A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Each time the bus jerked, Asha placed her hand on her belly, trying to nestle the life within. It was an instinctive reaction, not one she even noticed.

She knew she was pregnant. They hadn’t done the blood test yet to confirm it, but she knew. It had been just three days since she had been through the procedure at Doctor Swati’s clinic, and already she knew.

Just this morning when she brushed her teeth, there had been blood. That was how it had been with Manoj and Mohini. A woman knew her body.

The bus jerked again, and this time Asha felt her hand move to her stomach, but she balled it into a fist and let it lie on her lap. This would not be like the other times. This baby was not hers.

Pratap slept, his head resting against the dirty glass window of the bus. They’d had to wake up at four in the morning so that they could be at the hospital by nine o’clock. Asha had worn her best sari, even though she knew that it would get wrinkled in the time it took them to get to Doctor Swati’s hospital. She had insisted that Pratap wear his nice pants and shirt and had painstakingly ironed the shirt to make sure there were no creases. It was now covered in wrinkles and sweat stains, his odor mingling with those of the other passengers.

Kantamma, the tailor in their village, had made the shirt. Asha had bought the cloth from Hyderabad when she had gone there for a wedding. It had blue and white stripes. It looked good on him. Pratap didn’t care what he wore, but it was important to Asha that they look like a handsome couple today, well-to-do, even though she was selling her womb for money,
especially
because she was.

She was almost grateful that her parents were dead. Her mother had died nearly five years ago, right after Asha was married. She’d had pancreatic cancer, and as soon as she was diagnosed at the government hospital, the doctors had told them that she would have just a year or so to live. Asha’s parents immediately started to look for a boy for her—her mother wanted to see her married before she died.

They didn’t have enough saved up for a dowry, and they knew this meant that they couldn’t find Asha a good match. Asha’s brother, Venkat, was supposed to get married and receive a dowry, which would then be used to marry off Asha. But Venkat had fallen in love with another clerk in the bank he worked in. Asha’s parents didn’t like the idea of a love marriage, but Venkat had always been headstrong. No one could tell him what to do, and he had gone and married the woman he loved without taking any dowry, ruining Asha’s chances of finding a good husband. The best they could’ve done was a painter. Pratap’s family was not mercenary (after all, they had no daughters to marry off) and had asked only that the wedding be arranged well and that the girl come with the basic jewelry: gold bangles, a gold chain, and gold earrings.

Venkat and his wife, Prabha, now lived all the way in Vizag. Asha rarely saw them or their two daughters. She had visited them once for her father’s funeral. Her father had moved in with Venkat after their mother died. He had not survived much longer; a heart attack claimed him just a year later.

It had been strange to meet the brother she had grown up with, with his own family. A family he cared more about than his own sister. But that’s how it was supposed to be. They wrote letters once a year to each other for Ugadi, the Telugu New Year, but beyond that, Asha knew that Pratap’s family was now her only family. Her relationship with her brother died alongside her parents. It was probably for the best, Asha thought. She doubted her brother would approve of her getting pregnant with another couple’s baby for money. And she would be ashamed if he ever found out.

It was a strange day—a day of anticipation, a day where everything, their entire lives, would be altered completely. Asha and Pratap’s neighbors, an elderly couple, were taking care of Manoj and Mohini for the day. They treated the children like their own grandchildren, and Asha knew they would be heartbroken when she and Pratap left the village.

Asha had kissed her sleeping children before leaving. Mohini was nearly two, a tiny princess, and the joy of Pratap’s life. And Manoj, such a beautiful, smart boy—just five and he could already read. It was scary that he could, both in English and in Telugu! When his teacher told them that he was one of those
very intelligent
boys, Asha and Pratap had known that they had to do something. They couldn’t give Manoj an education in a big-city school with what Pratap made as a painter.

Pratap made a sound and shifted in his sleep. He wasn’t comfortable in the jerking bus—but he was sleeping. Here she was pregnant with some other man’s child, and he was fast asleep, like a baby, Asha thought angrily. She wanted to wake him and make him see the atrocity she was committing.

This was his fault anyway. It was Pratap’s brother, Raman, who had planted the idea. Last year, Kaveri, Asha’s sister-in-law, had given birth to a bald, blue-eyed baby for a British couple living in Nottingham in England. Asha hadn’t even heard of a place called Nottingham until Kaveri and Raman had told them. The parents had paid five lakh rupees to Kaveri for having their baby. Five lakh rupees! Pratap’s eyes had almost fallen out. And when the teachers told them about Manoj and how he needed to go to a better school, Pratap had started to talk about it with Asha. She couldn’t blame him entirely, not really, because five lakh rupees was a lot of money, and it had made her think as well. Could she? Could she do what Kaveri had done? And now she had done it, just like Kaveri.

