by Shruti Swamy
Of the following days, the less said the better. They were not very good days, hot days, days—pardon me—of hell, where I lived in a dark room, shades drawn in a flimsy attempt to keep the heat at bay, neglecting the housework so badly that my husband hired two bais to pick up all the work I had left, and which he must have paid for at least partially with his parents’ money. These two women punctured the cottage’s silence—they opened the windows to let the air in, and they talked to each other and tried to talk to me, but they could not puncture the strange, oblong state in which I lay, egg-shaped, oblivious, in the vast and strong reaches of the afternoon, which seemed, each day, endless, simply punctuated by the arrival of my husband, and therefore of night, and the departure of my husband, and therefore the arrival of day. Through these day-long afternoons my mind traveled endless spirals of thought, no, one circle of thought, like the snake eating its own tail, or a lost, baffled explorer traversing the same small section of forest, unable to point himself in another direction. I can say that the circle of thought began and ended in the death of my body, and that death aroused no fear in me, as it had those days of the top-step at the Bhavan, a thrilling fear that was in its own way like joy, but only seemed at the time a logical end and a logical beginning. Once, through the dullness, I felt the recovered knowledge come up in me, come up like bile in my throat. No, like electricity, a scorching feeling. My eyes flared very suddenly open and I began to sweat, and the child, feeling my alarm, started banging against my body, wanting to be let out. The surface of me rippled with its hardness, fists and knees: it was angry. Or, I was. It would have felt good to scream or to cry, to beat myself against something as it beat against me, blind and rageful. I could not do it. No sound came through my mouth. I started to hit my thigh with my palm, keeping a violent taal. It was hypnotic, the feeling of the thigh against the palm. Both stung: the thigh and the palm, the palm I could see becoming red. I began to calm. I let the room glaze. Then I could breathe again. The child was coming, though I had not wanted it, though surely there was no one less fit to mother it than me? Mrs. B could have her, and if she loved her with one tenth the love she reserved for a boy, well, even that would be enough to raise her in the infinite rooms of her elegant home, hire one man to teach her how to ride a horse and another man to teach her how to swim in the Parsi Gymkhana’s jewel-colored pool. Would be enough—would do. Would be more than I had.
No. I had no mother, and neither would she.
“Here, you must eat this, in your condition, you need to eat and keep up your strength,” said the kind voice of the younger bai, truly they were kind, I could see this from far away, and I accepted their food into my body knowing the child needed it, and that the body would need it to expel the child, but I could not taste the food or maybe didn’t try to register it. Then I lay back down.
When my husband came he greeted me with affection and went to bathe, then he put on a record that we both liked to listen to. I wasn’t listening. He said something to me, and then he said it again. I said, “What?”
“Can you please tell me what’s happening to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” he said. He was angry. “Nothing. Look at you.”
What difference did the body make, let alone its appearance? He would have paid the bais to bathe me and dress me if he could. But the next day he came home and told me that he’d spoken to the doctor and that everything was normal. The doctor said that sometimes women become erratic and odd in the last week or two of pregnancy—the hormones. Just as long as I didn’t have a fever, which, my husband confirmed, putting his hand against my forehead, I didn’t, I felt completely normal. Yes. Long ago I had visited a woman in a room who turned her face away and whose words, if she spoke in the room at all, carried no sound. She was just tucked inside her egg, I knew now, as I was. “Yes, normal,” he said, and then, thinking I needed some reassurance he continued, “You’ll have the best care, my love, the best medicine, there’s no need to be afraid. And look, you’ve seen how nice it is to have a little help, at my parents’ house, you won’t have to lift a little finger. You can rest, recover, and then enjoy, have a cold drink, learn how to swim, meet my mother’s friends, my family’s friends, they’re quite—well, some of them—are quite—”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, let’s shift to their place.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
He looked so pleased, solved, as though someone had just popped a dislocated shoulder back into its socket. “That’s just wonderful, Vidya—you’ll be—I promise—so happy—”
Happy. A word didn’t hurt more than any other. That was the odd part. There was no hurt, no ache at all. It was like sweat, it just stayed on me. Might pain be better? Where was it going? I almost couldn’t feel my body, except in its heaviness, its lethargy, so swollen that I was unable to take deep breaths all the way to their apex.
