The House of Hidden Mothers (15 page)

ON THE THIRD
morning in their hotel in New Delhi, Shyama opened the glass doors leading on to their small balcony and came face to face with a plump brown monkey, which looked up from the oversized brassiere it held in its paws. It barely reacted to Shyama's cry of surprise; in fact, it looked somewhat annoyed at the interruption. Toby wanted to feed it some banana from the modest fruit bowl they had found in their room, but Shyama snatched it out of his reach.

‘They're vicious, these street monkeys, and they're crawling with rabies.'

‘You don't crawl with rabies.' Toby smiled, making a lunge for an apple. ‘That's fleas. Besides, he's holding a bra. How tough can he be? Not yours, is it?'

‘Since when have I gone for purple nylon underwear, Toby? Back off! It's like going to hug a hoodie – he'll mug you for your fruit and probably chew your shoes off for good measure.'

Toby backed down and, at Shyama's insistence, tried to shoo the monkey away with loud claps and noisy stamps. The monkey scratched its bottom, threw the bra at Toby's head and leaped into a nearby tree with a yawn.

Shyama and Toby stood on their balcony for a while. Five floors up, they could see pockets of South Delhi in between the treetops and office blocks: dual carriageways and flyovers snaking around a mossy ruin of an old religious site; students streaming out of a nearby college with backpacks and bicycles; a sports stadium of some kind, its long-necked spotlights craning at each other in a perfect circle.

Later on, lying on the bed under the revolving ceiling fan, the air-conditioning unit thrumming at full blast, Shyama told him how a group of these frisky rhesus monkeys had broken into the Indian Ministry of Defence offices some years back and had thrown about top-secret papers whilst looking for food. They'd even broken into the Lok Sabha itself and run amok, terrorizing MPs, inevitably inspiring reams of column inches inviting readers to ‘Spot the Real Monkeys!' Plus raising more serious questions about national security and the dignity of government.

‘They're a real problem in this city. They attack people, break into houses; they can open fridges and everything, run off with kids' packed lunches. I remember the last time I came here, my auntie kept a pointy stick on the porch, she called it her
bander dhi lukurd
.'

‘Which means?' Toby stroked Shyama's damp hair away from her eyes.

‘Monkey stick.'

‘Does what it says on the tin.' Toby snuggled into Shyama and rested his chin on her shoulder.

‘It got so bad in the area around parliament, they hired these other monkeys, bigger ones, to chase away the smaller ones. Langurs, I think. Scary-looking, huge teeth.'

‘Like
Planet of the Apes
.'

‘Well, not really … I don't think the monkeys are going to rise up any time soon and enslave the good citizens of Delhi.'

‘No, I mean in the film there's a pecking order. Amongst the apes. Or rather, the apes are at the bottom, they're treated like the dumb strong workers, and the brainy chimps are in all the managerial jobs. And the orang-utans are the professor types.'

Shyama raised herself up on one elbow. ‘You've really thought about this, haven't you?'

‘I was imagining the last scene, you know, where Charlton Heston finds the head of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand and realizes he's not on some freaky faraway planet, he's actually on Earth. But in the future. That somewhere along the way, human beings have messed up and it's too late to do anything about it. Except in our version, he'd find the top of the Taj Mahal, wouldn't he?'

‘Now I'm worried. Must be the heat. Mad Dogs and Englishmen.'

Shyama kissed the tip of Toby's already sunburnt nose. She had warned him before they left that a natural blond like him who had never been anywhere hotter than Devon was going to suffer in the sun. And yet what surprised her was how easily Toby had adapted to the chaotic swell of her mother country.

