A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel (27 page)

“Now that I don’t live in London, don’t have a work visa or a job, they think the best thing for me is to get married,” Mayuri said. “They put my profile into the database of a local matchmaking agency. They’re determined to find a ‘nice boy’ for me.”

“What’s wrong with that? You’re what, thirty? You’re not getting any younger, and since you don’t have any long-term relationships in your past, maybe arranged marriage is the best thing for you,” Priya teased.

“Oh, fuck you,” Mayuri said.

They sat on the veranda again. Divya sat with them, and Priya wondered why the woman had to be with them all the time. It was obvious Divya was spying on them—making sure that Asha didn’t say anything untoward about Happy Mothers. The thought sent a chill down Priya’s spine. What were they doing here that they were so worried about? Had all their phone calls with Asha also been monitored?

“So what do you think?” Priya asked Asha as Mona and she laid down their plan for Manoj.

“He’ll be alone with you?” Asha asked.

“Well . . . my mother will be there, and so will Mona’s in-laws,” Priya said. “Maybe your husband can come along?”

“He has to work,” Asha said numbly.

“Of course,” Mona said. “But we will take good care of your son. We promise. He can stay at our house. My in-laws love children.”

Asha seemed skeptical, so Priya asked her to talk it over with Pratap and get back to them. She would be back again next week, and they could talk more then, firm their plans.

Asha was even more reluctant to send Manoj with them when Mona said that most of the schools for special children were in the city, which meant that the only option for the boy would be a boarding school.

“Unless you move to Hyderabad,” Mona said. “Would you be able to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Asha said. “I don’t know how easy it would be for Pratap to find work there, and it’s also so expensive. Here we can afford to buy a flat. There we won’t be able to do that, will we?”

And then she sighed and leaned back on her chair, stroking her belly. She looked at Priya and smiled. “She’s kicking; you want to feel?”

Priya walked up to her tentatively and put a hand on her belly. She felt the tiny touch of her child through Asha’s flesh and felt an answering tug inside her. She put both her hands on Asha’s belly, naked under her blouse, her cotton sari’s
pallu
caressing Priya’s hands.

“Oh my God,” Priya gasped. “Oh my God. Hello, baby. Hello, my darling.”

Her eyes filled up as the baby kicked again as if responding to her touch.
Oh how I wish you were inside me,
she thought. Nothing, just about nothing compared to the feel of touching her child like this, and Priya knew then that holding her baby in her arms would be the single most important thing in her life, a defining moment, an all-encompassing emotion.

The baby stopped kicking, and Priya reluctantly removed her hands.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s your baby,” Asha said softly.

They went back to talking about schools for Manoj, Mona telling her how many schools there were in the state of Andhra Pradesh and their caliber.

“A boarding school—but then he won’t be with us,” Asha said. “And what about the money—won’t it be more expensive?”

“It won’t cost you anything,” Mona said. “We’ll find a scholarship for him.”

Asha shook her head, as if trying to sort through what they were
really
saying. “Sometimes I wish Manoj were a normal boy. Now he has to go to a boarding school, and how will I stand it, not seeing him every day?”

“That’s why Swati Atha suggested the school close to Srirampuram. They even have a school bus,” Divya said.

“But it’s not a school for gifted children,” Priya said.

She had done her research. It was a private school. What was more, she had learned, Doctor Swati’s husband, Doctor Ravi Gudla, was a board member. She couldn’t understand why Doctor Swati had made a big deal about the weight of her recommendation while also saying that he couldn’t get in this year. This was a new school, looking for new students. In fact, Priya wondered why Doctor Swati didn’t waive tuition altogether for Manoj. After all, having a child of a high IQ in their school would only raise the school’s image.

“But it’s a good school,” Divya said. “We have a lot of connections there. We can get Asha’s son in.”

“But it’s a regular school,” Priya repeated. “And if Manoj has to go to a regular school, he might as well go to the one he’s going to now.”

