A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel (6 page)

Whenever they came to India, Madhu and Priya always stayed for two weeks at least; their trips were packed with visits to relatives and friends of Madhu’s from college days. Tonight they were off to see Madhu’s friend Jeevan and his girlfriend, Rosie. Jeevan and Rosie were defying convention and living together without the benefit of marriage. His parents were not happy about him living with a Christian girl, and her parents had disowned her for wanting to be with a non-Christian, and that, too, without marrying him. They intended to get married eventually, but for now they were too busy with their careers. Jeevan was a partner in a software consulting firm, and Rosie had her own advertising agency.

They met for drinks at Jeevan and Rosie’s house in Banjara Hills. A mammoth mansion, the home was designed to cause envy. Jeevan and Rosie liked to throw parties that were legendary. Their New Year’s Eve party was one of the best Madhu and Priya had attended, by far.

Jeevan and Rosie had decided not to have any children. It didn’t suit their lifestyle.

“We like to travel,” Jeevan told them. “We like to socialize and we have busy work lives. We don’t have time for children.”

Priya could imagine a man saying that—hell, she could even imagine Madhu saying that—but she couldn’t understand how Rosie felt the same way. But for her persistence, Madhu would have been fine without a child. Disappointed, but he would have gotten over it, unlike Priya.

“Don’t you want to feel life inside you? Don’t you want to hold a baby, be a mother?” Priya asked, and Rosie shrugged as she smoked a cigarette.

“And give all this up?” she said, moving her hands over her body.

“You can always get your body back,” Priya said. “I know plenty of women who have children and look amazing.”

“Honey, I can buy my body back if need be,” Rosie said with a laugh. “I just can’t see how a child will fit into our lives. Just last week Jeev had to go to Paris for a conference, and I took a couple of days off and went with him. We had the best time. We couldn’t do that with a child hanging on to my tit.”

Priya wished then that she were more like Rosie, wished that she hadn’t had this burning desire to be a mother that kept her and Madhu from jetting off to exotic destinations.

When Madhu had first told Jeevan about their plan to get a surrogate and asked him to check up on Happy Mothers for him, he and Rosie had thought it was a fabulous idea.

“The only way to do it,” Rosie said now as she served mojitos on the patio with a view over their swimming pool. “Let someone else grow fat.”

“Oh God, that’s not why we’re doing this,” Priya said.

“I know, honey,” Rosie said as she sat down next to Jeevan and lit another cigarette. “But you have to admit it’s a nice way of doing it. If I wanted children, I’d do it that way. Someone else can deal with the blood and gore.”

“But if you don’t like the blood and gore, then what will you do once you take the baby home? There will be poop and gore,” Jeevan said, and Rosie made a gagging sound.

Priya and Madhu looked at each other, thinking the same thing—these two
so
needed to grow up.

“Ten lakhs doesn’t sound like that much money to us,” Rosie said. “But to them it’s probably a lot.”

“Ten lakhs is a fair amount of money,” Madhu protested.

“A hundred years ago, maybe,” Jeevan said. “Remember the days when being a
lakhpati
was a big deal? It was like being a millionaire in the United States. Now neither seems to have much weight. A million dollars just doesn’t cut it anymore, and a lakh is nothing. I paid ten lakhs for my car, and you’re paying that much for a baby. It’s ironic.”

One of Priya’s single colleagues who had no desire to have children used to joke about how in eighteen years Priya would introduce him to her child and he’d introduce her to his yacht.

“How are things in the United States?” Jeevan asked Madhu, and when he made a noncommittal sound, Jeevan laughed out loud. “How many times do I have to ask you to move back here, man? Hyderabad is as sexy as San Francisco, and there’s so much money to be made here. You move here and I’ll take you on as a partner. Your kind of sales experience will be great for my company.”

Jeevan was constantly trying to recruit Madhu, but there was no way he would move to India, not as long as he was married to Priya. Vacations were one thing, but to live in India—to see this level of poverty every day, to see the dirt and dust, the desperate lives, the human suffering—it would be too difficult.

