The House of Hidden Mothers (6 page)

Seema paused for a breath, almost as if she was going to say yes, but she said, ‘No. No one died, Mala.'

And she threw the sodden saris at the stones with such fury that Mala expected to see cracks show themselves in the sad old boulders.

Of course, there were so many stories – some filthy, shameless ones, although Mala noticed that in all of them Seema was the dirty wrong-doer and never her husband. She knew this was the same old crappy talk but still, she stopped talking to her too.

And then something even stranger happened. Mala's husband and Seema's husband suddenly became friends. Mala caught them laughing together several times, smoking under the neem tree, muttering at the water fountain; even across the fields she recognized her husband's tall stork-stepping legs and Seema's husband's stout hooves keeping time together as the sun started to dip and the crows settled in the trees, like rotten fruit hanging blackly from the branches. But it was when Ram started to behave like a complete
oolloo
that she knew she had to do something.

At first she kept catching him looking at her much as he had done in the month after they were married, like a starved dog salivating at the meat of her backside. This wasn't an unpleasant sensation. After all, who doesn't like it in the first year, before any children have come along? It's a new thing, after all, completely free and allowed. So she waited for him to pull her on to the charpoy, waited to hear the creaky song of its weave under them, punctuated by Bee-ji's pneumatic snores. But he didn't touch her. He just looked and looked, staring at her breasts beneath her blouse, swinging in time with the chapatti dough she kneaded angrily because she knew he was looking and doing nothing, the drooling idiot. She felt his gaze on her back as she squatted over the fire, breathing it into life, his eyes moving down in time with the sweat snaking along her backbone; he watched her ankles and thighs as she hitched up her sari to sweep the courtyard, trying to poof-poof the dust right into his stupid smiling face. At night she lay next to him, burning like a dying fire. She tried throwing her ankle over his, pretended to roll in half-sleepy moans into his back, pressed herself into his trembling thighs. Mala could feel his desire and knew he was tying it down like an unbroken animal. She told herself, it cannot be me. Not yet, not this soon.

At one time she thought he might be angry with her, wanted to punish her for not managing to keep her first pregnancy. It must have been a child conceived on their first night together. They had barely got used to the idea of themselves as a married couple, let alone as parents, when the blood and clots plopped and pooled out of her as she was squatting on the riverbank with ropes of wet saris coiled around her arms, waterlogged iridescent snakes. She had been in her fourth month, when all should have been safe inside. Instead, she became like the river, an unstoppable tide flowed from her, the banks of her womb too weak to hold it.

The other women had helped her home. One of them held her face hard, turning it away from the thing she had already seen caught in a rock pool, the too-tiny baby curled in on itself, a bloody comma, a pause in the paragraph of her life. The women soothed and sang to her, clucking loud reassurances as she cramped and cried in the windy heat. Hai, why so many tears? This is nothing, this happens, this will happen again. Some children are not meant to stay. You are young! But Mala had not been crying with grief, just relief. She thought Ram would see this in her face, but instead he sat at her side every evening for a week, ordering his mother to bring her ginger tea and
pinny
, sweet balls of spiced gourd stuffed with secret herbs supposed to tighten a woman's insides like a drawstring. Maybe he was already preparing her for the next time.

Yet still Ram kept talking to Seema's husband, and she noticed the more he talked to him, the more he day-looked and night-trembled and left her lying choking on her own desire, blowing on her own simmering skin when really she wanted to bite into it and taste her own blood.

That's when Mala decided. It was Seema's husband's fault, all of this mess. And then she knew she had no choice. Who cared what the other women would think? She had to talk to her.

TOBY ARRIVED HOME
still smelling of mud and pig. He had been so anxious to leave that he had forgone his usual end-of-work shower in the small mouldy staff cubicle, and had jumped on the first bus going east.

