The House of Hidden Mothers (18 page)

‘She's gorgeous.' Toby nodded towards Gill. ‘Has your eyes.'

‘And not my nose, thank God!' Gill laughed. ‘Our donor daddy's a handsome beast, but we're hoping our son will have some of Debs's lush face. It's her turn next.'

‘Yup.' Deb grinned. ‘My eggs this time. You're using yours, or …?'

Shyama flinched. She felt as if someone had just reached over, pulled down her trousers and started poking her with a monkey stick. But there was no malice in the two friendly countenances opposite her. She had left behind the pinched faces and empty eyes of the women with whom she had shared those endless private waiting rooms; her new compatriots exuded vitality and good fortune, discussing eggs and sperm as if they were ordering off a menu. Get a grip, woman, she scolded herself. You've come too far to get embarrassed any more.

‘No, I … we'll be using donor eggs and Toby's … my husband's …'

‘Cool. Well, Renu … Dr Passi's got great contacts. She gets eggs in from a load of European countries as well as here. I guess you guys could go native? Indian eggs, I mean, if you want the baby to look like you?'

‘Gill, honey!' Debs laid a hand on her knee, leaning forward mock apologetically to Shyama and Toby. ‘In Adelaide, she's considered subtle. She pissed off everyone we knew in LA so that's how we ended up in San Diego … Remember how nervous we were first time? Give them a break, honey.'

Shyama was now holding the phone and scrolling through an endless parade of the mummies and their baby. ‘So, you had your baby here – how long ago?'

‘Nadia,' Gill said proudly. ‘She's twenty-three months old, so we were last here …?'

‘Two years next week, it will be. We came weeks too early, sort of had a holiday while keeping an eye on Kamini, our baby momma.' Debs took the phone and stroked the screen with a finger, looking up at Toby briefly. ‘It's so hard being here without Nadia, though. My mum's holding the fort. We're just hoping her brother comes along before her birthday – we so wanted to be back for that, but—'

‘Well,' offered Gill, ‘we could always ask Dr Passi to bring forward Kamini's Caesarian if she goes over our deadline.'

Debs threw Gill a brief questioning look.

‘What, Debs? Renu suggested it, it happens a lot. Babies don't just turn up on schedule, right? And we'll need a couple of weeks to sort out the paperwork afterwards.'

‘Oh God, don't get me started on the paperwork,' sighed Debs, rolling her eyes at Shyama. ‘You're both British citizens, right?'

Toby nodded. ‘Yeah, so …?'

‘So you shouldn't have a problem getting the baby home. Just make sure you get in quick with Vinod, Renu's lawyer, as soon as your surrogate's sorted. He's not cheap, but you can't take any chances with the—'

‘Don't scare them, Debs,' interrupted Gill. ‘Look at their faces. It's going to be fine!'

Shyama's face felt tight with smiling. Toby's left foot drummed a jittery beat on the floor of the moving vehicle.

‘Look,' Gill said kindly. ‘We're here again. Can't get a better recommendation than that. And some of the crap we've heard goes on …'

The rest of the journey passed in a haze of horror-filled anecdotes – of couples presented with the wrong babies due to embryo mix-ups; babies born with incurable diseases and left behind; illiterate surrogates virtually pimped out by their male relatives – stories that would later give Shyama vivid nightmares. She and Toby being handed a screaming bundle, which was then revealed to be a squalling baby with a monkey's face and too-human tortured eyes. Shyama in a toilet cubicle, desperately trying to stuff a gurgling infant into a leather holdall, hiding the child under layers of application forms, while Toby waited outside, holding their passports as the last plane ever to leave for London prepared to depart. Shyama and Toby, older, but clichéd old, as if arranged by a slapdash make-up artist – over-greyed floury hair, pencilled-in wrinkles, sitting in slippers before a fire and raising their faces as they heard, ‘Bye, Mum! Bye, Dad! Don't wait up!' Their eyes resting on their son, five foot two, pebble glasses, flaming-red hair. That one at least made her laugh out loud as it woke her, heart slamming against her chest, sheets coiling round her in a damp tangle. This despite the fact that Gill and Debs had ended every tale of doom with the reassurance that ‘It would never happen under Renu's watch. She's the best.'

