The House of Hidden Mothers (32 page)

It was the news about Seema that had confirmed everything. Just a lucky chance, listening in to the brood mares sitting on their charpoys
hai hai
-ing about their fat ankles and bulging veins, boredom making them indiscreet. Virtually every woman was there in secret, only their husbands knowing the truth about their confinement. They feared the reaction of their neighbours and friends, village elders and local gossips. Then Mala heard Seema's name mentioned, and the name of her own village. Her ears pricked up whilst she carried on nonchalantly leafing through the pages of her
Elle India
.

‘So they had the house built, AC, widescreen TV and all. But someone must have told someone else, you know how it is. They go off shopping, they come back,
bas
. The whole
koti
is burned to the ground.'

Also all that Shyama Madam had done, how she had done it, Mala would never comprehend, but the two of them – she and Toby sahib – were always huddled together doing
sus-sus
whispers and then looking over at her with that fond faraway smile that made Mala feel both special and utterly transparent. As if they looked through me, nah, not at me, as if I was made of smoke, of cloud. Then there was schoolwork – at least, that was how it felt to her. What to say, what not to say, especially to anyone in a uniform or at an airport.

‘Not that all of this isn't perfectly legal,' Shyama Madam would say. ‘I mean, we have paid enough to make it happen, but …'

Mala held up a hand. No need to explain, she conveyed, I live here, I know how some pot belly in khakhi who's had a row with his wife or didn't collect enough
rishwat
that day could decide to make your life more difficult simply because he could. Hadn't she managed to sit with her blank-wall face whilst Dr Passi shouted and banged desks and wagged witchy fingers, and then totally calmed down when Toby sahib told her in that deep soil voice that she would still get paid? Then, Mala sniggered as she recalled, doctor-ji couldn't do enough for the
firenge
parents: hot chai and the special cardamom biscuits and the patting of my hand and telling me how lucky-lucky I was to be so looked after and so special. God knows how I didn't spit biscuit crumbs in her face. But then, Mala told herself as she opened another packet of complimentary cashews, I have had a lot of practice, hiding what is heating me up inside.

There had been one very sticky moment – actually a few days of stickiness – when the question of leaving her children had arisen, the
bacche
in the photograph still pinned to the wall behind her small dormitory bed, smiling as if they loved her and would never let her go.

‘But surely,' Shyama Madam said to Toby in front of her when this whole running-away idea had come up, ‘this is not going to work. How can Mala leave her two children behind?'

Hare
, that was the moment when everything could have crumbled like laddoos in milk, for why should you tell the truth when the truth is only going to make you look bad and make them feel like first-class fools?

‘Madam …' Mala began, keeping her eyes to the floor, ‘those children … I didn't … they are my husband's children … you understand?'

Mala had seen the confusion in her face, then the suspicion, and then the thing that disturbed her most, the disappointment.

‘You mean they are your stepchildren?' Shyama registered Mala's uncertainty and continued impatiently, ‘Your husband had another wife then? They are her children?'

Mala nodded, relieved she did not have to think on her feet and find the correct English translation at the same time.

‘So you didn't give birth to these children. This …' Shyama continued, a soft gesture towards Mala's abdomen, ‘our first baby … is your first baby as well?'

Mala nodded again. She felt Toby sahib's eyes on her. Would he be coldly furious, the way he had looked at Ram that night outside the hotel when his boyish features had hardened into something bestial and thrillingly cruel? She had glanced up briefly. Toby had placed a restraining hand on Shyama Madam's arm. She had talked too quickly and loudly for Mala to pick up everything, but she had known it was not good. Something about taking the doctor to court and proper background checks and what would happen if something went wrong ‘with her', looking at Mala, pecking at Toby sahib like some heat-crazed, red-feathered bird until he had put his hand up, just like some traffic cop on a highway.

‘Nothing will go wrong,' Toby sahib said to her, while looking at Mala, who realized that she should say something, anything to make this OK.

‘Madam,' she said softly, ‘those children … they were mine, but not mine. I loved them, but I can leave them also. Just the same with this one. I can love this baby, but also I can leave this baby when I have to.'