India was tough on the nerves if you hadn’t grown up there. The abject desperation of people living on the streets; the children who grabbed your clothes, begging for money; the thin and dark woman who moaned while she held out her hand; a baby suckling on the nipple of her dried-up breast . . . it was a far cry from the States, where poverty had a very different meaning than it did here. Madhu tried to stop Priya when she gave money to every hand that begged for it, but she couldn’t help it. A few rupees didn’t amount to much for her, but for the person who was begging for it, it was a gift, a need fulfilled.

“Don’t encourage the beggars,” Madhu would say.

“I’m not the one encouraging them,” Priya would respond. “If you guys cleaned up your country and gave these people a decent life . . . they wouldn’t be here.”

Each time she left India, Priya went back feeling so fortunate, so lucky to have the privileges and the luxuries she did. If she had a baby, that baby would have everything she needed and wanted; there would be no need to beg on the streets. But for these women, there was no choice. Just like Asha, who had to grow someone else’s baby in her womb so that she could give her family a better life. It wasn’t exactly charity, but Priya really did believe that by using a surrogate, she was helping a woman who could end up on the streets. Someone would have a better life while she got a baby. Really, how could her mother think that there was anything wrong with that bargain?

“Priya would learn to enjoy India, trust me,” Rosie said.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Priya said, sipping her mojito. “Wild dogs couldn’t drag me here. Not for love, not for money. California is home.”

“What if Madhu insisted on moving?” Jeevan asked; it was a challenge.

Priya looked at Madhu and he smiled at her—that warm smile that told her he loved her and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her.

“He won’t,” Priya said confidently.

“So, he has to make sacrifices for you to live in California?” Jeevan attacked.

“
Arrey!
Let’s not make a drama out of this. I love California a lot better than Hyderabad,” Madhu said, interrupting Jeevan. “I couldn’t imagine living elsewhere.”

Priya knew this was true. Madhu had himself become too American to live in India. He might have grown up here, but he wouldn’t fit in anymore.

They made love almost desperately when they got back to Madhu’s childhood bedroom that night, thanks to the excitement of Asha being pregnant and three strong mojitos. Between giggles and loud whispers of telling each other to shush, they groped and touched and enjoyed having sex like they hadn’t in a very long time. The pressure was off. Sex had nothing to do with making babies this time—sex was for fun.

“Do you think your parents heard?” Priya asked when they finished, sweaty and breathless.

“The whole neighborhood heard,” Madhu said, and they both burst into laughter. “And this bed creaks like a son of a bitch.”

“You think they knew what the creaking was about?” Priya asked, the rum in the mojitos still running through her blood, making her giggle.

“Probably,” Madhu said.

“You think if they heard it again they’d be offended?” she asked.

Madhu started to move back and forth while he lay on his back, making the creaking sound, and Priya laughed hysterically, lying next to him.

“Our bed doesn’t make such a ruckus, does it?” she asked.

“I don’t think so, but it’s been so long since you and I had some quality sex, I may have forgotten,” he said. “Let’s make sure when we get back we do this on an experimental basis, you know, to make sure the bed doesn’t creak when there’s a baby in the next room.”

“Yes, it wouldn’t do to wake up the baby,” Priya said, and leaned back against the pillow, content. “We’re going to have a baby,” she said, still in awe.

“Yes,” Madhu said. He moved his pillow up the headboard and leaned against it. “We need to think of names. We need some good names.”

“I don’t think we can name the baby before we see it,” Priya said.

“True. But we can have a short list,” Madhu said.

They’d had this discussion once before when Priya had been pregnant the first time. The second time they had been too scared.

Priya felt some of that old fear again. What if there was another miscarriage? She felt it was bad luck to talk about baby names. But she also wanted to talk about them, because that made the baby real. She felt the fears and conflicts of being pregnant once again, even though she wasn’t the one who was pregnant this time; it was another woman, from another world.

“I like the name Abhay for a boy,” Madhu continued.

“Americans can’t pronounce Abhay; they will say
Abby
,” Priya said, pushing the fears aside. “My dad will say
Abby
. I think we need to find a name that everyone can pronounce.

“I still like the name Ayesha,” Priya said. That was the name they had picked for the girl they were both convinced they would have when she had been pregnant that first, beautiful, carefree time.

“Me, too,” Madhu said. “But I thought you liked Anastasia.”

