The House of Hidden Mothers (41 page)

Sita couldn't remember ever saying such a stupid thing, but nevertheless, Prem had booked them a room in a modest hotel equidistant from Ravi's office and the flat. Yet more money they should not have to be spending, fumed Sita, but after this, they could finally close their wallets. Of course, she did not mention to Prem the large wad of sterling that she had secreted between her two best saris for the bribes she knew would have to be handed over on the actual day, but she intended to give that job to Ravi himself. They had come too far to go all shy and English now.

Shyama had once seen a sad-faced stuffed monkey tied to the front of a refuse truck as it roared its way down her narrow street. That's how she felt now: lashed to a juggernaut that was hurtling its way towards Mala's due date of 14 December, and towards the Christmas build-up when she knew business at the salon would reach manic levels. And on top of that, she had begun to panic about having nothing ready for this unnamed, unborn boy. She had forgotten everything she must have known when she gave birth to Tara nearly twenty years ago. She could just about remember how to change a nappy, but how often did you actually feed a baby when you weren't breastfeeding on demand, as she had done before? Would Mala insist on feeding him? Or would they get her to express milk so she and Toby could have that shared experience? Would Mala mind being milked like a prize cow? Should she even care that Mala might mind, because if they'd been in India, she would have had no say in the matter.

A quick dash around the local department store's baby section left her breathless and baffled; there were so many gadgets now. Luckily, a smiling sales assistant seemed to be following her around. Eventually Shyama turned to face her.

‘Anything I can help you with today?'

‘Er, I'm just … I need a start-up package really,' said Shyama.

‘How long before baby's due?' the assistant enquired.

‘Um, about seven weeks, I think …'

‘Oh you've got time. Pretty much everything here is in stock and the longest wait on ordered items is three weeks. So is it a grandchild you're waiting for?'

‘Pardon?' stammered Shyama.

The woman's expression barely rippled. ‘Or maybe a niece or nephew? We have a lovely range of Gifts from Grandma, Auntie or Godmother, all very personal … if you'd like to follow me?'

Shyama would have liked to buy the Peppa Pig baby thermometer and stuff it into one of the assistant's orifices, but instead told her she had been very helpful and that she would come back later with Grandpa. On the way home, she put Priya on speakerphone and regaled her with the whole story and they both laughed so much that she almost missed her turning home.

‘Cheeky mare! Although, fair dues, you could have been a child bride, because “They do that in your culture, don't they?”' Priya snorted.

‘And I thought Mala's face masks were actually doing some good! Maybe she's given me the reject batch, the ones that age you instead.'

‘Does this all feel incredibly weird now?' Priya asked, sounding like she was at the end of a wind tunnel.

‘Oh, I think we've redefined weird, don't you?' Shyama replied. She noticed that a couple of the pound shops already had tinsel edging their windows. One window display featured a gaggle of ugly dancing reindeer. December the fourteenth. D-Day. Due date. By the time every one of those Rudolphs had been unwrapped and broken, she would be holding her son.

‘Thanks for listening to me bleat on. I needed to laugh. And now I need to wee.'

‘Welcome to the golden years,' Priya deadpanned. ‘I'm booking you in for the first weekend in December. We will go to John Lewis and kit you out with anything we can't borrow or beg from mates and contacts. Don't worry about being ready. Who's ever ready for a baby? And at least you won't be worrying about cracked nipples and stitches when yours arrives. You will be looking rested and lovely, and yes, very very young. There's got to be some advantages to doing it this way, right?'

She was only a few streets from home when she got a call from Tara.

‘Mum, are you free? Can you come and meet me?'

‘What, now?'

‘It's … sort of urgent.'

Shyama didn't need to be asked again. It was a rare enough call, and for Tara to reach out to her with something urgent …

She had been through every possible scenario by the time she reached the Bluebird Café, tucked away in an alleyway between two trendily reclaimed warehouses not far from Tara's college: an STD, nervous breakdown, drugs, being thrown off her course, a broken heart. As far as she knew, Tara had never had a boyfriend. Or girlfriend, for that matter. She couldn't have guessed what was coming in a million years.

‘Sorry, say that again?'