Shyama and Toby drew up outside the clinic at around the same time that Prem and Sita found themselves once again climbing the dusty stairs to L & L Associates' reception. The office was tucked away in a shopping complex which had remained reassuringly unchanged over the last twenty years, one of the low-roofed, whitewashed buildings that were once the commercial heart of the apartment complexes of the nineties building boom. Sita remembered how proudly their estate agent had gestured towards the Chambeli Centre as he drove them towards their almost completed flat just a couple of blocks away.

‘You see, everything very convenient for you. Pharmacy, grocery, foot doctor, suitings and shirtings boutique. No need even to leave the complex. Perfect for your restful retirement,
hena
, Madam?'

Fifteen years ago, she and Prem were still healthy working people, confident that they would carry their enthusiasm for life and fully functioning limbs into retirement. They made their plans over their kitchen table as the British winter sank its sneaky fangs into their bones: April to September in London, summer holidays with Shyama and Tara, doing all the touristy things they never seemed to have time for while they worked and lived in the capital – Madame Tussauds, tea at the Ritz. Then October onwards, back to Delhi, catching up with family, until the December damp and pollution set off their chesty complaints, and so off to South India – almost another exotic country to North Indians like themselves: coconut fish curry in Kerala, maybe even a peek at the saucy cave statues. Enjoy their free time and the money they had been working all their lives to amass, the golden carrot after the immigrant's donkey work, munching finally on the future together.

Sita paused for breath on the landing. Fifteen years ago she could have run up these stairs. Ten years of fighting for the flat they had never spent a night in had aged them both prematurely. She could feel it, see it in Prem's face beside her. He wore the same expression he always did when it came to anything to do with this dispute, whether it was one of the many international phone calls conducted at unsociable hours, or scanning and emailing duplicates of complex legal documents, or simply listening to one of their friends tentatively enquiring if there had been ‘any good news …?' ‘Long-suffering' was too bland a term for what she saw in the eyes of this gentle, generous man with whom she had shared her life for over fifty years. This was not about the loss of money; it was about the betrayal of a brother whom he had trusted. What price could you put on a man's loss of faith? Prem's brother, Yogesh, could answer that: such a bargain he'd got for the sale of a sibling bond.

Sita reached for Prem's arm and they laughed at each other's wheezy
hai-hais
as they negotiated the final few steps.

‘So, the good news is that we are listed number three for Friday's hearings.' Ravi Luthra beamed at them from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. Ravi didn't actually need to wear glasses at all, but he hoped they would lend him some sorely needed gravitas and so had purchased a pair from a young man in the mall with a stupid haircut. This self-consciously cool-dude type had assured him that many young executives were choosing intellectual eyewear to enhance their chances of promotion. Promotion wasn't an issue for Ravi. His father, Luthra Senior, had had to virtually threaten his son with physical violence to make him study law at college so he could begin the process of taking over the family firm. The promise of a hard slap from the back of his hand was undoubtedly exacerbated by Ravi's announcement towards the end of his law studies that he wanted to pursue an acting career. This then set off a chain reaction amongst the entire extended family, fuelled by months of nervous fainting fits and fundamentalist-level prayer sessions led by his heaving-bosomed mother. His father had gone into total meltdown at the news, infuriated that nothing seemed to sway Ravi from his embarrassingly clichéd Bollywood fantasy. Unfortunately, his son had enjoyed some minor success in the uni drama soc, listening to too many hangers-on telling him that he had that certain star quality and he should most definitely give it a go,
yaar
, why not?

‘It's not all escapist-fantasy, shake-your-asses-at-the-masses movies nowadays,' Ravi had argued with him. ‘The independent film sector is doing some really political ground-breaking stuff. All the major US studios are pouring money into bases over here … and with all the cable channels coming in, we're considered cool now. I mean, actually in fashion. Indian actors are winning Emmy awards over in America! This is the new India, Pops!'