Priya shook her head. “Krysta told me she had a cousin called Anastasia, and everyone called her Nasty Girl.”

“Great. That name is ruined,” Madhu said.

“We don’t have any boy names,” Priya said thoughtfully. “How about . . .” She sighed. “I have no boy names.”

Madhu put his arm around Priya and pulled her close. “We have plenty of time to come up with the right name.”

Priya moved toward Madhu and nuzzled his chest. “And decorate the baby room. We’ll need a rocking chair to feed the baby. I’m going to miss breast-feeding.”

“Doctor Swati said that could be made to happen,” Madhu said.

Priya shook her head. “It won’t feel natural. And it’s OK; it’ll mean that you can also wake up to feed the baby at night.”

They held each other as they fell asleep, Priya’s thoughts on the baby that was growing in Asha’s womb.

Transcript from message board at www.surrogacyforyou.org

Trying1Time: We have wonderful news. Our surrogate is pregnant, and on the first try. We will go for an ultrasound in two weeks and then back home to California. I’m so thrilled but also scared to leave my baby thousands of miles away.

Mommy8774: Congratulations. And I know what you mean. My heart broke in a million pieces to leave. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else having my baby. But at the end, when I held my child, it made it all worth it. With the second baby it was much easier. I knew what I was doing and in the end it’s easier to do it this way than have more miscarriages.

LastHope77: Congrats! I know how you feel; I cried all the way back to the States. But Mommy8774 is right; holding the baby in your arms, you forget about the bad times. It’s like women who forget how tough the labor and delivery was—this is our labor and delivery, this is our pain and suffering. No one said it was going to be easy, but it is beautiful in the end.

UnoBaby: Absolutely right. I love my baby. I don’t even remember the sleepless nights of worrying. I am ready to do it again. LOL.

NearlyMother: We’re going to try again. Our SM lost the baby—so now it’s back to the drawing board, so to speak. It’s going to be so much tougher this time. But congratulations, Trying1Time, on your pregnancy. XOXO.

CHAPTER FOUR

Asha glared at Pratap as she threw up for the second time that morning.

“This didn’t happen with Mohini or Manoj,” he said, concerned. “Are you sure everything is OK?”

“Yes,” Asha said, wanting to scream at him. Now he acted concerned. Now that he had already forced her into this. He had used Manoj’s future to blackmail her, and she had nausea from the pits of hell. If she had known it would be like this, there was no way she would have agreed to have another woman’s baby.

“Doctor Swati says that it’s a sign that everything is good with the baby,” Asha said, annoyed with herself for comforting her husband while she could still taste the vomit in her mouth. Why didn’t he have to suffer? He should have to feel this same swirl in his stomach—it had been his idea, after all.

The nausea started a week after they saw the baby’s heartbeat in Doctor Swati’s clinic.

The parents had been there. Asha knew their names, but she preferred to think of them as the parents, the mother and the father.

The mother was rail thin. She wore pants and a shirt, and you could see her collarbones. She had bright blue eyes and dark hair—she looked like Aishwarya Rai, the Bollywood actress, only not as pretty. The father was not as tall as Pratap, and he was thin, but not as thin as his wife. He wore sunglasses that he put into his shirt pocket every time he came inside a building. Asha wondered if the glasses would fall if he leaned over to pick something up. They both smelled expensive, and even though they were Indian, she felt they were foreigners, so different from anyone she had ever come in close contact with.

When Doctor Swati had pointed to the heartbeat, the father and mother had pointed as well and looked at the monitor as if it were a precious thing. Asha had felt neglected, like who she was and how she felt didn’t matter; all that mattered to the parents was the baby, and that was the truth.

She was just a vessel, not a human being. Their relationship, if it could be called one, was about the baby inside Asha. Once the baby was born, there would be no relationship. They would not care about her. She would stop existing for them. There was no reason to feel bad about this; Asha had known it going in, but lying there with the cool gel on her belly, she felt a strange sense of injustice, of unfairness, that for nine months she would be very well taken care of, and after that, nothing except the money.

Before they left, they shook her hand; the mother even hugged her, as if overwhelmed. She had said thank you again and again in English.
Thank you
,
sorry
,
please
,
I love you
—these were English phrases everyone was familiar with, even poor nobodies like Asha and Pratap.

