The House of Hidden Mothers

by Meera Syal

  They stared at each other for a moment. Somewhere in the background Sita clattered pans and hummed an old Hindi film song to herself, the soundtrack of Shyama’s childhood, when choices were simple and mostly involved food. They stood in the cluttered hallway, mirroring each other’s stance, hands on hips, chins tilted defiantly, each waiting for the other to break the silence.

  Only the grandmother of the house, who now hovered in the kitchen doorway holding a dripping colander, could see the ironic symmetry that bound both these women. It was at moments like this that Sita wondered how life might have turned out if they had not left Delhi, but had raised their children as pukka Indians. Shyama might have settled with some nice Army officer with a waxed moustache and a pension, and now be busy arranging Tara’s marriage, instead of the two of them standing there shouting at each other like village sweepers. Then again, if they had stayed, she herself would have ended up in a joint family home, cooking for three generations at every mealtime and watching her husband be slowly drained of cash and confidence by his needy family. Easy to be sentimental afterwards about what you might have missed, easy to forget how much worse it could have been. And look at how bad it was now – even from five thousand miles away, their beloved relatives had behaved like dirty snakes in the grass. If it wasn’t for her bad knee, she would kick every last one of them up the bund. Secret thoughts, delicious and dreadful, that she would keep to herself, for now. She had to behave like a proper matriarch, and with the practised ease of all women who were expected to sacrifice personal desire for public duty, she said, ‘What’s the matter with you two?’

  Tara raised an eyebrow at Shyama, who swallowed a prickly ball of shame. Her mother had no idea that she and Toby had been trying for a baby and this didn’t seem the right time to drop that particular bombshell on her sweet silvery head.

  As it happened, Shyama didn’t have to.

  ‘Mum and Toby were trying for an IVF baby, but it’s not going to work, apparently. See you later.’ Tara flounced out of the front door, which slammed heavily behind her.

  Shyama turned to her mother, who regarded her with a puzzled smile.

  ‘A baby?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WAS THE arrival of the tip-top luxury silver fridge that got tongues wagging again, soo-soo-soo, all over the village. Mala first heard it from Cuckoo, a one-eyed, stick-thin boy, who spotted the delivery van huff-chuffing its way along the dirt road. She knew it must be coming to them because the road didn’t lead anywhere else. As it got closer she could see that it had some fancy name on its side in red and gold letters, wedding colours all glittered up and showing off, catching the sunlight and throwing it back at them even brighter, just to impress them. Of course, Mala was impressed, though, unlike some of the other slack-jawed idiots in the village, she would not be showing anything other than boredom on her face.

  Her husband’s mother, Bee-ji, heaved herself up from the charpoy and left her mother-in-law-shouting-at-daughter-in-law TV drama to watch the van chug into the village square, coughing clouds of dust into their mouths like a newly arrived relative.

  Mala knew who the delivery was for. Everyone did. It was for the only person in the village who did not come running out to see the tamasha but lurked behind her new blue-painted bug screen, shivering in the fierce blast of her new AC unit, all icy cool and waiting.

  Two men got out of the van, city sahibs with their Brylcreemed hair and tight trousers, sweating and dusted with red earth, asking for water. Pogle sahib, as village elder, pointed to the well. He wasn’t being impolite, Mala understood, no one was going to waste time running indoors to fetch cups and suchlike. Who knows what they might miss? One of the men drank loudly, gulping like a buffalo, the other unrolled some scrunchy paper, pointing to the name everyone already knew was written down there. Pogle sahib stroked his wispy white beard and pointed a bony accusing finger at her house, with its gleaming new bricks and proper roof, the only house with a wall around it. Not that it stops anybody knowing everything, Mala reflected bitterly, because even a private belch in your own bed is being sniffed and discussed next door in moments.

  And then the back of the van was rolled up like a steel chapatti and the city men trundled the new fridge out on a standing frame that somehow reminded Mala of her papa’s funeral stretcher, when the men had had to stand him upright to get him down the bank towards the foaming river. She thought he would fall off, roll all the way down, his white shroud unrolling and unwrapping like the winter rug when they shook out the silverfish. But they didn’t drop him, they burned him, and Mala and her mother and sister watched from afar. As women, they were not allowed near the funeral pyre, but they were still close enough to see his skin blacken and crackle like roasting meat and his fingers – the fingers that had fed Mala laddoos and picked leaves from her hair and poked the dimple in her left cheek and called it Shiv-ji’s kiss, a blessing on her face – she watched as those same fingers curled in on themselves like sooty claws trying to hold on to them and their old happy life that would never come back.

