” Gangamma asked. “How are they to you?”

“They’re nice,” Asha said. “They call every week and send presents. They even send toys for my children. The father is Telugu; the mother is half-Indian and half-American.”

“At least your baby won’t be white with blue eyes,” Narthaki said.

“How does it matter what it looks like?” Keertana demanded. “It’s not like we have anything to do with it.”

“We’re carrying them,” Narthaki said.

Gangamma, like Asha, wondered if she was going against the wishes of God by giving a barren woman a baby.

“If she can’t have a child, it’s because God doesn’t want her to have one,” Gangamma said. “Don’t you think we’re doing something wrong here?”

“And if God gives us cancer, we still get treated, don’t we? We don’t sit around and think this is God’s will,” Keertana said. “This is the same thing.”

Despite her harsh demeanor, Asha was starting to really like Keertana. She seemed not to have any moral or emotional issues with being a surrogate. She was doing it for the money, plain and simple, and she didn’t think there was anything complicated about that.

Her philosophy was simple: she wasn’t going to win the lottery—this was her lottery. So she had to put in a little effort to get the prize; it was worth it.

Revati announced that Charu had given birth to a healthy baby boy after seven hours of labor. Everyone clapped and Revati distributed
ladoos
to mark the occasion. Charu would come by the house to get her things in two to three days, after which she’d go back to her family and they would probably never see her again.

“Poor Charu,” Gangamma said. “She really liked being here. Someone to cook and clean, and now she has to do it all by herself.”

“As we all will,” Keertana said. “I say enjoy this time; it will be over soon enough.”

“I like cooking and cleaning,” Narthaki said. “And I at least do it better than that maid Rangamma.”

This would become a pattern, Asha realized. She would make friends with these women, and one by one, they would leave and new women with new pregnancies would join them. And then it would be Asha’s time to leave the house and go back to her life. And what would that be like?

CHAPTER NINE

“I miss my children. Every day I see them, I feel they have grown up,” Asha had told her. “But I’m happy here. It’s very nice.”

Priya had put down the phone feeling like a monster.

“She misses her kids,” Priya told Madhu unnecessarily. He had been part of the conversation over the speakerphone in their study.

Madhu sat down on the office chair and sighed.

“You feel bad, too,” Priya said. She stood up and started to pace up and down the small study.

“But our baby needs to be safe, and it isn’t for the rest of her life, just a few months,” he said.

Priya nodded.

“And it’s for her safety, too,” Madhu added.

Priya nodded again.

“But I still feel like shit,” Madhu admitted.

“I can just hear Sush say we’re exploiting the poor.” Priya stood in front of him for a moment and then started to pace again.

“We’re helping her give her children a better life,” Madhu said. “We’re making sure her family has a better future.”

Priya shook her head. “We’re rationalizing. This pretty much sucks. All of it. Our baby is growing halfway around the world while we sit here. Every time I drink coffee or a glass of wine, I feel I shouldn’t be doing it because we’re pregnant.”

No matter what she did, Priya couldn’t shake a feeling of inadequacy—that she should be pregnant, that she was somehow a lesser woman because she wasn’t. She had even considered buying a fake belly and putting it on . . . just around the house to feel some connection to the pregnancy that was going to result in her and Madhu’s child.

Her back wasn’t hurting. Her feet weren’t swollen. She had no nausea, and she could drink like a fish if it pleased her.

“We
are
pregnant,” Madhu said. “But I feel it, too, the strangeness of this.”

“But I’m the one who would’ve been pregnant, who should’ve been pregnant,” Priya said. “I’m the one who outsourced this.”

“Not because you had a choice, and don’t use that word,” Madhu said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Hard on myself? I think that I’m being way too easy on myself,” she said.

They sat silent for a while, and then Priya gasped. “Oh my God! We’re going to have a daughter.”

Madhu grinned. “Yeah.”

Doctor Swati had told them the sex before they had talked to Asha.

