The security guard hit his cane on the ground every few minutes to let everyone know he was at work, doing his duty. Round the apartment complex he went, the thwack of his stick growing fainter as he moved towards the swimming pool and the garden. Amrita imagined him stopping at the corner where the drongos nested, where the bulbuls chattered and where she had once seen a hornbill. A hornbill in this crowded corner of Pune where glass towers that worked to American time rose out of manicured lawns, where planes droned overhead! Could the birds hear themselves over the din? She waited for the guard to pass the gym and climb up the steps to the upper parking lot. She could hear the sound of his stick hitting the tar again now and his occasional low whistle. Amrita, lying on her side of the bed, trying to make the pain go away, wondered what he thought about on his interminable rounds – she’d counted twenty so far. Was anyone else awake to hear him. Probably not. Like Nikhil next to her, they probably lay fast asleep.
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee
Her husband did look like a corpse in his sleep, still and deep. As her perspiration soaked the sheets and seeped into the mattress, she fought to breathe deeply and regularly. Isn’t that what they said you should do to avoid panic attacks? Only, it didn’t seem to work for pain. When the spasms grew too intense, she hobbled to the bathroom and squatted on the pot. The savage calloused fingers that gripped her innards, twisted and pulled at them with a ferocity that made the room reel. The tiles with their grey abstract patterns grew flashing lights and the plastic soap dish with its glistening suspended goldfish leaked amniotic fluid that oozed redly into the drain. Amrita held on to the towel rail, the edge of the sink, anything to steel herself. Finally, she gripped herself, her fingernails leaving red half-moons on her arms. Then she took off her sweat-soaked t-shirt and stuffed it into her mouth. It would never do for the children to hear her groaning.
In the bedroom, Nikhil slept on as deeply as Kumbhakaran, the little snores escaping him, the sheets kicked off the bed and onto the floor. A cough emerged from the children’s bedroom. Please don’t let Sunny have an asthmatic attack just now, Amrita prayed. She didn’t feel capable of finding the nebuliser, of twisting the cap off the respules, squeezing out the Duolin or Levolin or Budesol, even deciding which one it should be, and fitting the mask on him.
Slowly, she got up and looked into the cistern, at the blood and bits of tissue, at the hands and legs, the brain, the lovely face with its features that looked like her own, and the beautiful body. Would she be wedged in the pipes forever so they’d never be able to use the toilet, would her ghost come back and complain of being flushed down the pot? Amrita giggled. Embryos aren’t supposed to have ghosts, are they? They weren’t even supposed to have souls yet. At what point would a soul have descended into this one? Had it already done that and was it caught up in the bend in the pipes too or had it risen free, oozed out of her own navel or the pores of her belly, or slipped out with the hot mess that jerked itself free and down through her vagina?
‘I don’t want to be born,’ she had said. Or had she whispered, ‘You killed me’?
And had she, Amrita, killed her? By not wanting her enough, by listening to Nikhil saying he didn’t want another child, by riding her scooter to work (though Kalyani Nagar and Koregaon Park, past Ruby Hall and the bridge over the dying trickle of the Mula and past the bus stand at 20 kmph avoiding every pothole), by even contemplating briefly the possibility of an abortion? Had she murdered her baby … with her thoughts? She had felt her fluttering in her belly, she had felt her manic hunger and her quiet slumber even though she’d only been a few weeks pregnant. She had known there was a person inside, growing, wanting, preparing to take on her full role in this Matryoshka doll play, the world within a world, waiting.
*
‘Get rid of it. We can’t afford another one,’ Nikhil said as they sat in the hospital reception waiting for the results of the sonography that would confirm what they both knew, what the pregnancy kit from the neighbourhood chemist had already told them. That she was pregnant. The place was stuffed with couples. They looked happy.
‘I thought you had your tubes tied up or something. We don’t need this now, you know?’
‘It’s a baby, not an “it”. And, no, I will not get rid of the baby like it’s some fucking cockroach,’ she whispered back fiercely. She didn’t want the man sitting next to her to hear. He’d think she was the kind of person who used four letter words routinely. She was, but she didn’t want a random stranger to know that. She didn’t want a random stranger to know that she used four letter words in conversation with her husband. Women with breeding; women from ‘good families’ didn’t do that sort of thing. They were sweet, nice and gentle. Especially to their husbands.
Ah, how my upbringing has screwed me over, Amrita thought, glancing furtively at the man who was looking towards the door of the lab into which his wife had just disappeared clutching a vial of piss. Everything is okay as long as the neighbours don’t know. Life is good if you can plaster on a perma smile, and if you must cry, make sure you do it soundlessly in the bathroom.
