The House of Hidden Mothers Read online

  Priya lay back on the treatment couch and stretched lazily. ‘It’s bloody agony, but I feel so clean afterwards. What’s the face for?’

  Shyama hadn’t been aware she was scowling. The sight of Priya’s perfectly toned body didn’t help her mood. She was all honeyed limbs and gym-honed muscle, the only imperfection the barely visible Caesarian scar curved like a rueful smile just below her navel. Shyama herself had always rather regretted that she had ended up not giving birth naturally; certainly her NCT teacher had made a point of congratulating all the mummies who’d managed to squeeze their babies out without medical intervention. All she said to Shyama was, ‘Never mind. Next time, eh?’ According to Priya, both her kids had needed emergency Caesarians – ‘One was stuck and the other was just bloody lazy!’ – though Shyama suspected the real emergency had been Priya’s panic at the thought of having a vaginal cavity as big as a bucket. ‘Too Punjabi Princess to push’ should have been written on her admittance form.

  ‘I’ve just had a bit of a row with Lyd,’ Shyama muttered, nudging Priya sideways so she could slump on to the couch beside her.

  ‘Ah, told you she wouldn’t take it well.’ Priya sighed. ‘What did she say about the surrogate idea?’

  ‘I don’t know, didn’t give her a chance. She said … she implied … doesn’t matter. Didn’t know she could be that mean without alcohol.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t say that. Shyama?’

  ‘I can’t stand it when women judge other women, when they should know, more than anyone else, how bloody hard it is!’

  ‘Have you forgotten already?’ Priya stifled a yawn. ‘Who gave you the hardest time after you split up with Shiv? You thought it would be your dad’s weirdy-beardy mates, shouting for you to shave your head and padlock your pants.’

  ‘I’m sure some of them were thinking it.’

  ‘But the ones who actually said it to your face? Their wives, right?’

  ‘Not exactly. It was just … they didn’t know what to do with me. Divorced single mother, the first in their circle. I think they were worried it might be infectious.’

  ‘How times have changed, sweetie!’ Priya laughed. ‘I think you started a trend.’

  ‘I remember once going to this party with Mum and Dad. It was only a few months after he’d moved out, and the hosts were so embarrassed at having to find a single place at the dinner table, they actually put me in the TV room with the teenagers and kids, with a tray on my lap.’

  ‘Nooo!’

  ‘It was either that or sit in the extension with all the old widows massaging their feet and waiting for their pureed samosas. And I had dyed my hair the day before – remember when I went literally scarlet ’cos I left it on too long? I was like an installation, “Woman on Fire with Pissed-Off Face”.’

  ‘And they just left you in there? The whole evening?’ Priya sat up and reached for her clothes, layers of silk and cashmere whispering over her body.

  ‘The host auntie came in with dessert – I think it was ice cream in a Disney bowl – as I was sneaking out, ’cos by then … well, you can imagine. And this woman, she cornered me and said something along the lines of, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. If we all had to put up with shitty marriages, why shouldn’t you?”’

  ‘She said “shitty”?’

  ‘Like I said, I’m paraphrasing, but it was … surprising. And really sad. She didn’t hate me. It felt like she envied me.’

  ‘Bet she did. Don’t you think loads of our mums’ generation would have run for the hills, given half a chance, high heels in one hand and what was left from their dowry in the other?’

  ‘Funny, me and Lyd were just discussing that. How lucky we are to have choices. I suppose for that generation it was either a lonely marriage or lonely independence, because remarrying was out of the question. For women, anyway.’

  ‘I love being a woman,’ Priya declared, zipping up her tailored pencil skirt. ‘It all becomes simple when you stop trying to second-guess what men want and realize how basic they are. If you’d had a son, you’d know what I mean.’

  ‘I had a husband, doesn’t that count?’

  ‘No, no, it’s too late with a husband because you don’t see them in their young, raw state. With Luka, watching him grow up was like a light coming on, honestly. Here’s the thing, they have all this bluff and bluster and they want to go out and fight dragons and win at everything and are obsessed with their winkies …’

  ‘I’m with you so far.’

