The House of Hidden Mothers

by Meera Syal

  ‘Well, I remember how I felt when we were trying and it didn’t happen for months … that blind panic and desperation. It makes you crazy. So now it’s happening, we get on board, right?’

  Lydia hesitated. ‘It’s Tara I worry about.’

  ‘Tara’s jealous, that’s all. When Maya was born, I bought Luka a DS and said it was from his new baby sister. Still didn’t stop him trying to tip her out of her Moses basket for a few weeks, but he adores her now.’

  ‘She talks to me. Tara, I mean, she …’ Lydia hesitated, aware, even with Priya – or maybe especially with her – of the dangers of breaching confidentiality. ‘She’s troubled. She was before all this, and now … it just isn’t great timing for her.’

  ‘Look, sweetie, and don’t take this the wrong way …’

  Lydia stiffened. All Priya’s sentences that began thus generally did go the wrong way.

  ‘But you don’t have kids and so …’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘All I meant was, teenagers are incredibly selfish and incredibly dramatic. I know mine aren’t there yet, but all my hormonal nieces and nephews are usually round my place moaning about their parents and quite casually breaking their hearts and shredding their nerves at every opportunity. That’s what parents are, at this stage, emotional punchbags. I’m going to send both of mine to boarding school the minute I smell a whiff of it, I swear …’

  ‘So you’re saying I’m not allowed an opinion because I’m not a mother?’ Lydia said evenly.

  ‘No, I’m saying sure, you know loads from your work, your patients …’

  ‘Clients, and thanks very much for your endorsement.’

  ‘Come on, Lyd … I didn’t mean—’

  ‘What did you mean, then?’ Lydia stood up and took the mugs to the sink, aware that Priya’s was still half full. ‘Do you realize how many assumptions the world makes about women who don’t have children? That we’re weird? Selfish? Neurotic? Tragic?’

  ‘Lyd … I asked you years ago why you didn’t have kids and you said—’

  ‘I said what was acceptable at the time. That Keith and I couldn’t. Because at least then we had a modicum of sympathy, as opposed to this patronizing shit you’re chucking at me now.’

  In the silence, the whirr of the fridge, the hum of the central heating thrummed between them, thickening the air. Priya searched her friend’s face for a hint of anguish that would give her a clue to this outburst. Lydia looked as she always had: groomed, lithely in control. Well, we all have secrets, Priya concluded. Skeletons come tumbling out of every cupboard in my house: Marco in Milan, George in Lisbon, the memorable all-nighter in Paris, although not memorable enough to recall an actual name. True, the early encounters hadn’t remained secret from her friends, it had been fun to share them out, to see the shock and, she thought, grudging envy on their faces at the thought that she was someone who really was ‘having it all’. It was also the main reason why she had never encouraged cosy get-togethers with either Shyama or Lydia and their partners; she had enough taste not to parade her husband in front of them, compromising their friendship. But lately she hadn’t wanted to share so much – and the affairs were less frequent. She had no doubt they would both approve of this, considering it proof that at last she was seeing sense, living a mature and healthy lifestyle uncluttered with corrosive duplicity. The truth was that she didn’t get as many offers, sometimes none at all, despite her ferocious grooming. Something had happened in the last year, something beyond the odd tiny wrinkle, the slight slackening of inner-thigh muscle tone. Maybe it was something hormonal: she wasn’t giving off the same bedroom smell, the one that allowed her to reel in a man with the merest flick of an eyebrow. It was as if someone had taken a large eraser and was slowly rubbing her out, pore by pore. Why else, when she walked across a hotel lobby, did she not attract a single male glance?

  ‘Lyd, I would never patronize you, you’re far too clever. So you chose not to have kids, no big deal, right? Probably means you will be the only sane auntie Shyama’s baby’s going to have.’

  Lydia paced her garden into the early hours. She knew how to handle this one, the insomnia triggered whenever she dwelt on the choice she had made all those years ago. She had made it clear to Keith what and who he was taking on – a woman who might never feel clean enough of her addiction to be responsible for a child. Mostly, she felt it had been the noble and right thing to do. Other times, when she saw slack-faced teenagers shouting at babies in buggies in the supermarket, or listened to wealthy mothers on her couch who felt drained or trapped by their kids, she had doubts about her long-ago sacrifice. She found herself muttering curses like some home-counties harridan – ‘People like that shouldn’t be allowed’– and had to pinch herself hard and read all her badges again to remind herself who she was when she’d made that decision. Choice. We marched for choices. The hardest time was always when she saw Keith with other people’s children. She knew how tender he could be – he would have been the kind of daddy who would wipe up goo and sit up all night with a sick child and cancel long-held plans because he was needed. She knew, because he had done all that for her, and more. And that’s what made her sadder than anything else.

  It was some time before Priya got into her bed, having had to unwrap her sticky hair from its clingfilm cap, wash and blow-dry it, cream her entire body and pluck a horrifically long hair from her chin. How had that one escaped the bloody laser? Anil barely stirred as she climbed in beside him, his laptop still open on the floor beside him, showing columns and graphs moving in slow projections. He never seemed to notice whether she was moisturized or not, whether her roots were showing or whether she was wearing a new piece of underwear. For years she had assumed that he was doing the usual spouse-taking-wife-for-granted routine. But now she thought that perhaps he didn’t say anything because it – she – simply didn’t matter enough to him. When she had told him about the surrogacy clinic before she approached Shyama with the idea, she’d expected some kind of negative reaction, or at least a degree of suspicion. Instead he had shrugged and said, ‘Imagine not having our kids …’ and had looked away. At the time, she had taken that as a vote of approval for suggesting surrogacy to Shyama. Now she wondered if it was a veiled insult, a barbed warning. ‘God, yes, imagine if we didn’t have kids, then at least I wouldn’t have to stay with you …’

  No, ridiculous. Priya wasn’t having any of this. She had a whole morning of meetings and if anything was going to keep her awake, it was worrying about them. She put on her padded sleep mask and spooned into her husband’s back, her hand resting on the furry mound of his stomach, too tired to feel the slight flinch of his flesh under her palm.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IN AN AGE full of surprises, perhaps the most unexpected discovery for Mala was how clouds were not what she had imagined they would be at all. From the swollen riverbank, in between the waving sugar-cane stalks in the fields, from her perch on her wobbly stool in her courtyard whilst she watched chapattis rise into floury discs, clouds were blowsy, corpulent pillows far above her head, soft yet firm enough to cradle her weight. Imagine jumping on to one of those, hena? Your body would sink into it, like the Pogles’ imported feather sofa, so springy you would be bounced back on to your feet. In the aeroplane she had braced herself for the impact as they ascended straight into a bank of dawn-tinted cumuli. Instead the world went grey, metallic vapour obscured her final view of Delhi, her old life exhaling its last foggy sigh until suddenly they were dazzled by bright sunlight again. Now the clouds were below them, but they looked like nothing that belonged to the sky, more like an expanse of curdled buttermilk or a heaving, slow-moving sea, or maybe a shifting desert, all dunes and hollows, forming and re-forming with indolent ease. Somewhere down there were her village, her husband, her pots and pans, her trunk. I could have said no, she thought, so many times; a simple shake of the head and everything would have stopped, and I would be back down there, thinking I could bounce on clouds. But inste
ad she kept saying yes: to Shyama Madam’s idea of coming away with her; to fleeing the communal dormitory without a backward glance; to every form thrust in front of her, awaiting her careful signature, which she still felt did not belong to her. Yes, yes, yes, because I know, she told her belly, I know there is no home for either of us there any more.

  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 Wa
sh 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?