“That’s
not
a good school,” Divya said peevishly. “I know the schools in this area, and that is a third-rate school.”

Priya saw Asha’s face fall.

“It’s a good school,” Asha said. “We pay five hundred rupees a month for it.”

Divya shrugged. “Look, it’s up to you. Swati Atha pulled a lot of strings for your son—but if you want to send him to another school, that’s up to you.”

“If Manoj has a high IQ, this school will not be able to handle his education,” Priya said, wanting to shut Divya up. She gave her the creeps, sitting here all the time, interfering in their conversation and manipulating Asha.

Divya just shrugged again and went back to the magazine she was reading.

Priya wasn’t sure she liked the doctor or her niece. Were they trying to push Asha into sending her son to this school, where she would have to pay an exorbitant amount of money for an ordinary education? Would Doctor Swati’s husband profit from this as a member of the board? And how would poor people like Asha and Pratap continue to pay tuition? Probably—she hated to think of it—by coming back to Happy Mothers to be a surrogate, where Doctor Swati was sure to gain a profit again.

Priya wondered if Doctor Swati would mention the school when they talked later, but she didn’t. Instead, she said something about being careful with bringing too many presents for Asha.

“I understand your need to give her gifts, but don’t bring something every time you come here,” Doctor Swati said. “There are other women in the house, and we don’t need jealousy brewing among them, do we?”

Priya had always liked Doctor Swati. But now, face-to-face, she didn’t seem quite as noble and sincere as she did over Skype.

Once Priya apologized, promising to be more circumspect in the future, Doctor Swati talked about the labor and delivery and how they should proceed after that.

“We will call you when she goes into labor,” Doctor Swati said. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming you will come to the hospital.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Priya said. “Madhu might be here then as well, depending on when it happens.”

“I don’t know if you can be in the delivery room. It depends upon Asha, and usually the women like to just have someone from their family there,” Doctor Swati said. “But then all our parents usually get here right after the baby is born. You are an unusual case.”

“So no one comes here before the baby?”

“Oh, they do, but a week or two before at the most . . . but you can’t plan delivery, so sometimes the baby comes early and they are here right after,” Doctor Swati said. “I can ask Asha, if you want to be in the delivery room.”

Priya thought about it and said, “No, please don’t. I don’t want to pressure her. This is such a private thing, and I don’t want to impose any more than we already have.”

“OK, I’ll respect your wishes,” Doctor Swati said. “To be frank, I’m relieved, because that would complicate things for us as well.”

“How come?” Mona asked. She had been quiet the entire time, but she spoke now.

“It’s never easy to have the biological mother and surrogate in the same room when the baby is coming—we want to focus on the baby, and I could tell you stories of full-blown hysteria in the labor room, and not from the woman giving birth,” Doctor Swati said.

Mona nodded in response and gave Doctor Swati a small smile for her attempt at humor. She hadn’t said anything to Priya, but Priya had felt Mona’s displeasure at seeing all those pregnant women squeezed into the surrogate house.

Priya was affected as well. She had been here before; still, it surprised her, the dilapidation around her. She didn’t quite remember it like this. Then, she had been wearing rose-colored glasses. She didn’t know Asha. The house had seemed cozy. Now it seemed dingy, beaten down, worn out and ill maintained.

“Maybe we should give her more money,” Priya said to Mona as they drove back to Hyderabad.

Mona shook her head. “No, no more money. People think giving money is the solution. It’s not. Giving tools is the solution. Giving a scholarship to her son is the right thing. You think she will allow him to be tested?”

“I do. I mean, she cares about his future so much. It’s so important to her. She’s pregnant with our baby for it,” Priya said. “But oh, it would break a mother’s heart to send her child far away. And he’s so young. Wouldn’t it mess him up?”

