The House of Hidden Mothers (14 page)

‘Lucky cow. Think of all the money you're saving.'

‘Food and laundry on tap? You're laughing.'

‘You've got an en suite? You will never know the grim shame of having to smell other people's shit every morning.'

That was Charlie. He was the department wit, or so he thought. He had cultivated a floppy fringe and what he assumed to be a snappy cheeky-chappie patter which had most of the girls in stitches. Except for her. When Tara deigned to respond to him, she generally wiped the floor with his sorry arse. That was the huge advantage of being an angry young woman: sarcasm came as easily as breathing. Although lately, the line between irony and sincerity was becoming increasingly blurred. When Tara had heard the chorus of moving-back-home stories, she'd muttered, ‘Well, what do you know? We're all Indian now.' And was confused to see her friends all nodding their heads sagely in agreement.

It had started in her mid teens, this blurred boundary between what was said and what was meant, and she traced it back to when she had first gone online. Having moaned at her mother for months, she had finally been given her own computer, one of the last in her class to have one. (And even then, only after her father had sent her a particularly generous Christmas cheque to make up for missing her birthday that year.) The glee at having her own Facebook page soon wore off as she found herself having to learn what felt like a complicated new language. Not just the myriad abbreviations, they were easy enough, but how to negotiate the layers of insult and innuendo that accompanied this collective faceless community. After every cruel barb exchanged online, every throwaway comment about X's fat thighs or Z's general sluttiness, all you had to do, apparently, was add ‘LOL' and a smiley face and claim you were only having a laugh. It was a joke! Older and more net-wise now, Tara had learned to filter out and block the teasers and the trolls, but she wondered if she had lost something else along the way: how to read a face for sincerity, how to vocalize a line that rang true.

A quick glance at her laptop screen confirmed a number of friends were trying to get hold of her: several missed messages on her Facebook page, a few more on Twitter, informing her that the gang were already gathered at the uni bar for someone's birthday. Trending right now: a school shooting in France; an ex-footballer's new underwear range; a dog from Canada who saved a baby from choking by performing a canine version of the Heimlich manoeuvre; a female movie star's slow public decline into insanity. A world of invitations and possibilities just waiting for her to log on and jump in, and if she didn't hurry, they'd simply carry on without her, forget she even existed.

A light snapped on in her grandparents' kitchen. She recognized the slow lilting gait of her grandmother carrying out her usual night-time rituals of wiping down the surfaces and checking that all the electrical appliances were off. Behind her, as always, was her grandfather in his kurta pyjamas, a sheaf of files under his arm, just there for the company, the routine. She remembered that she had promised to pop round to collect some papers they needed to scan and email to their lawyer in India. If she left now she would catch them before they settled down in bed to watch the news on the Hindi satellite channel. Tara grabbed her coat and handbag and made her way down the stairs. As she paused outside her mother's bedroom, she wondered who her tears had been for – the couple who had gained a baby, or the woman who had given one away. Certainly not for her own daughter. She called out briefly, ‘Popping out – back by twelve. My phone's on.'

She didn't quite hear Shyama's muffled reply.

Outside the house, she rolled another cigarette before running towards the approaching bus that would drop her right outside her uni bar.

EVEN THOUGH SEEMA
cried constantly, Mala could not stop eating. The more Seema sniffed and dripped, the more food Mala piled on to her plate, as if she could concentrate better whilst chewing. If she could have eaten the plate itself, she would have done. It was so wafer-thin that when she held it up towards the light, she could see her fingers on the other side. Around the edge was a regular looping design, which on closer inspection revealed itself to be a chain of tiny elephants, each holding on to the tail of the one in front with its trunk. The detail was so clever and delicate, the folds and wrinkles of their hide hanging like just-washed winter blankets, their sad rheumy eyes, the tender pink tips of their trunks. How many hours must it have taken to paint even one, Mala marvelled, before she dumped another handful of colourful pastries over the pattern.