  ‘But they can’t do any of it without constant approval. Without this drip-drip “Yes, you’re the best at everything and king of the world and yes, I’m looking at you, and just let me know when you need a hug-break and a biscuit.” If they have that, they can do anything. Without it, they’re bloody useless.’

  Priya was at the mirror now, pulling a strange crinkly face so she could ascertain how much she had aged in the past half-hour.

  ‘But every kid needs reassurance, Priya,’ Shyama shot back. ‘I’m no Lydia, but I think I could have worked that one out.’

  ‘No, it’s not the same with daughters. Of course, Maya needs me to be there for her, but … I dunno, you look at your daughter and you know she’s as smart and wily and strong as you are. There’s a sort of mirror thing going on. When the mood swings and the self-loathing crap kick off, you know how that goes because you’ve been there. You know how her body feels. You know she loves you but also can’t wait to not be like you, right?’

  ‘The Queen is dead, long live the Queen, sort of thing?’

  ‘Right. But with boys – and men – the real shocker is not how complicated they are. It’s how simple they are. Full tummies, regular sex and timetabled ego stroking, and no one would ever need to go to Relate again.’

  Shyama wondered if Priya’s regular extra-marital affairs had anything to do with the apparently happy marriage she extolled at every opportunity. In their early days, Priya would regale her and Lydia with spicy tales of illicit couplings in various hotel chains around the country. Gradually the hotels got more expensive and foreign, as did the men, and her stories became less detailed, less tinged with uneasy wonder; maybe Priya sensed from her audience that what had sounded daring and bohemian at thirty-five sounded a little more habitual and jaded at forty-five. Not that Shyama had ever judged her friend, not consciously. By then she knew that nothing was as inexplicable as other people’s marriages; hadn’t she seen the look of incredulity on their faces when she’d relayed her latest awful anecdote from her own marital car crash? And who knew what arrangement had been agreed in Priya and Anil’s marriage? Maybe he played around too. Maybe he turned a blind eye to her dalliances, accepting them as some kind of reciprocal payment for his wife’s devotion and her care for his ailing parents, her über-mater marshalling of their children. Priya’s presence in the world confirmed to Shyama that there were two kinds of people: those who bent and bullied life into submission, who accepted nothing as inevitable, predetermined or fated; and those who made plans, tried hard to keep to them, but knew when to shrug their shoulders, let go painfully and walk away with some dignity intact. Shyama knew which camp she was in, and at times like this, she was thankful that her friend was in the other.

  At that moment, Priya reached into her briefcase and slapped a bulging file on to the couch. ‘I’ve researched all the ones we liked the look of. And I think I’ve found the perfect place for you and Toby.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘New Delhi. You’re going home, baby!’

  As the soothing music began drifting from Priya’s laptop, Shyama burnt her tongue on her steaming cup of chai latte. Priya turned the volume down and pulled Shyama further back into the velveted booth. The Tip-Top Café was heaving this lunchtime. Shyama remembered the days when they had sat here on plastic seats at Formica-topped tables and been served their chai in metal beakers, which had scalded the palms of the uninitiated. But last year, the premises had been taken over by some baby-boomer City dropout, a s
mart Punjabi guy who had made his millions working for The Man and decided to take early retirement to indulge the artistic yearnings he’d been banned from exploring as a student. He knew that Bollywood-themed eateries were now passé, and instead had exploited the childhood nostalgia into which his contemporaries were retreating, the first-generation immigrant kids who fondly recalled sofas covered in plastic film, concreted-over front gardens with rusting swingballs instead of flowers, and fridges containing ice-cream cartons deceptively concealing leftover curry. So Tip-Top, named after a synthetic-cream topping used on the pudding of choice in the seventies Indian household – tinned fruit cocktail – was now an homage to that decade: leather sofas and loud textured wallpaper; rush table-mats and light-up Taj Mahals; nests of tables around tiled mantelpieces where home-fried snacks were served in period dishes; framed film posters of the era, a time when stars had rounder bellies and luxuriant, bouffant hair; even framed black-and-white photos of the extended family – whose family was irrelevant as everyone looked the same back then – a row of unsmiling, stiff-backed relatives obscuring whatever monument or achievement they were meant to be celebrating: Trafalgar Square, India Gate, Bitoo’s new moped, a beloved son or daughter emigrating, perhaps for ever. All this, coupled with the undoubtedly excellent food – reasonably priced, always hot – made Tip-Top one of the places to hang out in the East End, although the local families who used to visit were now drifting away, unable to turn up and get a table, edged out by the trustafarians and edgy boho-clones eager not to miss out on the next undiscovered hangout. Luckily for Shyama and Priya, their mutual friend Kate happened to be married to the owner, Joshan, so they had their own regular booth that was always available to them, excluding rush hours and private-party bookings.