“It’ll mess him up more not to be challenged,” Mona said. “Gifted children tend to be very impatient and need constant stimulation, otherwise they become aggressive. Vishal, my brother-in-law, his son is a member of MENSA. He’s sixteen and has a one fifty IQ. Very smart kid, and when he was young they didn’t want him to go to a special school. They wanted Kabir to go to school with his sister, Mira. But then Kabir, who is three years younger than Mira, would be in her class. And then he started getting into trouble because he was so bored. They had no choice but to move him. It was for the best. He’s already in university, will have a PhD by the time he’s twenty-one.”

Priya thought about that for a moment and said, “But Asha and Pratap don’t have the possibilities your brother has. He’s a doctor in New York. Pratap is a painter in Srirampuram supplementing his family’s income through surrogacy. I wonder if Manoj can really have the future a child like him deserves.”

“If he’s got the smarts and we make sure he gets the right guidance, why not?” Mona said. “I know it looks hopeless. You look at the poverty in India and you think it’s so massive, so huge, there’s nothing we can do. But I believe that we can make a difference, one child at a time, one single mother at a time.”

“You’re very passionate about helping people,” Priya said with a smile. She had not expected Mona to be passionate about anything but Prada boots and her family, in that order.

Mona grinned. “I know, I know. People look at me, see a twenty-three-year-old girl who married into a wealthy family and decide I must be a trophy wife. But the fact is that I come from money. I would’ve always married into a wealthy family unless I fell in love with a bus driver, which only happens in the movies. Because, really, when would someone like me take the bus?”

She wasn’t being snobbish, just honest and genuine. She grew up with money and married into money, and she didn’t see what the fuss was all about.

“I choose to have this life,” Mona said. “I don’t feel guilty about having money. I like money; it buys us things and makes our lives very comfortable. But I can also use it to do good. And not just our money; I throw all these fund-raisers to get Papa’s friends involved in our foundation, too.”

“Excellent philosophy to live by,” Priya said. “And if you can help Asha and her son, I’ll be indebted to you for life.”

Mona laughed. “And I
will
call on that debt,” she said. “So be forewarned.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

One sixty.

They kept saying that number, kept repeating how high it was. Asha didn’t understand what it meant. Priya was very excited. She said that the other woman, Mona, who had come with her the previous week, was looking into arranging a scholarship for Manoj.

“It was so much fun, Amma,” Manoj said. “Mona’s parents have such a big house. And I got to sleep in Priya’s room, with Priya.”

Priya smiled at him and touched his face gently.

Not your baby. This one is mine,
Asha wanted to say, but Manoj was oblivious to her jealousy.

“They have so many servants, but the best was Mona’s father-in-law. He used to be a general in the army, and he was so funny. We played cricket together in the garden. I threw the ball sideways and broke a window . . .”

“Oh my God, were they angry with you?” Asha asked.

Manoj shook his head as if that were a strange question. “No. But he said that we would pretend when Romila, that’s his wife, asked, that we didn’t know what happened.” Manoj laughed then. “But she knew and she gave me a chocolate anyway.”

Priya sat on a charpoy by the swing where Manoj sat with his mother, his excitement spilling out of him in waves of conversation.

“He was a perfect angel and everyone is in love with him,” Priya told her. “He could’ve had a room of his own, but I thought five might be too young.”

“And it was such a great room,” Manoj said. “And I played on Priya’s iPad. It’s like a computer, but the size of a magazine. Priya downloaded three games for me, and I won them all.”

Asha just wanted to hug him and ask him to stop talking. He was speaking too fast, about things she didn’t know.

“He had a good time,” Priya said, smiling. “He’s a great kid.”

“And the test, was the test difficult?” Asha asked Manoj.

Manoj made a face. “Of course not. It was very easy. I have an IQ of one sixty, Amma. They told me. That’s a high IQ.”

He was already not her Manoj, Asha thought. One night, just one night he was gone, and there was a different swagger to him. He spoke differently. He seemed to have already changed.

“Oh, and the school was . . . fantastic.” Manoj said the sentence in Telugu but said
fantastic
in English like they did in the movies.