The first time she had visited India with English friends, way back in her college days, she had underestimated or maybe just forgotten how even stepping out of the plane was like being slapped in the face – emotionally, physically, sometimes literally, if you got caught in the pack of passengers determined to get ahead in the passport queue. Somewhere over the Middle East, these fellow travellers, who had stood politely and patiently in line at Heathrow, had shrugged off the stiff jackets of their
angrezi
manners and slipped back into their
desi dhotis
, louder, loose-limbed, ready to push their way through any barrier, as queueing was strictly for foreigners now. Shyama still remembered the fear on her friends' faces as they realized that no amount of ‘excuse me's and pursed lips would help them. It carried on as they left the airport, immediately besieged by taxi drivers and porters fighting for their luggage, which they clung to like driftwood in a sweaty storm of cheerful humanity. It got worse as they sat in the back of an incense-filled cab, its dashboard adorned with beatific smiling deities, who seemed to mock their terror as they swung in and out of the suicidal traffic, gaping as whole families perched on one moped cut them up on one side, articulated lorries decorated like wedding carriages on the other. It was when the begging children appeared at their cab windows, tapping on the glass, pointing to their mouths, that they finally cracked.

‘Sister … Mummy … hungry … please …'

Shyama had looked up to see both her friends crying, one of them with her purse already out, the whole of her spending money on show.

‘Don't!' Shyama said instinctively.

She hadn't meant, don't give money. Rather she was warning them to hide their money in case the beggar boss around the corner decided to send one of these children to their hotel later on. She had wanted to advise her friends not to give hard cash, which would be snatched away from those little hands the minute they rounded the corner. Rather they should get out of the cab and take the kids for something to eat, fill their bellies and then give them enough to keep them from being beaten up later. But she didn't have time to say any of this. The taxi had zoomed away, leaving the children coughing in a dustcloud, their hands still outstretched and her friends staring at her with undisguised contempt.

This single incident had overshadowed the whole holiday. Every so often, Shyama would catch her friends giving her a peculiar sideways glance, one that seemed to say, you are not the person we thought you were. She didn't know how to express what she knew instinctively: that their judgement of her was somehow linked with a whole deep-rooted colonial past, where they were the good guys and she the savage who had reverted to her true primordial nature. She didn't know how to explain that in order to survive here, as opposed to just passing through, you had to find strategies to preserve your sanity. Otherwise how does anyone get the washing done and work and laugh and dream, unless there is some way to live alongside death, poverty and truly terrible traffic? This was how her relatives had expressed it, in those years when she had visited India every summer, determined not to lose the thread that connected her to her extended family. That was, until the whole issue around her parents' stolen apartment had arisen.

The hotel phone rang, and Shyama reached over Toby to answer it.

‘Oh, hi Mama … Sorry, did you call before? OK, just let us know. You've got my Indian mobile number, haven't you?'

Shyama replaced the receiver and rested back on Toby's chest.

‘They've got legal stuff most of the day. Mum says she'll buzz us later if they can make supper.'

‘Didn't she want to know what we were doing?' Toby enquired teasingly.

‘Well, she's still doing the Indian-mother thing; if you don't mention it, it's not really there.'

They hadn't planned on telling Prem and Sita about the purpose of this trip, until it transpired that they would all be in India at the same time, the latest court hearing coinciding with their clinic booking. As Sita and Prem had insisted on travelling on the same flight as Shyama and Toby, and recommended hotels for them near Prem's older brother's place, where they would be staying, Shyama realized they would have to confess all. Dry-mouthed, with Toby at her side, she finally sat them down on their first evening in Delhi and announced their surrogacy plans. The first couple of minutes went well – innocuous enough stuff about why they had chosen this particular route, how they had chosen this particular clinic, how they would manage their finances. It was when Shyama came to the actual mechanics of the process that she began to falter.

‘So, well … it's a very common procedure … I mean there are literally hundreds of clinics in India that do this.'

‘Do what exactly?' Sita had looked up innocently from her cuppatea.

‘Well, they take an egg from another woman – the donor – and they combine it with one of Toby's …'

Shyama simply could not say the word ‘sperm' in front of her mother, her mouth refused to move. Toby put his farming head on and manfully took over, running through the explanation with breezy efficiency, even inviting questions from the audience afterwards. Prem said nothing, but puffed at his pipe so vigorously that he sat in a cloud of fug, no doubt thankful for the smoky camouflage.