  And so, months later, when Ram said he would take pity on fatherless Mala with her cursed widow of a mother and unmarried sister, Mala didn’t feel she could complain. He was taking her on with virtually no dowry, just a wooden trunk full of secondhand saris and stainless-steel pans. Six months later, there was nothing left in the trunk except the one coconut that wasn’t broken at the wedding ceremony, lying at the bottom, poking out of an old tablecloth like the wrinkled brown head of a long-dead baby.

  A few of the kids, shoeless, grinning monkey-boys who had clambered into the neem tree from the stone bench at its base, clapped their hands when the fridge finally came out, its shiny steel surface smooth as a mirror. Mala’s lip curled at their open-mouthed, silly, greedy faces gasping in its reflection. But she managed to twist the grimace into a sort of smile before anyone noticed. Bee-ji might claim she could not see well enough to make it to the toilet, but she could read Mala’s face as expertly as a farmer reads the skies, never missing any passing cloudy look or rainy-day eyes.

  The fridge-wallahs didn’t manage to reach the house before the husband emerged: new kurta top, new leather chappals – everyone saw them, but pretended they didn’t and that they certainly didn’t care. He nodded at the men almost sadly, not meeting anyone’s eyes, and yet the way he patted the fridge before he beckoned them inside was as if his favourite cow had finally come home.

  The new steel gate cling-clanged behind them, and five minutes later Mala heard the kick and kerang of their new generator starting up, which meant that everyone else’s electricity would have just cut out. Mala stared at the shiny steel gate, willing Seema, the lucky wife beyond it, to show her face just for one moment, so that she could shoot her a swift sneaky death-stare. In that look Mala wanted to say to her, ‘Our electricity is gone off but in your house there will never be darkness again. There will never be milk that curdles while your back is turned, or ghee that overflows its earthen jars and pools into yellow crusted rivers, or almond-bursting wedding barfi that you bury in shade and hope will last but still becomes a sugary palace for tickly bugs, and every one of your drinks will sing with the clink-kiss of crystal-clean ice cubes.’ But Seema never appeared.

  Mala remembered how Seema used to be before whatever it was happened to her. She would come down to the river to wash clothes with all the other women. Washing was only the background for the real work of talking: who’s marrying who, who’s fighting or travelling or cheating or hitting. Nothing surprised them. Mala had once visited Chandigarh for a cousin’s wedding, startled and energized by the speed and vigour of the city, but surprised at how many doors were shut at night. Even next-door neighbours would smile and disappear inside to be with their widescreen TVs. It was then Mala realized that in the village they saw more real-life non-TV stories than the city-wallahs ever did, because here, there was nowhere to do your business other than your small house or the fields, and people will be people, after a
ll, so you just learned to turn your face away, from your own shame or theirs. It was exactly like when people passed through on the train and saw the farmhands shitting at the side of the tracks, balls to the wind. The passengers looked away, not the labourers, whose doleful faces seemed to say, ‘Who asked you to look anyway?’

  Mala reflected that Seema must have been a first-class fool if she thought that no one would notice the difference in her. Or spot the lies. She and her husband had said that they and the two children were going all the way to Delhi for a wedding, even though Pogle sahib said he knew their entire family over three generations and no one had ever mentioned any relatives in the capital. When they returned a few weeks later, something had changed. They were all different, as if they had brought back with them an uninvited guest or a very bad smell, and suddenly Seema was fainting in the heat and avoiding unripe mangoes and all the women knew what that meant. Yet Seema did not say a word to anyone, she just came down to the river as usual, and if Mala noticed that she did not scrub the clothes as vigorously as usual or thwack-smack them against the river-glistening stones as forcefully as before, she assumed this was because of the secret hiding in her stomach.