The father spoke only in Telugu, clear and perfect, but the mother spoke a mixture of Telugu and English. Her Telugu was heavily accented, like when a foreigner spoke it, and she peppered it with many English words, not all of which Asha understood.

There had been no ultrasound when she’d been pregnant with her children. The
dai
, the village midwife, had checked her once in a while and had deemed everything OK. But this was different. Doctor Swati had prescribed her vitamin pills and instructed her on how much she could physically exert herself, especially when it came to cooking and cleaning and taking care of the family. No one had done that for her before. She couldn’t help but feel that her children were not as important as the child inside her now.

“
Please
take good care of our baby,” the mother had said as she left. She had said
Please
in English and the rest in Telugu.

“I’ll take good care of the baby,” Asha had responded.

“We’ll send a device for you so that the baby can hear us,” the mother said. “Will you play our voices for the baby?”

Doctor Swati had told Asha that some parents did this.

“Yes,” she had said when they gave her a white device with their voices on it. But the baby would hear her voice, too, and Pratap’s and Manoj’s and Mohini’s, Asha thought. Would their child seek them out after birth?

“We will come in the last month and stay until the baby is born,” the father told her. “If you need anything, just let Doctor Swati know.”

Asha couldn’t imagine what she could want, but she said yes.

“If you ever feel anything is wrong, go straight to Doctor Swati,” the mother said. “
Please
, just go to her.”

Asha felt the mother’s panic; it was just like hers when she was pregnant with Manoj. That had been her first pregnancy, and she had been certain that she would hurt him somehow.

“Don’t worry,” Asha said to the mother. “I promise I will take very good care.”

The mother stared at her, as if checking to make sure she was telling the truth. Without thinking, Asha took the woman’s hand in hers and put it on her belly. “I will think of this child as a gift for you. I promise.”

Asha was surprised by her own words and actions, but the woman’s agony had been compelling, and she found herself reacting.

Doctor Swati would send the parents reports about Asha’s health and the baby’s and that would have to suffice. Asha couldn’t imagine how hard that would be. She remembered the first time she’d had to leave Manoj as a five-month-old with her mother-in-law. She had been gone for just two hours for her puja, her prayers, at a neighbor’s house, and she’d been worried the whole time. She at least knew her mother-in-law and trusted her, but these people were leaving their baby inside a stranger. They just had to take it on faith and on Doctor Swati’s word that everything would be OK.

“If you need anything at all, please let Doctor Swati know,” the father said to her again. “Thank you very much for helping us.”

“You’re helping me, too,” Asha said, and for the first time since all of this had begun, she felt a modicum of rightness about what she was doing.

This couple would be overjoyed when she delivered. She would never make anyone as happy as she would make these two people.

“I wonder what else is going to be different about this pregnancy,” Asha muttered as she walked out of the bathroom.

They had moved in with Kaveri, Raman, their boys, and Puttamma. Pratap’s brother’s
big
flat with its two bedrooms, one TV room, and small kitchen was filled to the brim.

Doctor Swati had warned her that every pregnancy was different. So far, this one was sucking the energy out of her.

Asha took her weary body to a chair in the TV room and sank into its cushions.

The others had gone for a wedding in Hyderabad and would not come back for another two days. Kaveri had cooked enough food and put it all in the fridge. All Asha had to do was heat it up. Asha had had to get used to the fridge. She’d never had one before, but Kaveri had assured her that it was really very easy to use.

“Once you drink cold water from the fridge, you’ll not want to drink any other water,” Kaveri had promised her.

Manoj was doing his homework at the dining table. Pratap sat next to him, watching over his work. He couldn’t understand the English words but felt it was his duty to sit with his son.

“Are you going to have a baby, Amma?” Manoj asked. His maturity was beyond his five years—they’d discovered that early on—so it wasn’t a surprise that he understood Asha was pregnant.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Asha said, and then sighed. “Don’t tell anyone about this.”

“It’s a secret?” Manoj asked.

“Yes,” Asha said.

“Why?” Manoj persisted.

“It’s just the way it is. So don’t tell anyone anything in school, OK?” Asha said.

