by Farahad Zama
“That’s right. Is there a law that says that you have to be married to adopt?”
“Yes, there is,” said the registrar, surprisingly.
Pari was crushed. She had not anticipated this. “Oh, what do we do now? What will Vasu say?” Without the adoption papers, his schooling would be delayed yet again.
Rehman took out a crumpled sheet from his trouser back pocket and smoothed it out in front of them. “The law specifically states that an unmarried man may not adopt a child. Women are allowed to adopt whether they are married or not. There is no requirement for a father.”
Pari gave Rehman the same look that a thirsty traveller might give a working fountain. “Are you sure?” she said.
“It’s all here in black and white,” he said, pointing to the paper. It was a prominent lawyer’s opinion citing article numbers and precedents.
“I’ll have to check this, but I don’t have the necessary books here,” the registrar said.
Rehman pointed to the telephone number on the letterhead. “Give the lawyer a ring. He is expecting your call.”
“Give me a moment,” said the registrar, taking the paper and getting up from his chair.
“You are a godsend! But how did you happen to have a lawyer’s opinion handy?” said Pari, as soon as the official left the room.
“I am always prepared,” he said, grinning.
“Come on, tell me. You obviously thought there might be a problem. But how…Actually, I don’t care. I am just so happy that you are here.”
“There was a case recently that Ammi showed me in the papers. A Japanese couple had paid a poor woman in north India to be a surrogate mother. Unfortunately, the couple got divorced before the baby was born and the Japanese woman did not want anything to do with the baby. The husband was still keen but, as a single man, he was not allowed to adopt. The surrogate mother didn’t want to rear a Japanese-looking baby that was technically not hers. That got me thinking. How would a simple official in a town like this be expected to know the law in these cases? So, I consulted the lawyer and had him prepare the document.”
“Thank you,” said Pari. After a moment, she asked, “What happened to the poor infant?”
“The Japanese baby? The husband’s widowed mother came to India and adopted him. Mother and son then took him home to their own country.”
Pari hugged Rehman’s arm tightly. “You are great,” she said.
“I know,” said Rehman, grinning.
Pari gave him a punch on his arm. “I don’t want to give you a fat head, but I don’t care. I feel like singing.”
Rehman looked apprehensive. “You won’t, will you?” he said.
Pari laughed – a clear, bright sound that seemed incongruous in the dusty room.
The registrar came back to his desk. “It turns out you’re right. So everything seems to be in order.”
He asked Pari to sign her documents in two places. Now that the moment was so close, Pari’s fingers started shaking and she couldn’t hold the pen properly. Rehman’s hand felt warm as it closed over hers and held it steady. When the shaking stopped, Rehman stepped back. She signed the document and the registrar stamped it with an official seal.
“Congratulations, madam. You are now a mother.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. The shabby government office suddenly looked beautiful.
♦
Aruna gave the blood-pressure pill to her father-in-law and handed him a glass of water. He swallowed the pill and washed it down, then smiled at her and went back to his television show.
Aruna put the glass away and went into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Her neurosurgeon husband, Ramanujam, was already there, sitting at the table, looking through Cat-scan slides and making notes in preparation for the next day’s cases.
“How is it going? Nearly finished?” she asked, hopefully.
Ramanujam shook his head. “Difficult case,” he said, tapping the papers before him. “It’s a meningioma – a brain tumour – but it has grown so much that it will be tricky to remove.”
“You have been looking at those X-rays for a long time. The best thing you can do is to rest now and go into the operating theatre in a relaxed frame of mind.”
Ramanujam flicked his pen on to the table and massaged his fingers. “As usual, you are right,” he said. “There is nothing more to be learned from these slides. Right, let’s talk about something else. Have amma and naanna gone to bed?”
“Your father is still watching television.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?” she said quickly.
“Ooh! The little bird is spreading its wings.”
Aruna flushed. She wouldn’t have made that comment a few months before, but as time passed her confidence had been growing. Not more than a year ago, she was a poor girl who had despaired of ever getting married because of her family’s financial circumstances. Now, she was the daughter-in-law of a wealthy family. Whenever she thought about the twists of fate that had brought her from there to here, she marvelled. She looked around the airy room – the marble floor, the rosewood bed with its sprung mattress, the teak table with its beautiful anglepoise table lamp, the painting of a Kuchipudi dancer standing on one leg, the en-suite bathroom…
Ramanujam stood up from the chair and stretched mightily. Aruna admired his bare chest and the muscles on his arms. She was certainly a lucky woman.
“No, seriously,” he said. “Before we got married, you told me that you’d never been out of the state and we haven’t ventured anywhere since then either. So, let’s go on a holiday.”
“A holiday?”
That was a new concept for her. All her previous travels had been local, either to a temple town for a pilgrimage or to an uncle’s house for a change of scenery, sometimes both at the same time, as her paternal uncle was a priest at a famous temple of Lord Venkateswara.
“We’ll go to Mumbai and stay in a nice hotel.”
“A hotel?”
“Why do I hear an echo?” he said. “Yes, from there we’ll go to Goa. You can hit the beach in a nice pink bikini.”