  What was unforgivable was that Seema refused to share any details of the wedding, nothing about the paleness of the bride or the height of the groom or how much gold was exchanged or how many starters were served or was it plastic compartment trays or sit-down servant-waited tables or how much the girl cried when prised away from her family with beetle pincers by her new in-laws, smacking their lips at the banquet bride, bringing the last of her family’s savings with her. She said nothing. And as if that wasn’t impolite enough, then Seema disappeared again weeks later, just like that, a dustball blown away. Her husband stayed behind, working his small scrub of land, and told Mala and everyone else who asked that their Delhi relatives loved Seema and the children so much they had insisted that all of them go and stay with them for a few months, for a holiday. A holiday! Mala snorted at the memory. This from the man who made his wife walk four miles with his lunchtime roti so he could eat it hot from the tiffin.

  And then months later, just when Mala was wondering whether Seema had met some urban misfortune, killed by a runaway three-wheeler or kidnapped to service lorry drivers in some backstreet brothel, she reappeared. She arrived in a taxi, she and the children in new outfits, still with the price sticker on the soles of their chappals. She had hardly raised her eyes to acknowledge the curious gathering crowd, and had entered her house, slamming the screen door behind her.

  Days later, the first of the expensive treasures began arriving. But Mala could see that Seema had left something of herself behind, as if the city had nibbled quietly, softly at her plump corners, and everything fat and free about her had been swallowed up. The kids also, they came back to school but their eyes were filmed over with something that had made them grow up bamboo-fast, too fast.

  ‘Did somebody die?’ Mala asked her one day at the river, before the washing machine had come but after the bricks for the new house had arrived. The only explanation that made sense to her was that some rich old relative had left them something in his will. The other women chirruped and clucked at Mala’s shameless tongue, even though they were all grateful she had had the guts to ask what they had all been thinking.

  Seema paused for a breath, almost as if she was going to say yes, but she said, ‘No. No one died, Mala.’

  And she threw the sodden saris at the stones with such fury that Mala expected to see cracks show themselves in the sad old boulders.

  Of course, there were so many stories – some filthy, shameless ones, although Mala noticed that in all of them Seema was the dirty wrong-doer and never her husband. She knew this was the same old crappy talk but still, she stopped talking to her too.

  And then something even stranger happened. Mala’s husband and Seema’s husband suddenly became friends. Mala caught them laughing together several times, smoking under the neem tree, muttering at the water fountain; even across the fields she recognized her husband’s tall stork-stepping legs and Seema’s husband’s stout hooves keeping time together as the sun started to dip and the crows settled in the trees, like rotten fruit hanging blackly from the branches. But it was when Ram started to behave like a complete oolloo that she knew she had to do something.

  At first she kept catching him looking at her much as he had done in the month after they were married, like a starved dog salivating at the meat of her backside. This wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. After all, who doesn’t like it in the first year, before any children have come along? It’s a new thing, after all, completely free and allowed. So she waited for him to pull her on to the charpoy, waited to hear the creaky song of its weave under them, punctuated by Bee-ji’s pneumatic snores. But he didn’t touch her. He just looked and looked, staring at her breasts beneath her blouse, swinging in time with the chapatti dough she kneaded angrily because she knew he was looking and doing nothing, the drooling idiot. She felt his gaze on her back as she squatted over the fire, breathing it into life, his eyes moving down in time with the sweat snaking along her backbone; he watched her ankles and thighs as she hitched up her sari to sweep the courtyard, trying to poof-poof the dust right into his stupid smiling face. At night she lay next to him, burning like a dying fire. She tried throwing her ankle over his, pretended to roll in half-sleepy moans into his back, pressed herself into his trembling thighs. Mala could feel his desire and knew he was tying it down like an unbroken animal. She told herself, it cannot be me. Not yet, not this soon.

  At one time she thought he might be angry with her, wanted to punish her for not managing to keep her first pregnancy. It must have been a child conceived on their first night together. They had barely got used to the idea of themselves as a married couple, let alone as parents, when the blood and clots plopped and pooled out of her as she was squatting on the riverbank with ropes of wet saris coiled around her arms, waterlogged iridescent snakes. She had been in her fourth month, when all should have been safe inside. Instead, she became like the river, an unstoppable tide flowed from her, the banks of her womb too weak to hold it.

