by Meera Syal
‘I lost a baby,’ she said finally. No, tell the truth. ‘I got rid of a baby. Once. At eight weeks.’
Krishan said nothing. He held her tighter. She could hear his heart, steady, strong.
‘I know I had to do it. It wasn’t the right time. We had careers to plan. We had families who could not have coped with the shame. But I lost my career. My family have never stopped loving me. What was it all for?’
She couldn’t see. His stethoscope was pressing into her cheek. His T-shirt sported a damp sticky patch but he didn’t seem to mind.
‘Listen, Sunita,’ he said. ‘You do what’s best at the time. If I started regretting some of the decisions I’ve had to make over a dying body, I’d never survive.’
‘But you save people!’ Sunita cried, pulling away from him.
‘Not always. I do what I think is best in the circumstances. Hindsight is useless. Predictions hardly come true. What is there, but the moment of decision?’
Sunita wiped her nose on her sleeve and stared at him. ‘Are you sure you’re only twenty-five?’
‘Are you sure you’re only thirty-four?’
Sunita sniffled, ‘Actually I’m thirty-five. So sue me.’
Krishan took her hand gently. ‘You’re an amazing woman. I mean, woman, mother, kitten, vamp, carer, joker, liar, soothsayer—’
‘Wife,’ Sunita interrupted.
‘Wife, yes. All of them. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d be proud to have you as a mother. Or a daughter.’
‘Or . . . ?’ Sunita asked.
Krishan leaned forward and stared into her eyes intently. His hand slowly rose and cupped her cheek tenderly.
This was it, she knew. All these weeks Sunita had wondered about this moment and of course it happened when she had no make-up on, reeked of sweat and had a considerable amount of nasal fluid smeared over her face. She waited for crashing waves, trains going through tunnels, fountains spurting into life, violins, anything. And she was back on a balcony, witness to another kiss, sacrilegious and defiant enough to shock her back into life. One kiss leads to another. Now she knew, if it had not been for Tania and Deepak, she would not be here, now, like this. And it came to her with the velocity of epiphany, the illumination of angels, the simplicity of snow. She looked back at him bare, unafraid, and knew finally what she wanted and what she deserved.
Chila couldn’t help laughing as she watched her son root blindly for her nipple. His eyes were closed but he smelled his way, twisting his head until he found the perfect aim. He latched on with a speed that almost alarmed her, fleshy clamps, gummy pincers, releasing a warming tingle until she flooded for him, relieved. With her free hand she slipped her forefinger into his palm, a tree trunk against the tiny branches of his fingers which curled around her with creeper-like tenacity. Swaddled in his blanket, he made the shape of a small canoe, the kind she had seen floating down the Ganges trembling under their cargo of burning candles and fresh flowers. Only on the television, of course. Strange, she called herself Indian when she had never been there. And her parents rarely talked about Africa as their regret at leaving overwhelmed any joy of remembrance.
She would take her son to India, she decided. She would buy one of those baby backpacks she had seen the posh woman in the bed opposite displaying to her friends, and one of those hats with flaps for the ears, and visit the Himalayas, her favourite backdrop for any Hindi film song. She would play him all kinds of music to sweeten his soul; Lata, of course, all the old Seventies soul stuff, even ‘I Will Survive’, because she felt he ought to understand there were many different songs and ways of singing them. She would teach him to be kind to animals and to be a rock for his friends, she would feed him simple, wholesome food straight from the earth; organic was more expensive but she could probably swing a discount at her old supermarket. She would encourage him to talk at an early age. She longed to talk with him; at him would do for now. They would have passionate open conversations, none of the pained silences and fumbling sentences she remembered having with her parents. She would massage his growing body with almond oil, and the force and love she poured into him would help sprout strong, lithe limbs. She would never smack him, but have a tone of voice that would let him know where his limits were. She would kiss him every day, take him to temple every week, to the theatre every month, on holiday somewhere warm and gentle every year. She would rewrite the book on motherhood, because every new mother could. Perhaps, she pondered, she ought to start thinking about a name.