  ‘You have to see the clip they’ve posted, it gives you a good idea of what the place is like.’

  Priya clicked on it and waited as the music snapped off and the face of a fine-boned, almond-eyed Indian woman filled the screen, the swathes of grey at her temples at odds with the healthy youthful glow emanating from her face.

  ‘Hello, I’m Dr Renu Passi. Welcome to the Passi Clinic,’ she began in a deep husky voice more suited to a chocolate advert than a surrogacy clinic. ‘We are one of India’s leading centres for ART – that is, Assisted Reproductive Technology – and we hope by the end of this short presentation you will see why.’

  Dr Passi’s dulcet tones narrated the story of how she had resigned from her previous post as a consultant obstetrician at one of Delhi’s leading private hospitals to found the Passi Clinic, which had always been ‘a special dream of mine’, fuelled by the misery she continually encountered from the infertile couples seeking her advice. ‘In India we now have an infertility rate of fifteen per cent and climbing, though still lower than the average rate in the Western world.’ Dismayed by the rising rate of unwanted pregnancies amongst the poorer, uneducated women she treated, she had the idea that surrogacy would be the perfect and humane solution for both parties.

  ‘This is a life-changing and life-enhancing experience for everyone involved: for the couples who long for a baby, and for the women who carry the child for them. The fees that our surrogate mothers receive enable them to transform their lives: to buy their own homes, educate their children … it gives them financial independence they could not get any other way. As for our couples, who visit us from all over the world, because India is now the world centre for ART, they not only get the gift of a longed-for child, but they also know that their money is going to help the woman who has given a new life to them.’

  The picture suddenly sped up as Priya fast-forwarded with a perfectly buffed nail. ‘You don’t need to know all this boring info, she’s just basically saying the clinic adheres to the newly implemented government guidelines on ART. Not all of them do.’

  ‘What guidelines, exactly?’ Shyama was irritated, frustrated by the glimpses of gleaming white labs and PowerPoint presentations that jumped across the screen. In between the flashes of techno-speak, she saw snatches of a low-roofed white building surrounded by lush gardens, what looked like a modest hotel lobby, and a smartly furnished bedroom with a widescreen TV in the corner.

  ‘Basically, surrogacy is unregulated in India right now, that’s why it’s cheap. There are guidelines laid down rather than laws, so it varies from clinic to clinic. I chose this one because they seem to be long-established and well-organized, have a good success rate and are pretty strict in their parameters: all the surrogates have to be married, have a clean bill of health and medical history, to have had two healthy births themselves, agree not to have sexual relations during the pregnancy …’

  ‘Nine months with no sex?’ Strange how unfair this now seemed to Shyama, whereas during her marriage it would have struck her as perfectly reasonable.

  ‘I know!’ chimed Priya, her eyes still focused on the screen. ‘I mean, nine months not shagging your husband, fair enough, but they have to promise not to do it with anyone. That’s dedication, huh? And they have to have a signed permission form from their husbands to offer themselves up for surrogacy at all.’

  ‘That’s a bit dodgy, isn’t it? What about the woman’s right to choose, own her own body and all that?’

  ‘It’s India, darling. And most of these women are from rural areas. I don’t think it would go down too well with the local menfolk if they snuck off and came back up the duff with a foreigner’s sprog. Even if it will pay for a new tractor or whatever. It’s for their protection, at the end of the day.’

