The House of Hidden Mothers Page 12

  In their hotel room, Toby began slowly unbuttoning Shyama’s top, kissing her neck. Outside the irregular honking of car horns was overlaid with the cries of vegetable sellers, temple bells, the soaring violins of a Hindi film song.

  ‘The real reason they will never get rid of the monkeys,’ Shyama mused, shifting so Toby could reach the last stubborn button, ‘is that people keep feeding them. Every Tuesday, my Auntie Neelum used to lug a huge bag of fruit and nuts over to Raisina Hill and join all the other good Hindus making their offerings to Hanuman.’

  ‘The monkey god …’ Toby murmured.

  ‘Gold star for you. She’d always make a big deal of how religious she was, my auntie – joss sticks and mantras every morning, dragging us all to the temple when all we wanted to do was shop. Making up her packed monkey lunch like she was going on some pilgrimage: Hanuman helped Ram defeat the ten-headed demon Ravan, therefore I will go and throw peanuts at the street monkeys in case one of them reports back to their boss and I skip a few reincarnations up the scale towards nirvana.’

  Toby was taking his T-shirt off hurriedly, his face filled with familiar blind purpose.

  ‘And yet she’s the same thieving old bint whose daughter has stolen my parents’ flat. Marvellous, eh? Do you remember, for your bonus point, what Hanuman is the god of?’

  Toby was by this time lying across her, bare chested, face flushed, about to tackle the complicated machinery of her bra fastening. He could have done with some assistance from the cross-dressing monkey. ‘I don’t know! Jumping?’

  ‘Not far off, actually. Wrestlers. Athletes. He’s a protector of boundaries, the supreme example of a devoted disciple. And sometimes seen as an icon of fertility.’

  Toby glanced at Shyama, a strange smile twisting her face. He noticed the fine lines fanning out from the side of her eyes, a weary droop around her mouth that he had not seen before. He had a sudden glimpse of how she might look in ten, twenty years’ time. The flesh at the top of her arms, which he held now, felt soft and sagged slightly in his hand. He knew that when he finally removed her bra, he would have to lift her breasts with careful tenderness, like handling warm, just-laid eggs. It had never bothered him before. He didn’t want to think about it now. He wished she would just stop talking. But she continued, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have chased that monkey away.’

  Dr Renu Passi had a very full timetable, as always. Two of her ladies looked as if they would be delivering over the next few days – it was time to alert the expectant parents to hop on to flights from California and Israel in order to welcome their babies into the world. She could not recall any parents who had not made it in time, even with the unexpected early deliveries. Somehow these people always had the cash and flexibility to drop everything and present themselves, sweating with nerves and smelling of aeroplane, at her clinic’s door.

  A more pressing issue was Kamini, who even now was crying into her freshly laundered pillow, eight months pregnant and threatening to leave as soon as her husband could reach her. Dr Passi had huge sympathy for those very few women who got attached to their surrogate babies. Hadn’t she carried three children herself? She would tell them, stroking their oiled hair and mindful of their heaving, ungainly stomachs, you would not be human if you did not feel protective towards this child, if you even loved it a little, for haven’t you grown this little seed from its first planting, knowing you will not get to see it blossom, take root and thrive? (She always found it helpful to use agricultural imagery, as the majority of her ladies came from rural villages. They, more than anyone, should understand the relentless, amoral march of Nature.) But then, after the women had calmed down a little, sipped some sweet tea and nibbled the cardamom biscuits she kept for such occasions, Dr Passi would have to reiterate the terms of their contract.

  ‘Theklo, beti,’ she would say, insisting on eye contact so there could be no misunderstanding. ‘It is true we cannot make you give this baby away if you don’t want to, God strike us dead if we were such monsters to do that. But you signed a legal contract that you will have no contact with or connection to this child after the birth, and if you refuse, you will not get any payment. In fact, you will owe us some money for everything that has been spent on your medical care here. This is a lot of money – money you do not have, I think?’

  At this point the woman would usually nod, sniff, and avert her eyes from Dr Passi’s kindly gaze.

  But Dr Passi would continue, ‘And then there’s the question of whose baby it actually is – where would it belong?’

  This could either be a very short conversation or a longer one, involving diagrams and much patient repetition. This was usually the moment at which Dr Passi marvelled at how far reproductive technology had advanced during her career. In some cases, the women were incubating embryos that had been fertilized elsewhere, not even in India. These could be any combination of the man’s sperm with his partner’s egg, the man’s sperm with a donated egg, the woman’s egg with donated sperm, or even an embryo created with donated egg and sperm, so that the surrogate and the parents were equally unconnected genetically to the child they all thought of as theirs. (In fact, it was recommended that the surrogate should have no biological connection to the child at all, even if she were to offer up her own eggs, purely to avoid situations such as this one.) Although Dr Passi’s clinic provided a one-stop service, with a healthy balance of sperm and donor eggs in its bank, specialized agencies had sprung up in dozens of countries to source eggs and sperm and create the embryo in the commissioning parents’ country, which some much preferred. These agents would then transport the frozen fertilized embryos in what looked like village-style metallic milk churns, to be defrosted and implanted in Dr Passi’s clinic, and many others, in India. It wasn’t so very different from the people whom Dr Passi’s own parents had used to pay to queue up for them in interminable lines at post offices, bank counters and government offices. Time is money, hena, so if you have the money to save some time, spend it on those who don’t mind doing the running round and form-filling and are themselves making a living in the process. Everyone gets what they want and the wheels of this flourishing industry keep on turning happily. A 2.5-billion-dollar industry at the last count, all of it helping the Indian tiger economy to stretch its jaws, flex its flanks and leap even higher, snapping at the sun.