Luthra Senior wished he could explain how many times he had heard that very same line of B-movie dialogue over the last thirty years. ‘Everything has changed and nothing has changed, my son,' Luthra Senior had told him. ‘And besides, take a good look in the mirror. You are skinny, with an unfortunate nose and a squeaky voice, and you will receive not a rupee from me unless you take the gift I and God are offering you. Furthermore,' he threw down his paternal trump card, ‘look at the filmi folk – most of the stars are simply the kids of famous stars themselves. All they are doing is following in the family business, because that is how business works. So why isn't that good enough for you, hah?'

This observation, more than any of his mother's fainting fits, had made Ravi pause for thought. And the longer he paused, the further his thespian dreams had receded, until he had found himself sitting in the chair once occupied by his father (who had retreated to a more comfortable office upstairs), playing with a pair of spectacles he didn't really need.

‘Number three!' he repeated cheerily. ‘So we will definitely get before the judge this time.'

‘
Definitely?
' Sita repeated. ‘Because that's what you said last time, and—'

‘
Hahn-ji
, I know, but this is a very complex case. Jarndyce
versus
Jarndyce, that is the legal system over here.
Bleak House
is, in my opinion, Dickens's masterpiece. A friend of mine did a one-man condensed version of it in Bengali. With some elements of Kathakali dance also. It was a total hit. You have read it, no?'

‘No, but I have read every bit of paperwork a hundred times over and I can tell you, there is not one mistake in there. Not this time. And not last time.' Sita fixed him with a steely stare. ‘So can you explain why our forms were returned as “incorrect” when we both know they were completely correct? After ten years, we have had a lot of practice in filling them in,
hena
?'

Ravi paused. He felt for these very sweet people, he really did. God knows he had dealt with some very difficult NRI clients over the last few years, all of them choking with fury over some stolen land here, some poached property there, banging their fists on his executive desk and demanding justice. Those who remembered living here got it much more quickly than their kids did, the real foreigners with their English accents and their imported bottled water. The second-generation sahibs and memsahibs would look appalled when their parents handed over paper bags full of money for the various bribes that had to be paid; the bags would include a substantial portion of his own fee (perfectly reasonable in any dual economy, the black and the white side by side), then they would be dipped into by his clerk, then handed over to the court clerks, passed on to their peons, the bailiff and his assistants or whatever
goonda
s might be needed to remove the squatters, maybe a locksmith; most certainly some would find its way to the judge (discreetly disguised as necessary administrative costs), and if the police had to get involved, well, then get out the second emergency bag, because there would be a lot of them and you wouldn't want to get into any kind of argument with them, or you might find yourself sitting in jail on some made-up charge, waiting for your traumatized kids to scrabble round for their inheritance funds to get you out in time for your flight home. It wasn't a case of like it or not, it was just how it was.

Of course, he himself would have loved to see all bribery and corruption banished in the new India. He would love to be able to hand in a form and know it would reach its destination simply because people did their jobs properly without the need for a not-so-voluntary donation, to be able to get his daughter into a good school, have his wi-fi connected, call the police when in danger – if he could do all these things without recourse to the paper bag, how simple and clean life would be. But if everyone else was doing it, what kind of a fool would he be to say no and be shoved to the back of the queue? Just as these two people sitting before him had been.

‘Sita-ji.' Ravi cleared his throat gently. ‘As I have explained to you many times, there is a way of resolving this matter much more quickly …'

‘No.' Prem finally spoke, staring Ravi down. ‘We have already made enough … concessions.' Prem nodded his head towards Ravi's briefcase, where he had just hidden a fat bundle of money wrapped up in a copy of the
Sunday Telegraph
.

Even getting these people to pay cash for a third of Ravi's fee had been a struggle, until he had explained that they were welcome to shop around, but every other solicitor he knew would be asking for at least half in undeclared paisa. But Ravi had felt an instinctive pang of pity for this particular couple when his father had handed over their case to him some eight years ago. They were now officially his most long-standing clients, and although it was entirely in his interest to keep this case going for as long as possible, even Ravi could see that time was not on their side and something had to give.