Manoj thought about it and shook his head. “I don’t understand. If I’m going to have a brother or a sister, why shouldn’t I tell anyone?”

“Because we say so,” Pratap interrupted. The problem with Manoj’s extraordinary intelligence and maturity meant that he questioned more than his parents could answer.

Mohini woke up at that moment, and Pratap hurried to the children’s room to pick her up. All four children were to sleep in one bedroom. Kaveri’s boys were six and eight years old and had always been good to Manoj and Mohini. But Asha worried about the sleeping arrangement. For a few days anything could be tolerated, but for nine months?

Asha, Kaveri, and Puttamma slept in the other bedroom, while the men slept in the TV room. Kaveri and Raman had been very generous with their space and had even declined Asha and Pratap’s offer to pay some form of rent while they stayed there.

“We’re family; that won’t be necessary,” Kaveri had said. “You took care of my family when I was away having a baby, and now it’s my turn to take care of you and your family.”

Asha touched her jittery stomach; there was no bulge yet. Nothing indicated the change she was going through. She stroked her belly and then stopped; it was a futile gesture. This wasn’t hers. She couldn’t fall in love with this baby as she had with her own. She just had to let it grow. She wouldn’t be picking names or thinking of what she would do once it was born, if it would be a boy or a girl.

It didn’t matter this time.

As soon as the baby came out, it wouldn’t be hers. She wouldn’t even have to see it. Surrogates could if they wanted to, she’d been told, and she wanted to, just one glance before she sent it to its rightful parents. But after even a single glance, would she be able to give the baby away? Of course she would. She shook the silly thought from her head.

Pratap brought a sleepy Mohini to Asha. “Hold her; I’ll get her milk ready.”

Asha hugged Mohini, smelled her special smell, and kissed a plump cheek. “Did you sleep well?”

Mohini nodded. “Sleep,” she said, and then laughed as Asha tickled her soft feet.

“Kiss,” Asha said, and held out her cheek, and Mohini half licked it and half kissed it, a real kiss still not part of her repertoire.

Asha kissed her daughter on the nose. “You’re such a pretty girl. Such a pretty girl.”

Mohini turned away from Asha, grabbed the steel tumbler containing milk that Pratap held out, and guzzled it down.

Asha watched her daughter drink with gusto and felt relief. In the past, there were some days when they didn’t have enough milk. But those days were over. They would now always have enough money to buy milk.

The poverty of their past would stay behind them. Each day would no longer be a struggle. They would be able to buy rice and sugar, the vegetables they wanted, and not just potatoes.

Asha used to count the money she hid in an empty steel container in their hut’s small cramped kitchen to make sure there was enough to buy food for the coming day. It was a ritual on the weeks when Pratap didn’t have work, weeks when they had to survive on the meager money they were able to save when Pratap did have work.

Pratap would feel guilty for sitting around the house, so he’d walk around the village, talking to people, seeing if he could find work in neighboring villages or in Srirampuram.

“We can always borrow some money from the village food store,” Pratap had suggested more than once.

Afraid of owing money and being under anyone’s thumb, Asha had always asked him not to do so. It wasn’t as if Pratap listened to her, but he didn’t want to be burdened by debt, either. He had seen his father work his entire life to pay off debt he had taken on as a young man, and that had been a lesson to both Pratap and Raman.

“We’ll make do with what we have,” Asha would say. “There’s enough for the children to eat.” But even as she spoke, Asha would worry about having enough for rent at the end of the month. Manoj went to a government-run school. It wasn’t a good school, but it was a school and it was free. However, there were other expenses, and she knew that at this rate they would never have enough money to pay for a good school for Manoj.

“As long as there is food for the children,” Pratap would repeat, “then we’re OK.”

Those had been difficult days. Impossible days. And there had been no end in sight. But now they would have a home, their own home, and they wouldn’t have to worry about rent every month. They would have savings, so when things got tough they could still survive. She wouldn’t have to go to bed hungry because she had given all the food to the children and Pratap. Manoj could become the man he was destined to be.

Thinking of the benefits this baby would bring calmed her upset stomach, helped the nausea subside. But it was a short respite, and before long she was running to the bathroom again, her stomach churning.