Deepak turned on the ignition of his car just so he could have the heating on full blast. Although it was a warm day, he felt as if he had been squatting in a freezer. He wrapped the fraying overcoat he had found in the boot around himself and held his hands up to the air vents, hoping the stale warm air would somehow unthaw his sinews. The car resembled a skip; the back seat was covered with empty take-away cartons and old newspapers. Two bunches of wilted flowers, a basket of over-ripe fruit and a clutch of bedraggled soft toys filled the front passenger seat, lying where Deepak had hurled them in desperation. Occasionally, a blue helium balloon with IT’S A BOY! written in white piping around the rim floated slowly across his vision, until he batted it to the back seat with a sharp slap. Since his son had been born, he had spent almost all his time in this same spot in the hospital car park, opposite the Maternity Unit entrance. He had only left for two brief periods: once to grab some food, and the second time to collect his passport from home. Each time he had come back clutching flowers, toys, fruit; meaningless gifts. He opened the glove compartment to check it was still there. He took it out, double checked the expiry date and winced at his photograph, which gave him the air of a shifty travelling salesman. It was only after Chila’s eighth refusal to see him, to even accept a hand-written note, that he had thought about the passport.
It didn’t make sense of course, nothing did. Since that midnight telephone call, everything he said, did and saw had taken on a disconcerting sepia gloss. The moment before Tania had picked up that telephone, he had confidently assumed where he lay was reality, the room in which he reclined, the pillow under his head, the body beneath his fingers. The moment after, a breath later, a blink of an eye, and it was gone, all of it, as if some huge hand had plucked him up brutally and held him high above the landscape, a vast empty plain, and in its centre, the room, the bed, the pillow, tiny and insignificant.
He had always imagined that when the moment of truth finally arrived, as he knew it would, it would come with terrible fanfares and the crumbling of walls. It would be a cleansing with fire, pure and savage. He was not prepared for this, this monochrome limbo, a gradual draining away of vital colours which left him weak-bodied and with a mind that raced like fever. He soon realized the black and white fragments that occasionally intruded were newspaper clippings, read long ago. Fathers who took their babies – Stole Them! said the headlines, but then they would, wouldn’t they? – were men who looked like him. They had wives who looked like Chila. They all loved their children. Love made people do terrible things, he knew that now.
He finished off the last dregs of some cold coffee and tossed the cup onto the back seat. He turned up the heating another notch and wondered vaguely if there was a hat lurking somewhere in the debris of his boot. Then he remembered: one of those fathers, an Indian father, had done something terrible in the name of love. A snapshot of a charred car crossed his vision fleetingly. He suppressed a wave of nausea and burrowed deeper into his coat. A savage. An inhuman act. No-one could argue with that.
Deepak leaned forward for a moment to adjust his coat and sighed when he looked up and saw her walking towards him, head bowed, deep in thought. Now he was hallucinating, he noted dejectedly, although he had to admit, she looked amazingly real. A bit thinner perhaps, her hair needed a wash, and that tracksuit did nothing for her, but yes, a good likeness. It was only when Tania actually looked up and he saw the fear in her face, that Deepak realized she was real. He opened the car door quickly, almost
barring her way.
Tania’s first instinct was to run, but there was something in Deepak’s expression that rooted her helplessly to the spot. A blast of hot air seemed to inflate him in front of her. He brought with him the smell of old food and rotting leaves. He looked as if he was running a temperature. He looked as if he would chase her until he caught her if she dared to run. So instead, she held herself upright, with effort, and tried to make polite conversation with someone who only hours before had been part of her, inside her.
‘You’ve seen her, then,’ Deepak said, feeling somewhat annoyed. ‘How is she? How’s my son?’
Tania edged away from him slightly. ‘No. I haven’t seen her.’
Of course she was going to protect her. They all did that. Deepak felt foolish now. How could he ever have imagined that anything he might offer would intrude upon their friendship?
‘Tell her I want to see her, Tania. She’ll listen to you. She must have forgiven us if you saw her.’
Tania managed a small pinch of pity for him. She did not expect some kind of explanation now, not having seen him. He was too far gone for that, and frankly, she didn’t care. She closed her eyes and watched the luminous green lines of bleeping machines snake across her lids. She opened her eyes and Deepak was holding the car door open, inviting her inside.