  Not that Dr Passi would say any of this to the occasional weepy lady with cold feet. Would she understand that without her cooperation, no one above them in this huge pyramid would be able to continue, to survive? No, once her ladies had been alerted to the small print, to the reality of giving back money they did not and would never have, of plodding back to their villages with a changeling baby tucked beneath their sari that would become at best an object of curiosity, at worst an outcast, they soon calmed down. They just needed reminding how important they were, how much joy they would bring to those who could not go anywhere else for a child, how many karmic blessings they would accrue for their next life in this, the most selfless of humanitarian acts.

  Dr Passi scrolled quickly through her new emails whilst dragging a brush through her wiry hair. The chaos of her desk belied her ruthless competence in every other area of her life: gold-medal winner at medical school; head of the Obstetrics and Gynaecology department at a leading Delhi hospital; all three children through medical school themselves, and a loving husband whose frequent business trips afforded her the time and energy to focus on her clinic. She caught herself sometimes regarding the surrogates almost as an alien race, their lack of education and opportunities, and their diminished status as women so far from her own experiences. As a woman, she had never felt, not for one minute, that there was any area of life closed off to her. Her parents had positively revelled in her ambition and achievements, had never once worried that she would not marry well and happily (although they did make some slight grumbling noises when she reached the age of twenty-seven without having expressed any need to settle down). Dr Renu Passi enjoyed every
aspect of being female. If some stupid men out there regarded her as less capable than them or in need of taming, well, that was their problem. One of the happy consequences of her job was that she was reminded on a daily basis of the astounding miracle of birth, of how wondrous women actually were, able to sustain and deliver another human being. She recalled the exhibits she had pored over at some museum on one of their European jaunts – maybe the Uffizi? Or was it the Louvre? Anyhow, the children had opted to go shopping instead, insisting her husband accompany them with his credit card, and she was left alone for a delicious few hours to enjoy an exhibition entitled ‘Fertility and Birth: A Sacred Mystery’. In every engraving or painting, in each statue or carving – some life-size, some as small as a month-old foetus – there was the attempt to express what each artist, probably male, must have felt as an incompetent witness to the act of birth: a helpless sense of terror and awe. Rotund female forms with pendulous breasts and spreading legs; buxom, drum-bellied goddesses, like ripe pods about to burst; open-mouthed, screaming women bearing down to gasp at the emerging head between their thighs; razor-toothed, wild-haired women, clawing the air, baying for blood and revenge as the pain of labour ripped through them. Even through the agony, Dr Passi could see in their ancient faces a twist of triumph that they had escaped death to create life. What must the first man have thought, wrapped up in his mammoth skin, poking around in his smoky cave fire, when that fur-clad woman over there in the corner suddenly squatted down and produced his future? They should damn well worship us, mused Dr Passi, grimacing as her brush caught on a particularly persistent knot in her hair. But why, then, did all the reverential iconography stop? You could see plainly in the timeline of the exhibition that the fecund, naked women gradually became smaller, neater, clothed, decorative and deferential. What had happened to the men to curdle their fearful admiration into fear itself? What made them cross that blood-speckled line between devotion and denigration?

  Dr Passi’s musings were halted by an email marked ‘URGENT’ from her lawyer, Vinod Aggarwal. Vinod marked virtually every email he sent her as urgent or extremely urgent; she appreciated his efficiency and it certainly made her read his emails immediately, but much of the time the contents were not at all urgent, merely another swell in the tsunami of paperwork she had to navigate on a daily basis. In the face of an as-yet-unregulated industry, where the Indian government had established guidelines for surrogacy as opposed to laying down actual laws, the contract between surrogate, commissioning parents and clinic was everything. A signed contract was all you needed to proceed and was your only protection should things not go according to plan. This necessitated enough paperwork to wallpaper the entire clinic and kept Vinod Aggarwal very busy and very well paid.

  Dr Passi scanned Vinod’s email and saw that, whilst it wasn’t urgent, it was certainly very worrying. She checked her appointments: Kamini had to be seen, obviously; she had two interviews with potential surrogates and a meet-and-greet with a couple just in from London. Of course, she had been in contact with Mr and Mrs Shaw for some weeks, arranging the necessary medical visas, liaising with the embassy about the future registration of the surrogate child, who would need a valid passport before entering its adopted country. All these boring, time-consuming procedures were now at least underway and she could concentrate on finding them a suitable match. They seemed good people, friendly, responsive, always prompt in their replies. Checking the computer’s clock, she realized she only had five minutes before her schedule kicked in, so she quickly called Vinod’s mobile.