Asha wondered if there had ever really been a choice for her. Could she have said no? Could she have been selfish and said, “No, this is my body, I decide”?

And now? Now it was too late. The seed had taken hold, and she could feel her body already nourishing this child that was not hers.

Asha’s mother-in-law, Puttamma, who now lived with Kaveri and Raman (they had a brick flat with an indoor bathroom), had also thought it was a great idea.

But to give birth to someone else’s baby—a stranger’s baby—how would that make her feel? Would this be an act of perversion, because it was perverse to deny nature her right to make someone barren and give that person a child anyway? Would this make Asha less of a mother to her own children? Could it somehow corrupt her motherhood, taint her soul?

“Where are you going?” the woman sitting next to Asha on the bus asked. She was a fat woman who took up a lot of space. The seat was designed for three people, but with this woman’s size, Asha was all but sitting on Pratap’s lap. It didn’t help that Pratap was a big man as well.

“Srirampuram,” Asha said, looking at Pratap’s hands, the nails always smeared on the edges with remnants of paint, this time white. “Our relatives are there. We’re visiting.” She felt compelled to embellish.

Their relatives did live there—Kaveri and Raman had bought their big flat in Srirampuram with their baby money. In any case, she couldn’t tell anyone the truth. Society had its rules, and even though many women were now stealthily carrying other people’s children in their wombs, it was all hush-hush, hidden, a dirty secret. The story they’d tell was that Asha became pregnant and then lost the baby. No one in her village would ever approve of this. Decent women didn’t use their bodies to make money. Their family name would be ruined if anyone found out. Asha couldn’t help but wonder what else would be ruined. Her heart, her mind, her body? What if this baby destroyed her womb? What if God struck her down for going against his wishes, giving birth to a child he didn’t wish to see born?

“I’m going to Hyderabad,” the woman said. “My daughter is about to deliver—any day now. I will be a grandmother for the first time. Do you have children?”

“Two,” Asha said, and felt a pang. What would she say after this baby growing inside her came out? Would she still say two children, even though she had carried a third and given birth a third time?

Pratap changed sides to rest his head on Asha’s shoulder, snoring softly. He was fast asleep, she marveled—fast asleep with the noise of the bus, the heat, the smell of sweat, let alone the life inside her womb.

The noise of the bus engine competed with that of chickens stuffed into baskets in the rear seats. People were talking, a radio was playing Telugu songs, there was the rustle of newspapers being opened, and babies were crying, making the crowded bus feel even more stifling. A woman sitting across from Asha had a basket of vegetables on her lap—tomatoes, coriander, cucumber, and bitter gourd. People were taking their wares to the bazaar in Srirampuram. Someone somewhere on the bus was eating
mirchi bajjis
, and Asha could smell the chili and the oil they were fried in. Pregnancy was already sharpening her sense of smell. They could do all the tests they wanted, Asha thought; she already knew she was pregnant.

“We have a boy and a girl,” Asha said proudly. One of each, she liked to say—an accomplishment.

“We wanted to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, but they wouldn’t tell us; you know how it is these days,” the woman said. “A shame that people kill their baby in the belly because it’s a girl.”

“Yes,” Asha said, and shifted to be comfortable in spite of Pratap’s weight on her shoulder.

“That’s your husband? What does he do?” the woman asked.

Asha told her and the woman smiled. “Handsome boy.”

Asha smiled back and then looked fondly at Pratap. He was handsome—with his mustache and rugged features. He was tall and built well, like his father had been.

When she had first married him, two things had struck her: his size and the smell of turpentine and paint. The first day she saw him come back from work, spattered with paint from head to toe, she had been shocked. He had used turpentine to remove the paint while he bathed with water drawn from the well in the backyard that they shared with several of their neighbors. The well was a bone of contention, and people complained about how much water Pratap used to wash himself, especially in the summer, when the well was almost dry. So Asha had started to hide water, store some away each time she drew some from the well in a big white bucket with a lid she had bought for just this purpose.

Now she was used to the turpentine and the paint, and even his size.

The woman and Asha chatted all the way to Srirampuram, and Asha was grateful for the company. By the time they got off, Asha knew the woman and her three children’s life stories. The woman knew nothing about Asha. There was nothing to tell. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to Asha was happening to her now, and this she could tell no one.