Vah
, how she had come out with such perfect poetry Mala still did not know, but it had worked and now she was here in an aeroplane, a speck in the sky, a blink of God's eye, about to watch her third movie on her personal television screen. She could not resist one more look at the secret tucked away in the inside zip-up compartment of her new nylon travel bag. She had checked the pocket every fifteen minutes or so since they had boarded the plane, until Shyama Madam had smiled and asked if maybe she wanted to hand it over to her for safekeeping. Mala had shaken her head. She saw the amused pity in the other woman's face, it rolled off her like ghee spitting from a hot griddle. She unzipped the compartment and brought it out again, feeling its weight on her palm, so light; she wanted to press it to her nose and inhale the newness and promise of its leathery smell, the deep-blue cover, the shiny gold stamp. ‘
Theklo
,' Mala whispered softly to her stomach. ‘This is because of you,
baccha
.' Mala rested her hands on her ribs, still clutching the passport, and wondered if the fluttering in her stomach was tremors of fear, joy, or the first tentative flexing of tiny limbs.

It was only when they had pulled away in the taxi and left the endless roundabouts and flyovers of the airport behind that Shyama's pulse rate finally began to slow down.

‘My God …' she breathed to Toby, ‘I thought I was going to throw up at passport control. That bloke kept her there for ages … I thought they were going to deport her, chuck us in jail … I mean, how do people ever have the guts to smuggle drugs or—'

‘We had nothing to worry about,' Toby soothed her. ‘She said exactly what's on her visa. She's our domestic, here for six months. The only thing we haven't mentioned is that she's pregnant, and they didn't ask, so we didn't have to lie. She did great.' Then, uncomfortably aware that the subject of their conversation was sitting opposite them, Toby leaned forward and and smiled. ‘You did great, Mala.'

Mala barely registered Toby's compliment. She sat with her nose pressed to the window, an expression of intense concentration on her face. She had hardly spoken since they had left the airport.

‘She's probably shell-shocked right now …' Shyama whispered, leaning into Toby, smelling their long journey on him – recycled stale air, antiseptic handwash, lukewarm coffee still on his breath. ‘I'd hoped at least it might be sunny …'

‘Ah, why fill her with false hope, eh?' Toby whispered back, wishing he could get to his fleece, folded away in his hand luggage in the boot. The slap of the freezing rain as they ran for their cab had surprised him too. He had got used to the freedom of flinging on a T-shirt and wandering out into bright light and balmy heat. His childhood was one long sequence of sullen skies and platter-flat fields, punctuated by the occasional exclamation mark of an unexpected, fleeting sunny day. He supposed there must have been more of them, but they had been overpowered by his memories of damp and drizzle. Suffolk lads were meant to tolerate wind and wet, he supposed that was why they all shared a similar wide-legged stance, feet rooted to withstand whatever gales came buffeting them from The Wash with nothing in between to slow or calm them down. And yet here he sat, shivering in the back of a taxi, numbed by the bleakness of the landscape rolling past, every colour bleached to steel, so few people out on the streets, the few that there were hunched miserably against the weather. No street vendors, no car horns, no lone cows or shamefaced stray dogs dodging the traffic, no eye-watering clash of the pinks and greens and reds of saris and painted trucks and awnings. Toby's chest tightened; if he hadn't been born here, he would have called this sinking sensation a kind of homesickness. So what Mala must be feeling, he could not begin to imagine.

Sofa Workshop … Storage Solutions … M & C Garages … Polski Sklep … Mala recited each one in her head, like the pupils under the peepul tree at school, repeating every word the lantern-jawed Master-ji pointed at, like eager scrawny parrots. No need to explain the word itself, not to these children who will only end up herding buffalo or scrubbing dishes, so repeat, nah? Shell Petroleum … Little Tykes Togs … World of Leather. This last one would have made her mother-in-law spit on the ground and fling prayers of forgiveness at the heavens; a whole world of dead flayed cows? And what was she doing now, the toothless, bat-eared
buddee
? No doubt smearing Mala's name with every word of shame she could imagine, telling the wide-eyed villagers that her ungrateful
bahu
had run off with a heroin dealer/was selling her scrawny body to building-site lackeys/had been most unfortunately knocked over and killed by a runaway three-wheeler. Of the three, Mala hoped it was the last one. She prayed fervently that Ram and his mother had decided to take the easiest option and kill her off completely. Then,
chalo
, I will never have to go back to the family village. She felt only a tiny twist of regret when she imagined the news reaching her mother's ears. No, better for her I am dead. How would she survive this, in a place where a disgraced woman is better dead and forgotten than walking around, brazenly and digracefully alive?