“Oh my God,” Priya repeated and looked wide-eyed at Madhu. “What if I have the same relationship with my daughter as my mother has with me?”

Madhu sighed. “You are not your mother, sweetheart.”

“No, seriously,” Priya said.

“Yes, seriously,” Madhu said. “You’re not your mother, and our baby is not you. Whole different set of people, whole different chemistry.”

“You know, I’ve been worried about the whole baby being a girl thing,” Priya said. “I mean . . . a boy is never going to come home at age fifteen and say someone knocked him up.”

“Woman, you need to calm down,” Madhu said.

And I even know her name,
Priya thought.
Ayesha—alive; she who lives.

“Do you sometimes wish we’d adopted? Wouldn’t that have been easier?” Priya wondered aloud.

“That isn’t a picnic, either. I did the research and it’s tough. Remember Sandeep, who went to New Jersey to work for Accenture? They went through the whole thing, even had a picture in hand and were then told the baby wasn’t theirs. His wife was completely broken after that, and Sandeep swore never to try adoption again,” Madhu said.

Priya took a deep breath.

“We’ll get through this; you know that, right?” Madhu said. “As long as you and I are together, babe, we can move mountains. We just need to not lose our minds for the next few months.”

But as the weeks progressed, that was exactly what they did. They did nothing on Friday nights but wait to call India and talk to Doctor Swati and then Asha. And then they spent Saturday and Sunday doing nothing but talk about the baby and how horrible it was that they were here and their baby somewhere else. They talked about the same things over and over again, going in circles.

Priya constantly worried the baby would die—and when she convinced herself the baby wouldn’t die, she obsessed about everything from hygiene at the Happy Mothers House to the labor.

“What if something goes wrong during the birth?

“What if she gets toxemia?

“What if she gets ringworm?”

Madhu tried to calm her, but Priya was spinning. The absolute last thing she needed now was a visit from her mother.

“If it isn’t French, sweetheart, it isn’t really wine,” Sush declared as she sipped a Napa Valley Merlot.

“That’s not true, Sush,” Madhu said. “Maybe we’re not wine connoisseurs like Andrew and you, but California wine is as good as the wine you get in Europe.”

“Not all European wine is good,” Sush said. “I know people get all up in arms about the German Riesling, but I’m a red person—something bold, like Bourgogne.”

“Italian reds are pretty good,” Priya said, even though she knew this was not a discussion she could win. She wasn’t a wine person. She didn’t care if it cost five dollars or fifteen or fifty—some tasted good and some didn’t.

She should’ve anticipated this and served French wine, Priya thought as she pushed a piece of duck around her plate.

Madhu had cooked dinner, because Priya was not able to figure out what to cook for Sush that wouldn’t elicit toxic criticism. Indian? No, Sush would immediately launch into how she cooked Indian food much better. French? Hell, no. Sush would demolish the food. She was such a Francophile. Italian? That might be too simple. Sush might say something about carbs and pasta. It was always so complicated.

They had discussed whether the best recourse would be to take Sush out to a restaurant, but they knew she would complain about having to eat out yet again when she had been eating out for nearly a week during the conference she had been attending in San Francisco. After spending the week at the Hilton, she was going to stay the weekend with them.

They wished there were some way of getting out of it, but there had been no polite way of saying, “No, don’t come, we’re stressed enough as it is.”

Both Priya and Madhu (and probably even Sush) knew that the wine talk was going to be short-lived. Sooner or later Sush was going to launch into a discussion about their baby. And after three glasses of even a substandard California Merlot, Sush would not hold back, or would, as she called it, speak from her heart.

“How was the conference?” Madhu asked as he attacked his duck breast. He had decided to stick with his specialty, duck à l’orange. He did it well, and the last time he had made it for Andrew and Sush, they had raved. Of course, then he had served it with a good French Bordeaux.