It was clear that Seema had not had many visitors, if any, since her return from the capital. The eager desperation with which she had unpacked boxes of expensive sweetmeats had embarrassed Mala, until she took in the obvious trophies around the room: a new sofa and armchairs in a floral pattern, all with polished wooden legs that reminded Mala of Bee-ji's arthritic bowed knees; a nest of tables, daddy, mummy and baby size, all fitting inside one another, all with smoky-glass tops and lethally sharp corners. Four new lamps over-illuminated the room, one in each corner, with heavy-fringed shades in which a couple of fuzzy moths already fluttered helplessly, trapped in the silken fronds. The new fridge freezer sat against a wall, emitting a low-pitched, absent-minded hum, like a simple relative who had come to visit and been forgotten about. And the purchase that really made Mala draw breath, although she had been trying to look unimpressed: up on the wall, with several wires hanging from its frame, hung a huge thin television screen, like a window into another world, still dark and waiting to be opened.

‘My husband can't work it yet.' Seema sniffed as she pushed another sugar-coated snack at Mala.

Mala ate it in one gulp and, finally satisfied, licked her glittered fingertips and settled back into her chair. The room looked odd, overstuffed with Seema's new purchases which seemed to be pushing against the uneven walls. There was no space to breathe properly, emphasized by Seema's snatched, shuddering breaths, which were finally beginning to subside.
Bas
, no more nicey small talk, Mala decided. When a woman opens her door and weeps a monsoon before a namaste has left anyone's lips, it is best to be blunt.

‘So you went to Delhi and they took your baby away?'

The shock of Mala's question finally stopped Seema in mid flow. She opened her mouth, closed it, then nodded her head, her tears threatening to start all over again.

‘Either cry or speak, you can't do both,' Mala snapped.

Seema wiped her nose on her sari. ‘How … Who told you?'

‘
Bas
, no one had to tell anyone anything. Everyone saw you were pregnant, you went to Delhi, you came back with no baby and a new handbag.'

‘He told me not to tell anyone.' No need to say who
he
was, the
he
was the same in everybody's lives. ‘It was his idea, the whole thing. But then I said yes also. I mean, he didn't force me.'

Mala made one of those all-purpose non-committal
hai-haa
noises that might encourage Seema to spill some more details. Especially the most important one: where all the look-at-me presents had come from.

Seema emitted a gentle watery burp before continuing, ‘Afterwards, I felt glad. But also too sad, crying all the time. Stupid, hah? I should be happy … with all this.' She waved a limp hand around the room. ‘And now we can send the children to the proper school in Bessian. And college also, if they work hard at their studies. And we can give my Babbli a good wedding when the time comes.'

Mala's toes curled with curiosity. Just how much money did this mouse-quiet mumbly couple have?

‘I know people must be saying dirty things about me,' Seema said softly. ‘It is a strange thing to understand. Even for me, sometimes.'

‘What is not to understand?' Mala retorted. ‘It happens all the time.'

‘Does it?' Seema asked, her eyes wide with disbelief.

‘Hah, of course! It is just you did it with a proper doctor. At least this way you won't bleed to death like a halal chicken afterwards, like poor Jassi in my old village.'

Seema looked confused. She was one of life's
lalloo
s, Mala observed – one of those sweet fools who drift on the wind, never making their own luck but letting it settle on them, good or bad; never prepared, always a little bewildered. Now if this kind of luck had blown my way, thought Mala, this room would look completely different. In fact, I would not even be living in this room. I would have bought a flat in Delhi itself with a balcony and a dining table on a ledge, a room attached to the main room but only to be reached by two-three steps. And this leaky long-face spends it all on electrical goods. What a waste! Mala would have gone on spending the money in her imagination for some time, but then something Seema said made her sit up and listen properly.

‘What? What did you say?'