On that night, as I lay awake, listening to my husband’s breathing, and to my own, which was soft and lapping, not quite in concert with my husband’s, I could feel that though I was ready for sleep, my child was awake, and I could feel this not from her movements but from the wide-openness of her eyes, black, and lashed, lidded, open inside me. Looking. I was being looked through, and because the seeing was so deep I looked in and out of myself at once: through my own consciousness and through a consciousness so intimate that it was a surprise to realize that it was not actually mine. The look of my body, its humped casing dampened by the blue-purple light, and the feel of it, of the her, the other I, the not-me, pushing out through me, all came oddly and exquisitely together. Instead of fear it was an animal calm, like those dreams where you remember you can fly.
The contractions started in the morning, shortly after my husband had left for work, and in the afternoon I decided it was time to go to the hospital. We didn’t have a phone in the cottage, so when the latest contraction abated, I went around to my landlord’s house, knocking a little too urgently on the door, which was answered by the maid who conversed over the wall with her sister—it being the middle of the week, the family was away. Without hesitation she sent a houseboy out on the main road to call for a taxi, and asked if I would like to come inside and telephone my husband, but I told her I would call him from the hospital. Between the pains of the contractions I felt fine, almost giddy, and I did not want to walk across the vast and gleaming parquet floor, which looked both treacherous and easily spoiled. Anyway, the taxi came quickly, and bringing nothing but my purse, I sat in the back seat. The driver was none too pleased with his charge, once he saw my condition and learned our destination, but I was already inside his car. We drove: too quickly. I was fine for a time until I wasn’t: it was difficult to breathe. I gripped the armrest and made no sound. The pain passed. Pain—not just. It was strange and deep, the movements that originated inside. Already in the center of their hot moments, time had begun to change around me, I lost the thread of it, so fully occupied in the intensity of the sensation until it let me go. We had arrived at the shining white building I had seen all those years from the roof of my house, built for British ladies to deliver their babies, fashioned of rose-blushed marble, shining white against the green hill, seeming to pick up some dazzle from the ocean below. The taxi driver had glanced at my face during the pain and softened toward me, and perhaps he was grateful that I didn’t soil his car: he got out, opened the door for me, and then walked me to the entrance, leaving me in the charge of the admitting nurse.
I loved the smell of the stairway, cool and mineral as rain. I clutched the banister as I climbed, slowly, feeling the full weight of my body—for the last time, I thought, not savoring it, but soon I would be, again, alone, and light. Down the long yellow hallway, pale yellow with mint-green trim, the floor clean and smelling of disinfectant, but my room was painted a melancholy blue I liked, and I was on the bed before the next contraction came, knocking the breath ou
t of me as the indifferent nurse took my blood pressure. Then I was left alone in the room, alone, for I still had not yet called my husband, and didn’t want to. (I had told the nurse when she asked that he was in an important meeting and not to be disturbed, and that he would come to the hospital when his work was finished—it was not at all strange for him to not be in attendance, though it was odd that none of my family was there: no sister, or mother, or brother-and-wife, or anxious mother-in-law.) There were bars on my window but my room had a door that led out to a balcony, all mine, that looked not onto the sea but onto the continuation of the hill’s green slope. The sight of so many trees, dark-branched, stocked with crows and smaller birds, some bunched with small yellow flowers whose overwhelmingly sweet fragrance, when I heaved myself off the bed to open the door to the balcony, mingled with the strong, harsh smell of disinfectant, reminded me of the edge feeling of the college campus, and I missed, wildly, desperately, Radha. I wanted her here next to me on the hospital bed, scolding me for making such a fuss, though she could see the depth and breadth of the pain I was in from the way I held my body and the length of my breaths, and so her scolding would only be to comfort me, to remind me of the other world, the one that existed outside the violence happening to my body, the one I would reenter when the pain left. How did you get yourself into this mess, she said to me, sitting on the edge of my bed and smoothing the hair from my forehead, very damp, you said you would never marry.