‘I can’t afford this. Please,’ Nikhil said. She looked at him, at his tousled hair, at the brown eyes fringed with generous lashes and the full sullen mouth and tried to imagine a lemon into existence to battle the nausea. When had she stopped even liking him she wondered swallowing the flat saliva that filled her mouth?
‘There’s just no money for this one,’ he said now. He never kept his voice down. He enjoyed making her squirm in public places. It tickled him to discuss deeply personal matters in crowded lifts, to make jokes about her family and look around at the other men who, strangely, always sniggered in solidarity.
‘Mrs Chauhan,’ the nurse called out, ‘this way please.’ Amrita scurried gratefully after her.
*
Yes, that was it, the baby had heard her thinking, had understood her ambivalence, had felt she wasn’t wanted and had decided to do things her way. She had decided to kill herself. An embryonic suicide. Now she, Amrita, was a tomb after the necrophiliacs had plundered it leaving only bits of infant inside. A walking, living, breathing coffin. Oh, baby, I didn’t mean it, honestly, Amrita muttered as fresh twists gripped her womb.
Unaccountably, she thought of the Angela Carter story she’d read as a student, of eating eggs with the embryos inside them half formed, of crunching into their little almost formed bodies. She had set the book down then and shivered. Chicken embryos had made her childhood miserable. She saw them everywhere and particularly in the dire mix of egg and Bournvita that her mother diligently poured down her throat each day. There it was, three black dots swirling on the surface of the milk, begging not to be swallowed, oh, look two of those dots were gleaming eyes that looked up at her balefully. ‘You killed me?’
‘Drink up,’ Ma said then. ‘You think too much. When will you learn it’s best not to think at all? Just do.’
‘You killed me,’ the embryo in the toilet bowl said as Amrita backed out the door clutching her stomach, dragging her feet, her mouth stuffed again with her sweaty t-shirt. Did she really see her – the miniscule female embryo ghost, her tadpole body, for she couldn’t be fully formed just yet, not yet – raise her finger and point accusingly? No, of course, she was imagining it. But it was true, her daughter had escaped down the shit hole, just like that. Amrita knew the foetus had been a girl. It had been one, hadn’t it, she asked no one in particular and a voice that sounded like her own replied, ‘Yes, it was a girl. And now she’s gone.’
Dr Sharma’s painkillers weren’t working. Amrita had popped two of them but that eyeless thing that had terrorised her girlhood, that had stayed hidden under her bed for years and ensured she always slept far away from the edges and never ever fell off had finally snaked its slimy arm into her, pushed its way in between her legs and dragged her baby out. After all this time, it’s got me, she thought staggering to the living room and lying down on the marble floor. Maybe if she kept praying, repeating the few mantras she knew, saying ‘Our Father’ over and over, that gnawing inside of her would go away.
Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven/
Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare/
You are my sunshine my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey/ Om namah Shivaya, Shivaye namaha/
Our Father in heaven holy be thy name/
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you!
Was that a mantra? No, no, it’s funny, I'm being Rickrolled even as the baby slips out of me bloody and dismembered, she thought. Maybe she should think about happy things, dump religion, who knew what lay beyond anyway?
*
Dr Anahita Sharma said everything would be cleaned out, that there wouldn’t be any bits of baby left inside.
‘But what if she isn’t dead, doc? What if we’ve made a mistake?’
The plastic flowers on the cabinet, shrouded in a layer of dust, threw their shadow on framed pictures of the doctor’s husband, a distinguished looking grey-haired gentleman, and her son, a distinguished looking black-haired gentleman. In the pictures, all of them wore white coats. A family of doctors. Like a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions. No, that can’t be right, Amrita thought, ‘family’ isn’t the collective noun for doctors.
‘What if she’s still there … waiting to be born?’
Dr Sharma coughed softly and turned around to adjust a photograph that showed her skiing in Auli. Amrita knew it was Auli because the doctor dressed in a red jacket, black trousers and a red and white striped woollen balaclava, her feet encased in skis, sticks in her red and white striped gloved hand was standing under a banner that said: ‘Welcome to Auli’. The white bits of her cap and her gloves merged into the glare of the snow around her so it looked like a trick photograph, like only intermittent bits of the glove were clutching at the sticks and whole bands of her head were missing.
‘Maybe the baby wasn’t meant to be born. Some of them are like that, you know,’ Dr Sharma said, adjusting the Ganpati figurines flanking the picture of Zarathustra on the cabinet. The thin jasmine garland on the picture changed colour every few seconds as a miniscule bulb shaped like a flaming torch at the base of the picture flashed now yellow now blue.
‘Fate. Besides, you’re quite old now, aren’t you?’
‘I’m 38.’