“These save-the-world conferences are a waste of time,” Sush said, pushing her plate away. She had not complimented the food, but both Priya and Madhu noticed that she hadn’t insulted it, either.

“Then why do you go?” Priya asked, and put her cutlery down. Sush killed her appetite, had been doing it since she was a child.

“Because in my position, I’m expected to,” Sush said, and smiled. “When you reach my level in the NGO business, you have to show up for such conferences and speak; otherwise when you have something important to say, no one will listen.”

Priya and Madhu quietly sipped their wine.

“And if I don’t continue to network, I’ll be out of a job,” Sush said. “I’ve worked my entire life for nonprofits, and now as I turn sixty . . . anyway, you get older and people stop listening to you. You find that what you have to say is not as important. I feel like I’m being shoved aside. I’m not young enough to warrant attention. You have to be Angelina Jolie these days to get anywhere.”

“No one is shoving you aside, Mama,” Priya said, feeling sorry for her mother. Her career had been everything to her, and it wasn’t easy to accept that she would soon have to retire, whether she was ready or not. And Sush wasn’t exactly sixty, more like sixty-five. But Priya knew her mom liked to fudge her age here and there.

It always amazed Priya that despite working for NGOs—working for the poor, as her mother put it—Sush was steeped in vanity up to her ears. Someone who worked for the poor shouldn’t be bitching about California wine! Someone who worked for the poor should be grateful that there was food
and
wine on the table.

“How are your jobs? Secure?” Sush asked.

Madhu shrugged. “As secure as can be.”

“The economy is a disaster,” Sush said, and emptied her glass of wine. Madhu promptly refilled it.

“It’ll get better,” Priya said.

“Layoffs in your company, Priya?” Sush asked.

Priya nodded. “We had a round, and we’ll probably have another if business doesn’t pick up.”

“You should be careful, both of you. I don’t know what you’re thinking, having a baby in this economic climate,” Sush said.

And here it came.

“If you were just having a baby yourself, that’s one thing, but spending all this money to have one is insane. If you have so much money, you should give it away to charity.”

Priya sighed.

Madhu took a deep breath, as if preparing himself for the argument that would probably follow.

Sush looked at both of them. “It’s selfish to have a baby like this. I don’t approve.”

Priya rose and picked up her plate. “Guess what, we don’t need your approval.”

That led to another interminable discussion about Priya’s lack of respect for her mother. If only she didn’t get so riled up, Priya thought. If only she didn’t turn into an angry teenager every time her mother came around, maybe then Sush’s visits wouldn’t be such a disaster.

They lay quietly in bed, listening to Sush putter around the guest room. When the room fell silent, Priya turned to face Madhu.

“Is your job secure?” she asked.

Madhu strangled another sigh. Sush had hit a home run. She planted these seeds of doubt, and they thrived.

“Like I said, as secure as it can be; the world economy is in the toilet.”

“If both of us lost our jobs, how would we manage?”

“We have savings.”

“And what would we do about health insurance?”

Madhu put a hand on Priya’s cheek. “We’d get on COBRA. I can always find a job. Something, anything, to get us through. We’d manage, I promise.”

Priya’s eyes filled with tears. “I see these stories about people being homeless, and I get scared. What if it’s us next? What if . . . what if our house got repossessed? What would we do?”

“Move in with Sush and Andrew?”

“Haha. Very funny,” Priya said.

They were silent again and Priya said quietly, “Madhu, I’m scared.”

“Don’t be. I’ll take care of you.”

Madhu was old-fashioned when it came down to it. He believed that the man took care of the family. He never begrudged Priya her career, but Priya often wondered if he’d be one of those jealous husbands if she started to make more money than he did.

“In any case, Calvin has assured me that there will be no layoffs. We’re still in the black. We’re not going to lay people off,” Madhu said.

“I’m just looping because of her,” Priya said.

“She has it down to a science, she does,” Madhu said. “The minute you’re happy about something, Sush makes sure you have some reason to be down.”