Asha hated the idea of a boarding school. He would not be able to live with them and would see them only once every three to four months unless they moved to Hyderabad, and even then they could see him only every Saturday and Sunday. Priya had said that was the only way. It broke Asha’s heart to think about not hugging her son every day. But was there a choice for her?

“Are we supposed to move to Hyderabad?” Pratap wondered later.

When Asha had asked him about them taking Manoj to Hyderabad for the night, he thought it would be OK; why not, he’d said; his son would enjoy driving in a big air-conditioned car, staying in a fancy house, showing these rich people how smart he was. But now it was turning into a reality—this whole dream of sending him to a school for smart children—and Asha could see that Pratap was wavering. “I don’t know about Manoj going to a boarding school,” Pratap said.

“This is for his own good, for his future. I hate it, too, but . . . we have to do this,” Asha said. “Maybe I should ask Priya to talk to you.”

“How can you even think about sending him away?” Pratap asked. “You couldn’t even imagine not seeing him every day while you’re here.”

“I know,” Asha said sadly. “But we have Mohini to think about as well. We can’t just move to Hyderabad and ruin Mohini’s chances for a stable life. She’ll have a home with us here, a permanent home, a flat. And . . . Hyderabad is just three hours by bus. We can go see Manoj all the time.”

“So you want to buy a flat now?” Pratap asked.

“If Manoj gets a scholarship, we should, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Pratap said.

“He’s really smart, they say,” Asha said, and smiled. “And Manoj can’t stop talking about the house he stayed in. It was full of servants, and he got to eat chicken curry with
rotis
, not rice.”

“And he got chocolate ice cream,” Pratap said. “He’s been talking nonstop about it at home, too. Priya’s much nicer than I thought she would be.”

“She is,” Asha said. “She’s so determined to make sure Manoj’s future is secure. I didn’t think she would care. I mean . . . all I thought she cared about was the baby.”

Asha hadn’t wanted to like Priya. But she was impressed with her dedication toward Manoj. She was impressed with how she had gathered her rich friends to help her child. How could she dislike someone who was trying to save her child?

They watched Manoj help Mohini shake the dirt from her hands outside before coming to sit by their parents.

“Did you like the people you stayed with?” Asha asked Manoj again. She wanted to make certain; he would go again next week with Priya to be interviewed at the school for children like him who scored high on the tests.

“They were so nice, Amma,” Manoj said. “And the woman there, Mona, she and Priya took me to see the school. I could go to that school. It was so great, Amma. They had computers everywhere and flowers and gardens. They had horses in the school, horses to ride on. All students can learn how to ride, and there was a big swimming pool to learn swimming. They also had rooms for students to live in. I’ll live there if I get in. For boys my age, there are four boys to a room, but the rooms are big, bigger than Kaveri Atha’s whole flat.”

“So you would like to live there?” Asha asked, her voice constricted.

“I’ll miss you and Nana and Mohini and Kaveri Atha and Sairam Mava and Sirish and Girish
Anna
. Will you be very angry if I say that I would like to stay there?” Manoj asked.

“No, I won’t be angry,” Asha said. Priya was taking this baby inside her away, and now she was taking Manoj away, too, she thought, just for a moment, before the thought passed like a cloud on a sunny day.

“Then I want to stay there,” Manoj said. “They have these big classrooms and . . . they have chemistry labs where they mix things and make new things. And . . . Amma, they had a biology lab where they cut frogs and mice to look inside them. I want to be a doctor, Amma. I want to operate on people’s brains and make things right when they’re wrong. They call such people neurosurgeons. Mona’s husband, Vikas, he is a colonel in the army, and his brother is a neurosurgeon in New York.”

He said the word
neurosurgeon
in English, and Asha couldn’t even repeat it properly.

She hadn’t seen him this excited in a very long time, if ever.

He had such a great need to absorb new things. She couldn’t stand in his way, she realized. She would have to send him away.