“Bikini?”
“Echo! Echo! Echo…” he said, his voice dropping with each successive word.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Aruna, ignoring her husband’s interruption. “I am not going anywhere in something like that. I don’t even look at magazines with pictures of women dressed in such skimpy clothes.”
“All right,” her husband said seriously. “You can come dressed in a nine-yard sari and keep your eyes on the sand. I will look at all the foreign women sunbathing, so I can describe them to you.”
Aruna frowned for a moment then gave a sudden grin and punched him on his upper arm. “You will run a mile if one of them even speaks to you,” she said.
“You will be pleased to know, madam, that I didn’t spend every night of my college in my hostel room.”
She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh yes, didn’t you tell me that you were a member of the astronomy club in college?”
She grinned when he became speechless, before sticking her tongue out at him and going into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Night-time teeth-cleaning was another of the rich people’s habits that she had picked up since getting married, along with changing into a nightdress rather than sleeping in her sari. When she came out of the bathroom, Ramanujam was already in bed. She got in, snuggled up against him and put her head on his right shoulder.
“Won’t the holiday cost a lot of money, especially staying in hotels and eating out every day?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about that. We deserve a holiday.”
“I wonder…” said Aruna and then fell silent.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing – just a thought. What if I feel like eating rice and rasam with poppadum? I am sure that a place like Goa won’t have any south Indian food.”
Ramanujan smiled, half turned and kissed her on the to
p of her head.
Aruna rubbed her hand over his chest and stroked the stubble on his cheek. “I think that there should be places to stay with a kitchen, so you can cook your own food.”
“What kind of fun would that be? Going to the market, chopping, frying and cleaning – you might as well stay home. At least here, you have servants to help.”
“It will still be a change and fun to see bazaars in other places,” said Aruna. “Sometimes you can go to restaurants and sometimes you can eat in.”
“Aruna’s self-cooking cottages,” said Ramanujam, using his hands as if framing a banner in the air. “I can see it now. It will be a national chain – in all tourist places from Kashmir in the North to Kerala in the South. Save money and enjoy.”
“Now you are making fun of me.”
He turned on his side and tightened his arms round her. His lips found hers and there was no talk for a while. Suddenly, she pushed him away and jumped out of the bed. He looked at her in surprise.
“In all this talk about holidays, I forgot to take my pill,” she said. She opened her wardrobe and took out a small box. “I only wished to delay children so that I could continue to work and support my sister in college. But you’ve made me realise that there’s another good reason: I want to travel with you and see all of India before we have kids.”
“That’s a great plan,” said her husband.
Three
Pari put the phone down and looked around her. A long row of cubicles faced her, each occupied by a person wearing headphones. She took off her own set, massaged her ears to get the blood flowing through her earlobes again and got up.
Unaccountably, she felt nervous. Sailaja, her best friend in the place, caught her eye and gave her a thumbs-up sign. Pari smiled back at her and made her way to the personnel department. Today was the last day of their batch’s probationary period. One by one they were being called into the HR manager’s office and given their papers. So far, the results had gone according to expectations – everybody had passed except one young man who was patently unsuitable for the work and had botched even the simplest tasks.
As Pari walked past Sailaja, the seated girl patted her hand and said, “Let’s go to Green Park tonight to celebrate. They have a dosa festival with chefs from Madras.”
Pari nodded and continued on her way. Soon, she was rereading the letter in her hand in disbelief. The HR representative across the desk would not meet her eyes. Pari looked at the letter again:
…We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a permanent position at this time. Due to current economic circumstances, we have had to take tough decisions. We will keep your details on file and get in touch with you if a suitable vacancy comes up. We wish you all the best…
“I don’t understand. I have done very well during my probation.”
The young woman from HR stirred. “We take a number of; factors into account, not all of which are immediately obvious,” she said. “Anyway, this decision does not mean that you performed unsatisfactorily. You must know what is happening to financial institutions around the world. We simply do not need as many people as we originally estimated.”
“But I did better than most people who have been made permanent,” said Pari.
The HR representative’s face froze. “We made it clear at the start that being made permanent at the end of your probation was entirely at our discretion. We do not have to give any reasons for our decision either way. You have the right to write to the head of human resources and we will consider your appeal in the appropriate manner.”
Pari got the message. She could write but her letter would simply be filed away somewhere. All the same, what had she got to lose?
“Yes, I will write to your head about the lack of clarity in your selections,” she said, the words sounding hollow.
“As you wish,” said the young woman opposite her, pushing a pen and paper towards her.
Less than ten minutes later, Pari was out of the building. The harsh mid-morning sun made her blink and she suddenly felt lost. What was she going to do all day? Vasu wasn’t expected back till the afternoon and Mrs Ali was visiting one of her sisters for lunch. All the friends she had made among her colleagues were busy working in the building behind her. They would be sitting in long rows in their cubicles, wearing headphones and waiting for the red light on the computer to indicate that a call had been patched in.
“Good morning, madam. This is your service representative Pari. How may I help you?”