He has gone mad, she thought.
Deepak thought for a brief second that Tania was going to refuse his plea. But then she glanced into the car and seemed to jump slightly. Maybe she could see how hard he was trying, see the sad remnants of his sorries strewn over the seats. Maybe she needed to talk too. But he felt elated when she threw him a brief smile and walked around to the other side of the car. He swept all the fruit and toys to the floor, clearing space for her. When he spoke he sounded almost cheerful.
‘Not too hot for you, is it?’ he asked.
Tania shook her head. She stared straight ahead while he talked. Deepak talked for almost half an hour, barely pausing for breath. He was grateful that she allowed him to do that. In fact, her silence encouraged him to say much more than he intended. He began by apologizing of course. The pregnancy, well, that had happened the night of Tania’s film and there hadn’t been any further contact since then, so he had not been lying in the absolute sense of the word and he wanted to tell her, oh, so many times, but he knew the minute he did that, she would leave him and that was something he could not cope with. Not then. Now it was different and they both knew they had been extremely stupid and these things happened when two people felt lost and lonely at the same time and they both had, hadn’t they? And they both knew that Tania was one of life’s copers and didn’t really need him whereas Chila . . . and at this point Deepak had to pause because Tania had batted the blue helium balloon so hard that it had burst with a loud pop and they watched it deflate slowly, until it wheezed to the floor and settled comfortably on Tania’s shoes. Then Deepak went on to say, a little sheepishly, that he had been having all sorts of strange thoughts, how hard it was to not see his own son, to miss out on those first few vital days, and Tania had nodded then, understandingly he thought, but he hastened to add that this situation could be resolved quite simply, if she, Tania could arrange something. After all, Tania and Chila were best friends.
Tania had smiled again. She seemed to wipe her face a lot. Then she had rooted around on the floor and asked him if he had a tissue, maybe on the back seat, or in the boot. Deepak had looked, and so had she, furiously, ferreting in his glove compartment and among piles of rubbish, and eventually he had found some serviettes that had come with his take-away fried chicken and he had wiped her cheeks himself, overwhelmed with gratitude.
‘Tans,’ he said, feeling clear-headed for the first time in days, ‘you probably don’t want to hear this, but I do love you. I always will. But it’s not enough, is it?’
Sunita found Akash sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by files. He smiled hesitantly as she came in and sat down by him. She could smell garlic and tomatoes. A bottle of wine stood opened on the counter.
‘How’s Chila?’ Akash asked.
Sunita nodded, a slow, world-weary nod, the nod she had seen so many of her aunties do around her mother’s kitchen table, the all-encompassing, we’ve seen it, done it and got the T-shirt nod which made her feel very old and wise suddenly. Akash nodded back, satisfied, then got up to tend to a bubbling pot behind him.
‘Where are the—’ Sunita began.
‘Asleep,’ Akash murmured, blinking against the rising steam. ‘I bunked off early and took them to Whacky Warehouse with Selina’s kids. Should have seen Sunny in the ball pit, he was a right goonda, chucking them all at the big boys . . .’
Akash barely looked up as he added a sprinkling of herbs to the sauce and stuck an experimental finger into the pot, burning it, as he always did.
Sunita watched him, transfixed by the ordinariness of it all. Home and hearth, what they had all whispered about, all three of them, even Tania, under duvets with torches, over milkshakes in cafés, shouting over bass lines at smoky tables, endless phone calls, millions of hours spent in hope and analysis, of what their lives might be with Someone Else. Was this peculiar to women, this constant projection in minute detail of a twinned future? Did men spend this amount of time and energy creating their perfect lover, fine tune the details to shades of wallpaper and names of future offspring? Sunita liked to think they did, that this was not only a female disease, it was just that women were honest enough to admit it. Maybe that’s why they were all so constantly disappointed, disillusioned, disenchanted, that was the word. Because fairy tales always ended with a wedding. Whoever began a love story with ‘They had just got married . . .’