So did you.
I didn’t.
But you will.
Don’t accuse me of your sins.
I didn’t think anyone would ever love me.
I loved you, she said very simply. But even then I could not say it to her.
I don’t want to die.
You won’t.
I’m frightened.
First you want to die, now you don’t. You claimed you’d never give up dance, then you did. You said you’d become an engineer, then you didn’t. You swore you’d never marry, then you married. You didn’t want to live with your in-laws, now your husband this very minute is moving your things to their place. You said you loved this man, now you want to leave him. You didn’t believe in your mother until she was dead, then you wanted her back. You didn’t want to be a mother, and you’re having a child. You’re having a child now, and you’re going to be a mother. You’re not going to die, but what are you going to do now? What kind of way is this to live?
I covered my face with my hands so I wouldn’t have to look at her, to look down at my alarming body, flushed and distended in its soiled sari, pink and smelling darkly of its seeping odor. Soon, blood, they’d part the legs, push up the skirt, and bare a wound stretching open. I didn’t want it; I just didn’t want anymore to die.
Why not, if you’ve lived your life so badly?
Because, I said, the pain was so terrible that I could feel death, I could feel it the way my mother felt it: not peering down from the ledge, but an inch from the earth, and it was not right, it was not comfort, the body did not want to release me, the body remembered pleasure in that inch more desperately than ever before; remembered the silky days of childhood in grandmother’s garden, whose soil was watered daily with the water in which we washed, and whose black perfume was sharpened by the acres of dust that surrounded it, stirred when the surface was broken; remembered my mother’s fingers in my hair, the strong smell of hair oil and the intelligence of her hands rubbing at my scalp; remembered the specific weight and heft of the brother I had failed, before I had failed him, the warmth of his small fingers around my ear; remembered you, Radha, your eyes closed and your lips slightly parted, and the cadence of your quickened breath, so sweet, sharing the body’s capacity for pleasure, the knowledge that pleasure meant something, it could be the opening to the soul—
I’m just babbling, I said, I’m frightened, for pain had come again and I was afraid I could not stand it, no, I was certain I could not: there was no way to reach the logical mind and assure it of its continuance, though the stern nurses made no attempt, just came in to note the frequency of my contractions, conferring with one another as though I myself were not in the room—in a way I wasn’t, in those moments of pain, yet I heard their distant voices with mounting anger—look how this one screams, and she’s not even at the worst part yet, the whole city will know when it comes time for her to deliver. They shut the door to the balcony and scolded me—this whole time, the air conditioning was escaping out the door, and when they closed it, I felt the full weight of it against my skin, white women gave birth like this—in ice-boxes—
It was evening now, and my husband arrived. He was still dressed from work and looked quite angry, his anger, enacted by a resident of the world-without-pain, looked almost comical to me and his words came from very far away. “I was worried,” he said, “I was so worried when I got home, why didn’t you call me?”
“I—oh.” Gripped and gripped, one hand in the other.
“Why are you sitting alone in this freezing cold room? Where is your doctor?”