She had noticed all the Indians at the airport – so many of them, behind the desks, serving in the shops, sweeping the floors. They looked the same in many ways as the ones she'd left behind, but there was a difference Mala couldn't quite define. Same clothes, same straight partings and carefully placed bindis, same trimmed beards, turbans, hijabs. Maybe the women seemed sharper-elbowed and more straight-staring, occupying their space with no mousey glances from side to side. But then, back home, the only women who did that were the lower castes, the poor ones who would stand aside with eyes lowered when any of the madams needed to walk in their space. Maybe that was it: here, Mala could not tell, just from looking, who did what job, what low-class bazaar or high-class mall their clothes came from, how rich their husbands were from looking at the gold they wore around their wrists and necks, how much of the day they spent on foot by checking the dirt on their shoes; even the shade of their skin gave no clue as to how many hours they'd had to labour outside. The man who had checked her passport was darker than Mala; the woman cleaning the toilet had a glowing milky sheen that would not have disgraced a filmi heroine. A person could get lost here, Mala realized. Me, I could walk along these too-clean streets and be anonymous and free. She could put up with a few drops of rain for that.

As the taxi finally pulled into Shyama's street, she squeezed Toby's hand, which lay limp as a fish in hers. He gave a slight shiver in response.

‘Nervous?' she said softly.

‘Cold,' Toby replied, and pulled his hand from hers so he could leap out of the car and run round to the other side to open the door for Mala.

Sita had had little to do in preparing the spare room. Tara's recent feverish bout of spring-cleaning had taken care of the elbow-grease jobs. Shyama's instructions, conveyed via Skype, were to transform what had been her study back into the bedroom it used to be. Prem took the laptop to Shyama's bedroom, the sofa was opened out into a sofa-bed and
bas
, it was pretty much ready. Sita had asked Tara a few times to put out fresh towels and a few basic toiletries – shampoo, soap, toothpaste – and ensure there were hangers in the small oak wardrobe which had been doubling as a makeshift stationery and DVD store – but somehow Tara kept forgetting. Too much time in her room probably, on that stupid computer, thought Sita, though thank God those loud locust friends had stopped visiting so much. Actually they had not been round at all recently. So Sita arranged the toiletries in what she hoped was a welcoming pattern on the chest of drawers, the top now clear of old photographs and the drawers empty of spare linen, and as a final and, she thought, generous gesture, added a bunch of tulips in a vase she had found tucked away under the kitchen sink. One more strange gesture in these strangest of times. She was putting out flowers for a woman carrying her daughter's baby. The idea of a newborn in this house was disconcerting enough, the fact that her daughter had chosen this path too much to digest right now. Sita only hoped she would not be roped in for babysitting, she was way too old and tired for that – something she wished Shyama had paused to consider for herself. The tulips bowed their crimson crowns to her, a pop of colour in the stark room. This will seem like luxury to that village girl, Sita thought not unkindly.

She had no objection to the girl giving birth over here – it made sense, given the behaviour of her low-life husband that evening. But she had her own personal and bitter experience of what happens when generosity is mistaken for stupidity, sacrifice for spinelessness. True, they had an eviction date now, but she knew only too well that it could still come to nothing, thanks to lost papers, incorrect data, courtesy of Sunil making the rounds of the clerks' offices with his oily moustache and greasy palms. The money she had paid out in bribes meant nothing to her – how much of their income had been sent back to Prem's relatives over the years without her approval? But there had been a bigger price to pay: for the first time in her fifty-year marriage, she had lied to her husband. It sat like a furball in her throat, choking her every time Prem remarked on how strangely fortuitous it had been to get this date, and so quickly after the judge's refusal! Didn't it prove his point all along, that good would eventually prevail, that Gandhi-ji's theory was right, and passive honourable resistance would erode all obstacles like trickling water on rock? And Sita would swallow and avoid his eyes and nod her miserable yes. All this, because some people had got too comfortable with the good fortune which had landed in their laps. Of course, Sunil and Sheetal were never going to quit voluntarily, it was always going to end this way. And the woman carrying Sita's next grandchild – once the baby was out and her job was over, with no husband or village to return to – well, what then?