Shyama's elderflower fizz remained halfway to her lips. She was surrounded by students tapping constantly on their laptops and tablets; leaflets for yoga classes and upcycling requests were stuck on the noticeboard behind Tara's head.

‘I'm not dropping out, it's an assignment. For my second-year dissertation. Did you know I'm on a steady first in all my modules?'

Shyama swallowed. She could still feel bubbles bursting at the back of her nose and throat.

‘I'll only be gone three months maximum. It was all they'd allow me and even then I had to plead for a special dispensation. You've always wanted me to spend some time in India, Mum, and with Nanima and Nana being there, it seemed the perfect time to go.'

Except they both knew it meant Tara would not be at home for the birth.

‘So what exactly will you be doing there? Where will you stay? How will you pay for this—'

‘Assignment,' Tara finished her sentence. She was beginning to sound impatient. It didn't seem there was any room for negotiation here. She wasn't asking her mother, she was informing her.

‘OK. I'm going to be shadowing an organization called Shakti, a women's activist group based in South Delhi, and filming their work, which I will present as a finished documentary for my dissertation. Secondly, I'm going to be staying at Nanima's hotel to start off with, and then hopefully I'll find somewhere through the women I'm going to be working with …'

‘Sweetheart,' Shyama interrupted, ‘it's not like London. Most women your age still live at home—'

‘I still live at home, Mum.'

‘You know what I mean. A woman living alone out there … it's a different mindset. You need family, not colleagues.'

‘I've got family there if I need them. Thaya-ji's not far. I won't be alone. I'll find a flat-share or a hostel if I have to. I could even live in Nana's flat once it's empty …'

‘And Nanima and Nana suggested that, did they?'

‘They said they'd pay for wherever I end up. As long as it's safe.'

Shyama blinked. They had arranged this whole thing without even consulting her. And then another thought wormed its way to the surface.

‘Did you talk to Mala about this? Was it her idea?'

Tara shifted in her seat. Of course she had discussed this with Mala. It was partly all her stories about her village, her husband, the fate of so many other women she knew that had inspired Tara to go out there, to do something practical instead of sitting in her room raging at her computer. But she knew her mother wouldn't understand any of this; all she would feel was betrayal, when for Tara, this trip was some kind of absolution. She needed to purify herself and the only way to do that was to give something pure back, balance the abusive act she had endured by fighting abuse elsewhere. If her mother had been younger, if she could remember how it felt to be almost twenty, a half-formed woman finding her way in the world, she would have given her blessing. But she was looking older nowadays. The pale autumnal sunlight filtering through the steamed-up windows picked out fine lines around her eyes and on her forehead, a slight tugging at the corners of her mouth giving her face a melancholy air that hadn't been there before all this surrogacy malarkey. It came to Tara then, a dull realization that this was the price they both had to pay: her mother had chosen to start all over again with a new baby, nappies and nurseries and playdates and homework and music lessons and sports days and exams and only being able to book holidays in the most expensive season, her whole life shifting on its axis to revolve around the sun, the son. All Tara's other friends had mothers who were planning travels with their grown-up daughters, spa breaks and walking holidays and theatre trips. Hers would be far too busy. It wasn't Mala who had pushed her out of the nest, it was her own mother. And, Tara suspected, maybe this was the only way that she would truly learn how to fly.

‘This has nothing to do with Mala, Mum. It's what I need to do. Anyway, you'll be too busy with … With everything else going on, you won't even notice I'm gone.'

Tara had been given strict instructions to leave her luggage in the hallway the night before they were to fly to Delhi. It was an early start. Toby knew everything would take twice as long with Tara's parents in tow so he'd asked them to do the same.

Tara set her single canvas holdall down next to her grandparents' battered suitcases. She wondered if they were the same ones they'd arrived with fifty years back, with their dodgy brass locks and the bright scrap of scarf that Nanima always insisted on tying to the handles, ‘So they don't get mixed up with anyone else's.' No one else would risk transporting their belongings in these creaky old bags, but Prem and Sita held on to everything – clothes, kettles, ironing boards – until they literally died of old age, fusing the house or splintering beneath their touch.