Even when Manoj was just two years old, they had known that he was different. When he made drawings, he would make them neatly and then color them neatly, like he was ten instead of two. He had great command of the pencil, and by the time he was three, he could write his name on the pictures. They had been proud, Asha remembered, but also scared. He was so mature for his age, understood so much about his surroundings that Asha sometimes forgot that he was just five years old.

He was just a little boy. And he wanted to go away and learn.

Priya came again, and this time with the father’s sister. Mayuri was very pretty, with long, straight hair. She wore tight pants and a bright-blue kurta. She wore beautiful, bright-blue slippers with golden designs on them. Her Telugu wasn’t as good as the father’s, but it was better than Priya’s.

“You’re so beautiful,” she told Asha. “You have that pregnancy glow.”

“It is what it is,” Asha said.

“So your son is very smart,” Mayuri said. “I mean, a one sixty IQ is stunning. Are you excited about sending him to a new school?”

“Excited and scared,” Asha had answered.

“Don’t be scared,” Priya said then. “Don’t worry about anything. The school is very good, and I think Manoj will be accepted after the interview. His test scores are so high that Mona thinks it won’t be a problem. And she’s setting up a scholarship for him.”

“They must be very wealthy,” Asha said.

“They are, but schools like this also subsidize . . . give a discount, when the child is as smart as Manoj,” Priya said. “And they all loved Manoj. He’s so bright, so clever. It was wonderful having him with us.”

Manoj had talked more about the room he shared with Priya. He said that it had a big bed, but that everything in the house was big and smelled like sandalwood. He promised Asha that when he became a doctor, he would have a big house, too, and she could stay with him there, she and Pratap and Mohini.

“When will you take him for the interview?” Asha asked Priya.

“Today,” Priya said. “It’s at nine tomorrow morning. He’ll stay with me at my in-laws’ house. It isn’t fancy like Mona’s house, but he’ll like it, I think.”

“And we’ll take good care of him,” Mayuri said.

Asha felt strange handing over her child to another perfect stranger, but there was also a rightness to it. Priya and the father had handed over their child to her, and now she was handing over her child to them. Even though they didn’t know each other well, there was a bond of trust between them, wasn’t there?

“It’s all happening so fast,” she said.

“It’s going to be fine,” Mayuri said. “You’ll see; it’ll all work out. You’ll buy a nice flat; your son will go to a lovely school.”

Asha smiled unevenly at Mayuri. All these people had become a part of her life, the most unlikely people, but because of this baby, these people were here, helping her.

“Thank you, Priya,” Asha said. This was the first time she had spoken the mother’s name, and it made her feel good to say it.

“It’s nothing.” Priya looked a little embarrassed. “You’re helping us and we’re helping you. That’s how the world goes round.”

Doctor Swati talked about the school during the next exam that afternoon. Priya and Mayuri had left with an excited Manoj. He was already asking for the pad thing with the games from Priya as he got into the big black car with the driver.

Asha had been nervous about this conversation. She had expected Doctor Swati to be upset with her for choosing another school over the one she had recommended, and, sure enough, she had been right. Doctor Swati was annoyed that all the effort she had put in was for nothing.

“I was only trying to help you,” Doctor Swati said. “I know you believe that Priya is helping, and I’m sure she is, but . . . your son will be fine in the school here.”

“But Manoj is very smart,” Asha said.

“Of course he is,” Doctor Swati said. “But—”

“He has an IQ of one sixty,” Asha said, even though she had no idea what that really meant. Mona had said something about it being a measure of intelligence, but Asha couldn’t understand how something like intelligence could be measured in the first place. She had asked Manoj about the test, but he had been vague, saying something about boxes and colors and shapes.

Doctor Swati raised both her eyebrows. “One sixty? Really?”

“Yes,” Asha said. “Priya took Manoj with her to be tested at some men . . . menses . . . I don’t know. She’s taking him today for an interview at the school. And they even found a scholarship for him. If it all works out, he’ll start school this September.”