  ‘Whose, the clinic’s?’

  ‘The woman’s … oh, you don’t need this section about egg retrieval either, right? Because you won’t be using your own.’

  ‘No,’ Shyama said quietly, flinching at a sudden image of her ovaries spread out like two burnt trees with bunches of shrivelled eggs swinging creakily from their branches, a mournful wind moaning through the cavern of her inhospitable womb.

  ‘Lucky you!’ breezed Priya. ‘Because it looks bloody vile, the whole thing. You have to have three days of really painful injections which pump you full of hormones that make you bloat and gag, and then hang around for two weeks until they harvest them – they actually say “harvest”, like you’re growing watermelons or something. And there’s no guarantee you’ll produce any class-A eggs anyway. And of course it pushes the cost up, the longer you stay – if you use donor eggs you can get away with a three-day trip. But they offer all the options if you’re both infertile – you can still make the baby, it’s just that it won’t actually be genetically yours. But that’s the same as adoption anyway, isn’t it?’

  Priya’s voice was getting louder and more excitable as she continued scrolling through the film. Shyama was relieved to see a waiter approaching with their food order, the loaded plates trailing spicy wisps of steam behind them. As he smiled and bent towards the table, Priya looked up at Shyama. ‘But you’ll still be using Toby’s sperm, right?’

  The waiter’s smile fixed itself to his face like a frightened leech and his tray wobbled slightly, just enough to send a buttery tide of sauce over the lip of each plate.

  ‘I am so sorry, Madam,’ he stuttered, reaching for a pile of paper serviettes which Shyama grabbed off him.

  The waiter scuttled off thankfully as Shyama reached round and plucked Priya’s hand from the keyboard. ‘Stop it!’

  Priya’s eyes flashed for a second, then softened as she took in Shyama’s mortified face. She squeezed her friend’s hand back.

  ‘I’m taking over, as usual. I get it.’ Priya rose, grabbing her handbag. ‘I’m going to freshen up, make a few calls. Just browse the site and tell me what you think, OK?’

  Later on, with Toby in the privacy of their bedroom, Shyama kept returning to the same section of the promotional film. It featured a roomful of surrogates, all plump with pregnancy, sitting on their single beds in their shared dormitory. But for the colourful batik bedspreads and the swollen bellies straining under bright saris, it c
ould have been tuck-box time in a modest girls’ boarding school. As each woman spoke to the camera, subtitles appeared below. They were mostly shy, some of them covering their mouths with their saris, and most were dark-skinned, that rich burnished brown that comes from hours of hard work under a hot sun. But they were always smiling.

  ‘This is my third time here,’ one woman with an enormous golden nose piercing told the camera. ‘It is not allowed to give more than three babies so I feel sad I cannot come again. Dr Passi is so kind to us. And after this baby, my own three children will be safe for the rest of their lives.’

  Shyama paused on her use of the word ‘safe’. Her three children would be safe because she was willing to hand over three babies she had carried with her for nine months each. An eye for an eye, almost literally.

  ‘We are looked after very well,’ another woman mumbled behind her hand, though her eyes danced mischeviously at the camera. ‘Always good food, fruit, all the tests and medicines … and we have classes sometimes – reading, writing, making cushion coverings.’

  Dr Passi’s melodic voice cut in with a question; the woman paused then replied, ‘Yes, we can meet the couples we have the babies for, if they want it. Some don’t, you know. And we can stay in contact every week during the pregnancy. Sometimes with phone or on the Skype. And they get all the ultrasound pictures also.’

  She said ‘ultrasound’ and ‘Skype’ as easily as Shyama would say ‘facial’ and ‘leg wax’. The woman continued, ‘We sign a contract to say we do not want to see the child again after we have returned it to the parents.’

  Again, Shyama was struck by her use of the word ‘return’. Stressing that the baby was never hers to begin with. She wondered if that’s what this woman had actually said, or if something had been lost or added in translation.

  Toby exhaled loudly, watching next to her intently.

  ‘That’s good to know. I mean, that’s what I’d worry about, that she’d change her mind about handing over the baby or come back in a few years wanting access or something.’