Shyama had been shocked at how little Tara was taking, but she'd explained that she wanted to be able to move around unencumbered by too much stuff.

‘Shakti have a lot of rural outreach work going on, I may end up on the road quite a bit …'

That ensured Shyama packed a couple of extra packets of diarrhoea tablets for her; if travelling with the contents of a pharmacy made her mother feel a bit better, Tara would do it. She could afford to be magnanimous, she was leaving.

She didn't want to switch on any lights. All was quiet and dark downstairs, and there was no sound from her mother's room. The street lamps outside were bright enough. As she turned to go back up to her room, she heard the faint creak of a floorboard behind her.

‘Tara?'

Mala stood beside her, her finger already on her lips, gesturing towards the open door of her bedroom. Only when they were inside and the door was firmly shut did she flick on the bedside lamp. Tara hadn't been in this room since Mala had moved in. It didn't look as if anyone actually stayed here, it was so neat and clean, with the feel of a recently serviced hotel room. There was a new cork board hanging on the wall near the bed. Toby must have put that up. Pinned to it were treatments lists from the salon, articles cut out from magazines on various beauty products, and the faces of assorted female celebrities marked with Mala's spidery writing, with arrows pointing to their eyebrows, lips, mouths. And, more surprisingly, estate agent details for a number of properties – some local flats, others grand detached houses way out of any normal person's price range, and most definitely Mala's. What struck Tara was that amongst all the information, there was not one article even vaguely related to pregnancy or babies.

‘Sorry to disturb, Tara … you will mind taking these to India for me?' Mala handed her a couple of letters, both unstamped. ‘I have no Indian stamps … I give you money for them?'

‘No, that's fine, Mala, I can cough up for a couple of stamps.'

‘Cough up?' Mala cocked her head to one side.

She's like a little sponge, thought Tara, greedy to absorb everything. There was a hunger emanating from her so palpable it seemed to fill the room. You could get sucked down into those eyes.

‘It means I can pay, no problem.' Tara took the letters from her. They were thin, one sheet maximum.

‘My mother. And my sister. They maybe think I am dead.' Mala shrugged. ‘But I don't say about the baby. I say I have a job here.'

‘And did you tell them when you're going back?'

Mala looked at her steadily. A noise at the open window made Tara look round, and she let out an involuntary gasp. Perched on the window-sill, its wings fluttering for balance, was a bright-green parrot with a scarlet gash of a beak. Spooked by Tara's exhalation, it flew off again in a whirr of feathers, a solitary mournful shriek fading into the night.

‘I'd given up seeing one up close,' breathed Tara. ‘Been trying for months to get one to visit my ledge. What's your secret?'

‘Sunflower seeds. Or maybe he wants to talk. He finds someone else far away from home.'

The night before the eviction, Sita couldn't sleep. She sat on the small balcony of their hotel – maybe guest-house was a more accurate description as there was no fancy lobby or communal restaurant, but the rooms were clean and airy and theirs overlooked a small park, where she counted the poor and homeless slipping through a gap in the railings to find a corner to sleep for the night. Scrawny men and women holding sleeping children and their thin rolls of bedding, as silent as ghosts flitting through the semi-darkness, seeking a hidden spot where the night-watchmen or some passing policeman wouldn't spot them. It was a nightly ritual. In the few days she and Prem had been in India, Sita had seen the same family groups infiltrate the park. She was getting to recognize them: the toothless man with hair dyed bright orange from an over-enthusiastic application of henna, with his limping wife and three small children who followed them in a blank-eyed raggle-taggle through the railings. The young couple, she heavily pregnant, whose clothes always seemed clean and pressed, her hand always holding her sari end over her face as if the shame of sleeping rough compelled her to hide her identity. And occasionally, a courting couple would dare to scamper under the low hanging branches and exchange fevered kisses, desperately pulling themselves into each other's bodies and mouths. Sita felt sorry for them.
Vichare
, they probably both lived at home, where else could they go? In her day, you waited until you had taken your seven steps around the holy fire before you even dared to hold hands; maybe that's why parents tried to get their children married so quickly. They knew Nature would not wait. The young would always sniff each other out, find the secret places on the street, in each other.