Seeing I could give him no answers he left; I could hear his footsteps down the hall. When he returned, he was shouting at my stern nurses, who followed him into the room, “Sir, air-con is a feature, sir, cool air is very good for the mothers-to-be—look, still she’s sweating, sir, the doctor has been called, but the case is not urgent, she has not yet even halfway dilated, sir, please lower your voice, we don’t have control over the temperature, sir—”
Their voices, angry, kept in time with my pain—pain, a word for which there is no good substitute, but now seems so empty when I set it down, almost completely devoid of meaning, when the experience of it dominated every inch of me, it defined my body in the bounds of the room fully and made my mind so utterly singular: no room for the thought stop, or no, or help—and I began to panic, I started screaming, not out of pain but of fear, cries that alarmed my husband, whose face went strangely white—and as I did so I could feel my body closing up, holding on to its spectacular pain and the baby folded inside it. Drawn perhaps by the voices, which, all raised, were surely attracting attention, for there was nothing unusual about my cries alone—these walls had heard worse, and would, even throughout the course of the night, still hear worse from my lips—another nurse came, one I had not yet seen. This nurse spoke quietly to the other two, who then left the room, and then she spoke very gently to my husband, “This is no place for men, sir. The doctor will be here soon, and in the meantime, your wife is doing very well, she’s quite strong, she’s young and healthy—”
“I’ve never heard her scream like this,” he said almost in awe.
“To me it’s the most ordinary sound in the world,” she said. “Come now, have you informed your family? Are there any preparations to be made? There’s a phone in our waiting room, available for just this purpose. We’ll inform you, of course, when the doctor arrives and of what he says.”
With a mixture of relief and anxiety my husband let himself be led out of the room. “Let’s take a look,” the nurse said when she returned, and pushed my sari up past my knees—I so far gone that her gaze there did not bother me, nor did it bother me when she pulled the lips open with her fingers and clicked her tongue. “They shouldn’t have let him in here. But he’s handsome, your husband, isn’t he? Sort of a big shot?”
I nodded. When the doctor came I did mind, I gazed at him with hatred, I resented his fingers on my body, returning to the places he had already dispassionately charted. “It will be a while yet,” he said, “You were dilating nicely, but you stopped, you just squeezed shut as it were. You need to relax—
“Relax—
“—and just let mother nature do her work.”
But the nurse, when the doctor left, spoke more kindly, “It is quite cold in here, isn’t it. Let me see if I can turn it down—” disappeared, and moments later the arctic rush ceased. The absence of cold rendered warmth pleasant—I was glad to be warm again, feeling my skin loosen, my face and my thi
ghs. The contractions beat against my body like waves. Would I die here? Or worse—I would live like this, suspended, I and the child, between this place and the next not for hours but for days—not for days but for years, for ever? This was not like death, there was no nothing in it: each moment was filled with sensation, pain, then no pain, pain, then no pain, and the violent inrush of breath.
“Come on now, sister,” said the nurse, in a soft, almost incantatory voice, “your body wants to open and you must let it open, more and more your body wants to open, and now listen to me, it won’t be easy—”
“—won’t be easy,” I repeated,
“—it won’t be easy but women have done this, your mother, her mother, and her mother—”
“—and her mother—” And the pain, ebbing for a moment as though to allow me to catch my breath. “But my mother died.”
She frowned, “God jesus, in birth?”
“No, later.” Where was my mother now? She was gone, dispersed, slipped into another body, or spread, her atoms, back into the earth. Not my mother anymore, I had no illusions about that, the poor Christians’ mistake about the afterlife. But I had never, not once, cried for her. I had never marked her absence in any way. I had never even named it.
“Well see, your mother, her mother, and hers. Don’t you see? Women have to be braver than men. Up you go, we’re going for a walk now, come on.” She came close to me and helped me shift my huge body off the bed by sliding her shoulder under my arm and dragging my legs toward the ground, almost as though she would lift me—and though she was very slight, this nurse, and young, younger, even, than me—her arms held a surprising strength as she got me to my feet. Walking up and down the hall in a slow, painful shuffle, I could see the pores across her cheeks—she smelled faintly of jasmine, and faintly of sweat, her voice was a practiced murmur of comforting near-nonsense: “You won’t remember this pain when it’s over, you’ll be so happy, you’ll see, this pain will pass and then it will be forgotten.”