Alighting at the end of their road, he began to walk steadily, distracted by the lights in various front rooms, glimpses of other lives before curtains and blinds shut out the approaching night. It was a mild winter and the air felt stale and thick. He missed the cleansing bite of frost. He still hadn't got used to this suburb on the edge of London, despite everyone telling him it was going up. In his opinion, that was the only direction in which it could possibly go, but he also knew as a yokel child that any place without a grassy view and a clear horizon would probably disappoint him.

As he approached Shyama's house, he was struck as always by the contrast between its squat, red-brick exterior and what was inside. ‘Deceptively spacious,' she had teased him when he first visited. And he liked the feel of it: the dark, tiled hallway leading into high-ceilinged, airy rooms with their original coving and fireplaces; sliding wooden doors that you could pull across to divide a room and make a space cosy; old wooden floors, scuffed and pocked with age but still as solid as the day they went down. Most of all, he liked the way Shyama had subverted the English rectitude of the architecture with her ethnic sass: many-armed statues bursting out from alcoves; framed fragments of old saris hanging on the walls, intricately embroidered, their seed pearls and sequins catching the light and throwing it back in fractured shards; a wall painted burnt orange. It made his lone Lamborghini poster in his bachelor bedsit look tragic. He had somehow fallen in with a mature woman with a grown-up house and a grown-up child, and even now, after six years of being together, four years after moving in with her, he still felt like a visitor.

He kicked off his mud-encrusted boots in the hallway, shrugging off his fusty-smelling windcheater, and paused halfway to the kitchen. He recognized Shyama's mother's gentle murmur, intercut with her daughter's staccato bass tones. He liked Shyama's parents – it was hard not to, they were always smiling, always polite – but he knew he confused them. He would catch them looking from him to Shyama and then at each other, disguising their disappointment with exaggerated hospitality. What was this blond boy doing with their divorced, too-much-older daughter? (He noticed they said ‘die-vorced'. Shyama told him that was a guilt trip disguising itself as a mispronunciation.) There had been a brief flare of hope when they thought Toby was a vet as opposed to a glorified farmhand, and they still didn't understand why someone would want to spend their time tending to beasts of the field unless they received handsome payment in return. Sita had tried to cover their disapproval by sharing her own childhood with Toby, proud to be the daughter of a Punjabi farmer, regaling him with tales of how she and her sisters would walk back from school gathering food from the land that they owned, bright peacock-hued
chunni
s fluttering from their necks against the emerald green of the endless fields. So many English people thought India was an uncivilized desert or a waterlogged swamp because that's what they saw on the news. Did he know Punjab was called the granary of India because it was fed by five rivers, Panj meaning five, Ab meaning rivers? Her family sent their wheat and beet all over the land, did he know that? No, Toby certainly didn't, and he remarked how satisfying it must have been to turn the soil in ancestral meadows. Sita had stared at him. ‘Well, of course, we didn't do that. Our workers did. Our family were owners, not labourers.' She ended her sentence with a little laugh and a warm smile, but Toby knew he had opened his big Suffolk gob and put his size tens firmly in it. He had smiled back, knowing they were killing him with kindness.

He hesitated in the hallway, aware the women were in mid-conversation. It sounded urgent, secretive, drifting through the half-open kitchen door.

‘A baby is so much work … you need so much energy to look after them properly.'

‘I'm fitter than a lot of women half my age.'

‘I know, darling, you look very nice. But honestly.'

‘Women in India have kids well into their forties. Look at Kamla Auntie, she was forty-eight when she had Vippu.'

‘Yes, but he was her seventh. She had lots in between. God knows why, the woman should have used up her energy getting a job instead of lounging around eating chocolates and watching TV melodramas. But what I'm saying is her body knew what to do, and her older ones helped her with the baby.'

‘I have Tara.'

A brief pause. They let that one go.

‘Anyway, Mama, like I told you, I won't be having a baby – any baby. I can't, and that's that. So we might consider adoption or—'

‘Adoption? At your age? Why do you want to start all that hard work all over again? This is the time you should be relaxing and going on cruises. Anyway, how can you adopt? You're not married.'