She rose slowly, feeling slightly light-headed, and stood next to Akash, uncertainly. He looked up quizzically. His face was flushed from steam and possibly wine; curls hung in baby tendrils from his temples. Catching him unawares, it was not so difficult to glimpse, somewhere in there, the nineteen-year-old in faded jeans who had promised her everything from a candlelit mattress.
‘What’s up?’ he said finally.
Sunita took a breath, inhaling a fair amount of garlic fumes, which made her splutter in an undignified hacking manner until Akash handed her a glass of water and watched curiously as she gulped it down, her mind racing. She would do what all the books had advised: honesty, tell him how the lack of communication in their marriage had led her to seek comfort elsewhere, albeit emotionally, and that Krishan – oh, those eyes – was merely a symptom of a much deeper problem that had to be aired in a civilized and frank manner, and if it meant she had to unpick all these strands, of herbs in a pot and children in ball pits and intertwined families and the steam-flushed face of her husband, then, surely, that was what must be done.
‘Akash,’ she began, and she took his hand.
Tania swung open the door, nodding her head blindly as Deepak reminded her to talk to Chila as soon as she could, thanking her again and again, telling her he would have his mobile on, waiting for her call. She walked away quickly, not seeing where she was going, and only when she was sure she was out of sight did she check her sleeve. It was there, the thing she had spotted and wanted and decided she would get, at any cost, even if it meant sitting in his car for an hour and a half, suppressing a constant desire to attack him with rotting fruit. She drove home via Tower Bridge, and parked recklessly on a double yellow line. She ran along under the absurd fairy-tale turrets until she reached the centre of the bridge.
‘For you, Chila,’ she whispered, as she took Deepak’s passport out of her sleeve, wrapped it in a plastic bag with the jack from her boot, and threw it into the green-grey waters below.
Tania
I KEPT ASKING myself afterwards: If I had had my camera with me when it happened, with all of us there for the first time together, would I have filmed it? It would have been an interesting test. It’s one of the basic rules of thumb, along with never revealing sources and always fiddling expenses form
s, you should carry your chosen weapon with you at all times. The camera or the notebook or the audio recorder. The best stories arrive unannounced, sexy happenstance, as I’m in the one profession where the unexpected is always welcome. I thought I would be better prepared. Maybe I’m getting rusty. Maybe I just don’t care enough any more. As it happens, I don’t need the footage. It’s all here in my head, every flicker, preserved.
I know it was a bit of a futile gesture, flinging his passport to a watery grave but it suited my mood at the time. I shouldn’t have had the Verve playing on my car CD; it sounded too much like a soundtrack and I had to fill the frame with something appropriately dramatic. Afterwards I parked up somewhere, I still don’t remember exactly where, but there were pigeons and the smell of frying bacon, and did the Care in the Community shuffle for hours through the streets. It was odd, seeing the fear on people’s faces as I approached them, watching their freak radar swivel them away from my trajectory, enjoying their confusion that such a pretty gal in a designer tracksuit should be dribbling and muttering her way through their patch. After a while, I actually began to enjoy it.
The Madness of a Seduced Woman – was that a song or a book? Hell hath no fury, You done me wrong and killed mah dog . . . I ran through all the phrases I could muster to try and name what was propelling me along the pavements. I recalled some country and western song titles which, despite everything, made me laugh, in a braying dislocated way. ‘I Gave Her a Ring, She Gave Me the Finger’, ‘Walk Out Backwards so I Think You’re Coming Back’. Except I did it out loud. Very loudly. I howled and keened and rent my fleecy top and I didn’t give a shit. I spat out gobs of bile until I went hoarse, I shouted whatever I remembered in no particular order: a leg resting on mine, my brother’s Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, a baby punching its way out into the world, glass winking in my heel, my dad’s surprisingly clean fingernails. Do you know how little we scream, as adults? Children do it all the time, never alarmed or worried by the decibels they produce. I frightened myself for the first few seconds, then I got used to the roaring and the skin tearing in my throat. Then I turned it into some kind of song, a mantra my old ma would no doubt call it, and I told my story to myself, to finally believe it, because no-one else would. Not then.