She suddenly felt such a surge of visceral hatred towards her ex-colleagues that it was like a physical blow. A couple of people she knew by sight came out of the office and she hurried away, not wanting them to see her. A three-wheeled auto-rickshaw tuk-tukked down the road, belching smoke from its exhaust. She hailed it and got in quickly.
The driver turned and asked, “Where do you want to go, madam?”
Her mind went blank and she just waved her hand as if to say, forward. The driver shrugged his shoulders and the auto-rickshaw started moving.
What had gone wrong? She had been sure of being offered the job and all the comments from her trainers and managers over the past months had done nothing to dispel her confidence. She knew, without false modesty, that she was better than many staff in the office who had been there much longer. Why had she been chosen for the chop rather than somebody else?
“Which way do I go, madam?” the drivers voice broke into her thoughts.
Out of the side of the auto-rickshaw she saw the blue of the sea. “Stop here,” she said.
She paid the fare and made her way across the road, towards the beach. It was deserted at this time of day, except for a pack of dogs in the distance. The sun burned her face and she shaded her head with the dupatta that covered her shoulders and chest like a shawl.
Why had she been chosen to be kicked out? After a moment’s reflection, she realised that this was a fruitless line of thought. If it wasn’t her, who else did she think had to be let go? Sailaja? Bobby? No, that was wrong. While it was unfair for her to be singled out like this, she didn’t wish it on somebody else. Except…Except that she actually did, in some corner of her mind. She didn’t want to be the one to be standing idle in the middle of the day with nothing to do. She wanted to work; she wanted to be busy.
She sat on the low, wide wall that separated the beach from the road. The beach, a hundred feet or so wide, stretched out on either side of her for some distance. Waves rose and crashed tirelessly into the sand, rather like her thoughts. She remembered the most terrible night that she had ever endured – when her husband’s body had been brought home from the hospital after the accident. The back of his head was bashed in, but from the front he looked as if he were asleep. His muscled arms, the broad chest of a born athlete, the sculpted face of a man who could have been a film star, looking so peaceful…She had expected him to rise at any moment and give her that crooked smile of his.
A seagull went screaming past her. She shook her head. Unfair as this day was, it did not, in any way, compare to that tragedy. And yet she had survived even that and found a modicum of happiness. Well, not quite happiness. A tiny bit of not-sadness. Life carried on, she knew that more than anybody else.
She thought about Bilqis Madam and her son. Should she accept the proposal to marry Dilawar? In the end, she didn’t have anything to hold her back in Vizag now. Although she had been strong and independent for almost two years, she was tired. It would be good to let somebody else make all the decisions and just occupy herself in running a home.
The breeze from the sea ruffled the dupatta over her head. The soft cotton felt good against her cheeks. She had enjoyed a physically sensuous marriage with her husband. She had not thought about it since, but she could feel her senses wakening again, as if after a long slumber. The warm sun soaked into her and she regarded her body with dispassionate interest. Her husband had taught her to be comfortable within herself. Also, the year-long nursing of her father, he
lpless, drooling and incontinent after his massive stroke, had removed any vestiges of embarrassment over bodily functions. Nevertheless, she could not imagine being in bed with Dilawar. After all, she had seen only a photograph of him, though it was clear that he was handsome. She could imagine herself in Rehman’s arms – his intense eyes drilling into her and his lanky body pressing powerfully against her. She squeezed her hands into tight fists and shied away from the thought. He was still in love with somebody else and she was sure that Mr and Mrs Ali had higher hopes for their son than a now-unemployed widow.
She wondered what would happen if she jumped off the wall on to the sand and started walking towards the blue horizon. Would she be scared when her feet got wet? When the water reached past her thighs? What about when it touched her chin? She didn’t know how to swim but she didn’t think she would turn back even then. Tears trickled down her cheeks. She was weary, worn out, fatigued – life was so difficult. Pari felt all alone in the world. She just did not feel like carrying on any more.
Suddenly, a hand gripped her shoulder. She turned, startled, and looked straight into the kindly eyes of Mrs Ali. She was shocked for a moment, confused by the unexpectedness of the older woman’s sudden appearance. Mrs Ali sat down beside her on the parapet wall and hugged her. “Oh, my dear. It’s all right. Don’t cry.”
Pari had not been aware that she had been weeping, but now she started sobbing even harder. “I loved him, chaachi. I truly loved my husband. You believe me, don’t you?”
Mrs Ali patted her gently on the back. “Of course you did, my dear. Of course you did. We all know that.”
After a long time, she realised that Rehman was standing near by, speaking on his mobile phone.
“Thanks, Sailaja.” He was silent for a moment as he listened. “No, no. I am really glad that you called. Your concerns were absolutely correct. Your directions were good too. We’ve found her now. I owe you a coffee.”
Pari realised that she was not alone after all. She had people, family and friends, who cared for her and looked out for her. She remembered her boy, Vasu. She, in turn, had somebody to look after, too. While she had been mired in her own dark thoughts, she had forgotten her adopted son. He had lost his father, then his mother and finally his grandfather, with whom he had been living. Yet, he was such a happy lad. It was not just children who learned from parents; it could work the other way round as well, she realised. A mother could also learn how to deal with life from her son.