  He answered on the second ring, sounding quite out of breath. ‘You got my email then? … Oof … Sorry, one second.’

  ‘Vinod? Are you climbing the stairs or what?’

  ‘I’m in the gym … God, how do you switch this goddamn machine off? It’s trying to kill me, I swear … OK. I’ve escaped. Go ahead.’

  ‘So this latest bill is definitely going ahead, is it?’ Dr Passi asked, plunging straight in.

  ‘That’s the rumour,’ Vinod panted, trying to steady his breathing. ‘But given it’s been hanging around for years, debated by lots of fat old men without a womb between them, shouting loudly at each other across parliament, who knows? Hai! Just let me sit a moment … Hahn-ji, look, the government’s under pressure to do something now with the press and the religious brigade snapping at their heels, so it’s looking likely it may become law soon … Renu?’

  ‘I’m here, just thinking …’

  Dr Passi slumped into her ergonomic office chair. The sudden relieving of pressure on her feet made her realize she hadn’t sat down for hours and had probably missed lunch again. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill had been knocking about since 2008, when it became apparent that India was fast becoming the world centre for surrogacy. Not surprising, considering the expense and restrictions facing childless couples in so many other countries. Dr Passi could list in her sleep the many advantages of coming to her instead – it was the section of their website that received the most hits. A service which would cost you around ninety to one hundred thousand dollars in the US or Canada would cost between ten and eighteen thousand dollars in India. She knew that the majority of her clients came from countries such as the UK, where both egg donation and surrogacy were strictly voluntary gifts offered by a few goodhearted women for no profit. Childless couples were not even allowed to advertise for a surrogate, let alone offer payment; they were dependent on the surrogates to come forward themselves. And all these women could expect in return for weeks of debilitating hormone treatment and painful operations for egg retrieval, or nine months of carrying someone else’s child to term, were basic medical expenses. Also, there were many countries where surrogacy itself was actually illegal, or where the law banned single people or gay couples from the entire process. True, at first, some of her staff had found dealing with the lesbians and the gay men somewhat bemusing: she had lost one very good midwife early on, who had stood open-mouthed when Dr Passi had introduced her to Joel and Luke, two Canadians who had arrived to claim their newborn son. Their mountainous proportions and gingery beards hadn’t helped matters: they had attracted crowds of gawping children whenever they ventured out of their hotel, sunburnt giants wading through a brown sea of giggling Lilliputians. But Dr Passi could only remember their sweet natures and the image of a sleeping baby in the hammock of their huge arms. The midwife had walked out moments later, clutching her handbag to her chest like a shield and interspersing Hail Marys with doom-laden mutterings about unnatural abominations and the incoming tidal wrath of God. Dr Passi paid her off; she had never understood bigotry. She felt a surge of pride when she reflected that here in India, the largest democracy in the world, famed for its tolerance and mix of so many different religions, the parental doors were open to all. But it looked as if that was about to change.

  ‘What’s really put a firework up their asses,’ Vinod continued, his daily and ever-increasing Americanisms grating on Dr Passi, ‘is all the problems around visas and citizenship for the children once they’re born. I mean, all the tamasha with that Norwegian woman, the worldwide coverage made us look like disorganized idiots – and cruel idiots at that. So they’re panicking and have gone too far the other way maybe, but until we get some sort of unified legislation across all the participating nations, it’s going to keep happening and I think …’

  Dr Passi zoned out for a minute, as she often did when Vinod got over-excited by legal techno-speak, remembering instead the haunted face on the news of that woman who was not able to take home her twin girls, successfully born to an Indian surrogate. Having subjected her to DNA tests which proved she had no genetic link to the children, the Norwegian embassy refused to issue the children with travel papers. Officially they did not belong anywhere, these stateless little girls, which meant that they and their adoptive mother were stranded in India for two years whilst she fought her way through the labyrinthine legal system for some proof that these children did in fact exist in the ey
es of the law and deserved to go home with her. In the same year, a gay Frenchman returned home with his newborn twins in tow, only to be arrested on arrival. As surrogacy was banned in his country, the children were forcibly removed from him and placed into foster care whilst he launched a lengthy court battle, which for all Dr Passi knew was still going on right now.

  ‘… and of course the Baby Manji case is quoted time and again in all the campaign literature, although I suspect they love throwing this around because it involved wicked parents getting divorced rather than focusing on what happened to the poor kid.’

  ‘I knew them,’ Dr Passi blurted out.

  ‘What, you knew the couple who …’

  ‘No,’ she corrected him. ‘I knew the people whose clinic they used in Rajasthan. They’re good people. They told me the commissioning parents seemed very stable, solid, you know? One was Indian, the other Japanese, can’t remember which. Anyway, they were completely shocked when the husband filed for divorce. The baby hadn’t even been born.’

  ‘It happens – if not during, then sometimes afterwards, we know that. Sometimes the process of finding a baby is what keeps them going, and once they actually have one, they have to look into each other’s faces again and … chalo, game over.’