  The other women had helped her home. One of them held her face hard, turning it away from the thing she had already seen caught in a rock pool, the too-tiny baby curled in on itself, a bloody comma, a pause in the paragraph of her life. The women soothed and sang to her, clucking loud reassurances as she cramped and cried in the windy heat. Hai, why so many tears? This is nothing, this happens, this will happen again. Some children are not meant to stay. You are young! But Mala had not been crying with grief, just relief. She thought Ram would see this in her face, but instead he sat at her side every evening for a week, ordering his mother to bring her ginger tea and pinny, sweet balls of spiced gourd stuffed with secret herbs supposed to tighten a woman’s insides like a drawstring. Maybe he was already preparing her for the next time.

  Yet still Ram kept talking to Seema’s husband, and she noticed the more he talked to him, the more he day-looked and night-trembled and left her lying choking on her own desire, blowing on her own simmering skin when really she wanted to bite into it and taste her own blood.

  That’s when Mala decided. It was Seema’s husband’s fault, all of this mess. And then she knew she had no choice. Who cared what the other women would think? She had to talk to her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TOBY ARRIVED HOME still smelling of mud and pig. He had been so anxious to leave that he had forgone his usual end-of-work shower in the small mouldy staff cubicle, and had jumped on the first bus going east.

  Alighting at the end of their road, he began to walk steadily, distracted by the lights in various front rooms, glimpses of other lives before curtains and blinds shut out the approaching night. It was a mild winter and the air felt stale and thick. He missed the cleansing bite of frost. He still hadn’t got used to this suburb on the edge of London, despite everyone telling him it was going up. In his opinion, that was
the only direction in which it could possibly go, but he also knew as a yokel child that any place without a grassy view and a clear horizon would probably disappoint him.

  As he approached Shyama’s house, he was struck as always by the contrast between its squat, red-brick exterior and what was inside. ‘Deceptively spacious,’ she had teased him when he first visited. And he liked the feel of it: the dark, tiled hallway leading into high-ceilinged, airy rooms with their original coving and fireplaces; sliding wooden doors that you could pull across to divide a room and make a space cosy; old wooden floors, scuffed and pocked with age but still as solid as the day they went down. Most of all, he liked the way Shyama had subverted the English rectitude of the architecture with her ethnic sass: many-armed statues bursting out from alcoves; framed fragments of old saris hanging on the walls, intricately embroidered, their seed pearls and sequins catching the light and throwing it back in fractured shards; a wall painted burnt orange. It made his lone Lamborghini poster in his bachelor bedsit look tragic. He had somehow fallen in with a mature woman with a grown-up house and a grown-up child, and even now, after six years of being together, four years after moving in with her, he still felt like a visitor.

  He kicked off his mud-encrusted boots in the hallway, shrugging off his fusty-smelling windcheater, and paused halfway to the kitchen. He recognized Shyama’s mother’s gentle murmur, intercut with her daughter’s staccato bass tones. He liked Shyama’s parents – it was hard not to, they were always smiling, always polite – but he knew he confused them. He would catch them looking from him to Shyama and then at each other, disguising their disappointment with exaggerated hospitality. What was this blond boy doing with their divorced, too-much-older daughter? (He noticed they said ‘die-vorced’. Shyama told him that was a guilt trip disguising itself as a mispronunciation.) There had been a brief flare of hope when they thought Toby was a vet as opposed to a glorified farmhand, and they still didn’t understand why someone would want to spend their time tending to beasts of the field unless they received handsome payment in return. Sita had tried to cover their disapproval by sharing her own childhood with Toby, proud to be the daughter of a Punjabi farmer, regaling him with tales of how she and her sisters would walk back from school gathering food from the land that they owned, bright peacock-hued chunnis fluttering from their necks against the emerald green of the endless fields. So many English people thought India was an uncivilized desert or a waterlogged swamp because that’s what they saw on the news. Did he know Punjab was called the granary of India because it was fed by five rivers, Panj meaning five, Ab meaning rivers? Her family sent their wheat and beet all over the land, did he know that? No, Toby certainly didn’t, and he remarked how satisfying it must have been to turn the soil in ancestral meadows. Sita had stared at him. ‘Well, of course, we didn’t do that. Our workers did. Our family were owners, not labourers.’ She ended her sentence with a little laugh and a warm smile, but Toby knew he had opened his big Suffolk gob and put his size tens firmly in it. He had smiled back, knowing they were killing him with kindness.