‘It doesn't matter nowadays.'

‘Well, it should. We are modern, but not stupid. What happens if you adopt a baby and your Toby runs off with someone younger? Someone more like him? You want to be a fifty-year-old on your own with a little one?'

‘Marriage doesn't stop husbands buggering off. Remember?'

So Shyama had told her mother. Toby initially felt confused, then slighted. She had insisted on keeping their IVF a secret from her parents for the last four years, so why choose to tell Sita now when it wasn't going to happen? And how had adoption filled that gaping loss so soon? He heard a chair being scraped back, a tap turning as the kettle was filled, then silence descended. If he left it much longer, who knows what he might hear next? So he cleared his throat and walked into the kitchen.

‘Hey!' Toby sang cheerily, making straight for Sita first, hands together in a respectful namaste.

‘Namaste, Sita-ji,' he intoned solemnly, making Sita giggle like a schoolgirl. It always worked. He had fretted over how to address Shyama's parents for ages. Shyama had vetoed any kind of Mum/Dad/Mrs/Mr business – one too formal, the other reserved only for bona fide son-in-laws, and they'd had one of those who had turned out to be a thoroughly bad sort. So how about the all-purpose suffix of respect for those older or more important than you, one word merely added on to the end of the name. Ji. It made Toby feel like an over-impressed American from the fifties, wanting to add ‘Neat' and ‘Swell' to the rest of the sentence. But it covered a million cultural potholes and it was, after all, one very small word.

Sita slapped him playfully on the shoulder. ‘Funny boy. Cuppatea?'

‘Lovely, thank you.'

Toby glanced at Shyama, cradling her mug between her hands, who shot him a small tight smile. She looked tired, with smudges of shadow beneath her dark lashes, and the pain clouding her eyes made his chest ache. He laid a hand over hers and gave it a small squeeze – there wasn't much else they could say now with Sita there. It didn't matter, telling her mother, mentioning adoption, she had needed to talk and he hadn't been there. He would have liked to throw his arms around her and carry her upstairs, but Shyama discouraged him from being too lovey-dovey in front of her parents. ‘It's a cultural thing,' she had explained, which was no explanation at all. He considered it for a second, tempted to see if Sita would throw a bucket of cold water over him in response.

‘Toby, would you mind if I call Prem over? He has some more papers to sign. We were wondering—'

‘Mama, he's just got in,' Shyama interrupted.

‘He doesn't mind. You don't mind, do you, Toby?'

‘No problem, Sita-ji. A pleasure.'

As Toby added milk to his cuppatea, Sita picked up the phone and made a brief call in Punjabi. A moment later, a gate at the end of Shyama's garden swung open and her father strolled through it, a bundle of files under his arm and his ever-present pipe clamped between his teeth, each step punctuated with a puff of smoke as if he was being power-steamed towards the back door.

Shyama greeted her father with a hug and got up to make his tea, very strong, a splash of milk, piping hot, the way he liked it. His kindly face and the tufts of hair above his ears reminded Toby of a koala bear.

Prem dropped the papers on to the kitchen table and slapped Toby manfully on the back. ‘Toby sahib!' he joshed. ‘How are you?'

The first time Toby had visited this house, Shyama said to him, ‘You know how English people have fairies at the bottom of their garden? Well, I have parents.'

Once he had got over the surprise of Mr and Mrs Bedi occupying the ground-floor flat of the house that backed on to Shyama's, and once he had reassured himself that there wasn't any possible way they could see him defiling their daughter in the master bedroom, he had accepted it surprisingly easily. Extended families were common in farming communities when he was a lad. As Sita placed the obligatory plate of biscuits before him, he remembered his own mother's wind-reddened hands producing scones and bread warm from the oven, her satisfied half-smile as Toby and his father and brother fell upon them with barely a thank-you. The memory brought a lump to his throat.