‘Oh, then it’s ok; you still have time. Get over this and try again,’ Dr Sharma said sitting down and pulling her pad towards her. ‘These things happen. Some babies aren’t meant to be born,’ she repeated. ‘It’s best that way for them, for you.’
She’d said that as she moved the transducer over the gel that the nurse slathered on Amrita’s lower belly. It felt like a smooth cold spoon or like a larger repurposed L’Oreal eye roller. Only, instead of banishing dark circles this one allowed you to gaze at your insides, gave you a shot of your own microcosm. Amrita had tried to read the machine’s screen but it was no use.
‘You know sometimes we don’t know why but things don’t work out the way we want them to, expect them to,’ the doctor said as she dropped her gloves in the dustbin and stepped beyond the screen with its standard hospital issue green curtains.
‘But are you sure, doc?’ Amrita asked after she’d pulled her trousers back on and was sitting at the doctor’s table. ‘What if the baby is still inside and you’re giving me all these medicines and they end up harming her … and … and something happens to her because of them?’
Dr Sharma put down her pen and leant back in her chair. She looked at Amrita for a long few seconds. ‘Do you still feel the fluttering?’
‘No.’
‘You are in pain and you’re bleeding?’
‘Yes, constantly.’
‘Do you feel like there’s life inside you?’
Doyoufeelthereslifeinsideyou?Insideyoudoyoufeellife?Lifeinsideyoufeelyoudo?Youdofeellifeyouinside?
It would never do to start wailing now so Amrita looked down at the tiles. Funny they were the same shade of grey brown as the ones in the house where she grew up. Was the old neighbour Mrs Dastur still around? Mrs Dastur with her ornate glassware, her exquisitely crocheted lace doilies and her talking parrot who was always careful not to shit on her teakwood furniture? Amrita would have loved to visit Mrs Dastur again except she was probably dead by now.
‘I don’t know,’ Amrita said, fixing her attention on the plastic flowers in the glass vase with its etching of sinuous vegetation through which the fake flaming torch-bulb’s reflection flashed alternately yellow and blue.
‘The ultrasound I did shows no movement and you say you have been bleeding for days now,’ Dr Sharma said, handing her a prescription. ‘The baby is dead, Mrs Chauhan. We haven’t made a mistake.’
In the waiting room a shiny happy couple was holding hands under a poster that advertised a cream for vaginitis.
*
But then if I dump religion entirely, who to pray to for the bleeding to stop, for the night to end, for everything to be alright?
What if she died like this on the living room floor? What nonsense! She couldn’t die just yet, she had other children to raise. Surely, the embryo realised that. But the embryo wasn’t the one who decided. The thing with the glistening arm was in charge and all it really wanted to do was satisfy its appetite for gouging. So now what? She was going to bleed to death on the living room floor while everyone in the house was asleep. What bad form. She had to fight the thing somehow. She couldn’t let Tito, smelling of sleep and Johnson’s baby soap, dragging his blanket along in his search for Mamma like he did every morning discover her on the floor cold and stiff as a chunk of meat in the freezer. And then she couldn’t die without destroying her diaries scrawled with pages and pages of complaints against Nikhil. It wouldn’t do for him to find them after she was dead. He’d never forgive her for remembering every slight, every infidelity, every barb about her utter unsuitability as a wife. And he wouldn’t forgive her for Sanjeev, for the long meditations on the texture and colour of his skin, for the imaginary encounters, her fantasies, that she had committed to the page. She should get up and tear those pages out; Our Father who art in heaven, keep me alive, help me get through this just so I can tear up those pages; please, she prayed.
*
By the time the mutton biryani arrived in a large patila, its mouth covered with a newspaper secured with rounds of hemp string, Amrita had prepared the finger foods and the raita, picked up the kababs and ensured that the bar was well stocked and the freezer stuffed with ice cream. The children had showered and put on their ‘party’ clothes; the maid had dusted every last knick knack, ash trays had been placed in the balcony and the plants watered. The numerous strips of pills: pills to staunch the flow, pills to clean out, pills to help you heal, pills to make you strong, pills to kill the pain, pills to make you forget why you needed all those pills, had all been secreted away in the drawer of the bedroom cupboard. Three days and it was already difficult to remember that faint fluttering, the ghost in the pipes, the underbed monster with his slithering, tugging arm, even the long list of names she’d picked for her, the embryo.
It’s easy to forget her. She lives quietly under the bed now in the space vacated by the murderous creature with the strong slimy tentacle.
When the first guests rang the doorbell, Amrita was ready for them. She was wearing cream harem pants and a perfectly fitted off shoulder top. Her toenails matched the citrine flashing light shards in her drop earrings.
Everything, even her happy face, was perfectly in place.
*
Manjula Narayan is a writer who lives and works in Gurgaon.