Sita was silent for a while, then dusted a few crumbs off the table and said, ‘Well, in our day, if you couldn't have a baby, your sister or brother would give you one of theirs to bring up. No one minded very much. As long as you loved the baby, they grew up fine. But I suppose as Shyama is our only child, now you must pay for that … service.'

‘Yes, exactly!' Shyama said, relieved. ‘That's a good way to look at it, Mama.'

‘Except, of course, there was none of this taking a bit from here and a bit from there. Like cooking with leftovers. But if that's what you both want …'

A small shrug of the maternal shoulders and that, apparently, was all Sita was going say on the matter.

Leaving the salon in the capable hands of Geeta and her team had been the easiest part of Shyama's to-do list. Toby had so many weeks of holiday owing to him that his sudden sabbatical wasn't opposed. And now here they all were – all of them bar Tara, who'd declined the offer of a free trip, citing coursework pressure. Shyama was ashamed to admit to herself that she'd been mightily relieved not to be dragging her daughter along too on her let's-get-pregnant holiday. Particularly as she had been feeling so unsettled since they had arrived in India. Sense memories hijacked her at odd moments: the smell of the
rath-ki-rani
garlands outside the roadside temples; the cool citric fizz of the
nimboo pani
she had yearned to drink on her arrival, achingly familiar, buried deep, making her feel both a stranger and a returning exile at the same time. What would they think of her now, her old lefty student friends, coming back as a fertility tourist? Was she now the colonial memsahib? The benevolent bringer of bounty, or the ruthless trader, smiling her way back home?

In their hotel room, Toby began slowly unbuttoning Shyama's top, kissing her neck. Outside the irregular honking of car horns was overlaid with the cries of vegetable sellers, temple bells, the soaring violins of a Hindi film song.

‘The real reason they will never get rid of the monkeys,' Shyama mused, shifting so Toby could reach the last stubborn button, ‘is that people keep feeding them. Every Tuesday, my Auntie Neelum used to lug a huge bag of fruit and nuts over to Raisina Hill and join all the other good Hindus making their offerings to Hanuman.'

‘The monkey god …' Toby murmured.

‘Gold star for you. She'd always make a big deal of how religious she was, my auntie – joss sticks and mantras every morning, dragging us all to the temple when all we wanted to do was shop. Making up her packed monkey lunch like she was going on some pilgrimage: Hanuman helped Ram defeat the ten-headed demon Ravan, therefore I will go and throw peanuts at the street monkeys in case one of them reports back to their boss and I skip a few reincarnations up the scale towards nirvana.'

Toby was taking his T-shirt off hurriedly, his face filled with familiar blind purpose.

‘And yet she's the same thieving old bint whose daughter has stolen my parents' flat. Marvellous, eh? Do you remember, for your bonus point, what Hanuman is the god of?'

Toby was by this time lying across her, bare chested, face flushed, about to tackle the complicated machinery of her bra fastening. He could have done with some assistance from the cross-dressing monkey. ‘I don't know! Jumping?'

‘Not far off, actually. Wrestlers. Athletes. He's a protector of boundaries, the supreme example of a devoted disciple. And sometimes seen as an icon of fertility.'

Toby glanced at Shyama, a strange smile twisting her face. He noticed the fine lines fanning out from the side of her eyes, a weary droop around her mouth that he had not seen before. He had a sudden glimpse of how she might look in ten, twenty years' time. The flesh at the top of her arms, which he held now, felt soft and sagged slightly in his hand. He knew that when he finally removed her bra, he would have to lift her breasts with careful tenderness, like handling warm, just-laid eggs. It had never bothered him before. He didn't want to think about it now. He wished she would just stop talking. But she continued, ‘Maybe we shouldn't have chased that monkey away.'