Seema looked up at Mala, eyes tinged with wonder. ‘It was a girl. With blue eyes. So bright blue, like a peacock's neck.'

‘But how could you—'

‘When I was crying afterwards, my husband said, you are just the nest, not the egg. The bird gets strong and then flies away. What is there to be upset about? Especially when these people are giving us so much paisa. But how would he understand? He did not feel her knees making bumps in my belly. He did not see his skin jump like the river when the rain falls on to it, when she got hiccups. He did not feel her flip like a fish under my ribs whenever Pogle sahib sang one of his loud wedding songs. He did not have to push her out with legs so far apart that one foot is in life and the other in death, did he?'

Mala nodded, her lips clamped shut, fireworks blooming noiselessly in her head. Five minutes later she had the whole picture, every detail. Once uncorked, Seema could not be stopped, so Mala had to do little else but listen. And as she listened, she began to understand, finally, why her husband had been spending so much friendly-time with Seema's husband, why he would not touch her any more, why he looked at her the way he did, not seeing her breasts and belly as his, but as valuable treasures for hire.

‘You won't tell anyone, will you?' Seema pleaded with Mala as she hovered at the gate.

‘Oh-foh, woman! Even if I did, they would not believe me, would they?'

Seema placed a tentative hand on Mala's shoulder, afraid it might be swatted away.

‘They were so happy, the American parents, they wept like babies themselves. Even though I gave them a girl. That's what the doctor told me. They felt blessed.'

‘How much did they give you?' Mala asked gently. Several eddies of emotion scudded across Seema's watery face, suspicion ebbing into childish vulnerability, a trickle of shame halted by the dam of Mala's hardening stare. Seema's breath was warm and pickle-scented at Mala's ear as she whispered a sum of money which made Mala inhale the night air in one astonished gasp that left her dizzy, overwhelmed by the layered odours of night jasmine, open fires and baked manure.

Seema's face, when Mala returned to it, was almost kindly, as if she felt sorry for the bitter knowledge she had passed on. It was an old look, one Mala recalled seeing in her mother's limpid eyes when Mala had left her childhood home to follow her husband to his, not knowing if and when she might return; a look of yearning, of bittersweet joy for what is to come and will not stay long, and guarded grief for what must be endured. A shared sense of sweet corruption when women see their fears, their frailties and perhaps their futures mirrored back at them.

As Mala swayed back towards her house, the moon hung low and heavy, a blood-orange earring pulling down on the night's taut skin. Fireflies flitted amongst the peepul-tree boughs, leaving luminous trails behind them which burned sharp and bright before slowly fading away, like the fleeing remnants of a vivid dream. In the distance, the slow pulse of the river throbbed through the darkness. Mala could feel it as she heard it, as if she and the coursing waters were one, being pulled towards the ocean, where she would disappear into its vastness, the speck of her life swallowed up as if she had never even existed.

She entered the house without announcing herself, startling Ram, who stood up too quickly from the charpoy, his metal cup of spiced tea spilling on the floor and absorbed hungrily by the pressed red earth it anointed. Mala began to untie her sari, unwrapping herself slowly like an unexpected present.

‘What are you doing?' Ram stuttered, backing off as his eyes devoured each inch of flesh deliciously revealed, layer by layer. ‘Mamaji might come in.'

‘Let her,' Mala said calmly, the night air greeting her flesh with a warm sigh, her skin rising up, swelling to meet its embrace. She felt dizzy with power, intoxicated by this body that had brought her so much shame. Tch, a girl! A burden to be carried and disposed of as quickly as possible, whose curves had to be disguised or hidden to keep away the predators and silence the gossips. But now, she breathed into Ram's ear, now I am a goddess,
hena
? I hold worlds within my womb and now, you trembling, wet-mouthed, dry-throated, knee-shaky man, now you need me more than I ever needed you. The groan she tore from his throat as she placed his hand over her breast made her smile, a smile that he ate from her lips like a starving dog.