Read Online A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel by Amulya Malladi - Free Book Online Page B

life in your stomach; don’t you feel it’s your own?” Asha asked.
    “You don’t let yourself feel like that,” Kaveri said. “Promise me, Asha, that you won’t. It’s a stupid thing to do. This is not yours. They put it inside you and you’re like a machine; you’re just growing it; you’re not a mother to this one.”
    Asha didn’t think it would be that simple. When the baby kicked and she soothed it by stroking her stomach, wouldn’t she feel like a mother?
    “Tell me about the surrogate house,” Asha said instead.
    Kaveri laughed softly. “It’s hard in the beginning to be away from the children and home, but after a week I didn’t want to come back. Gauri used to take care of us; she herself had been like us, twice before, and now she takes care of the pregnant women. We had a cook, a maid—we didn’t do one thing. We went to this computer room for two hours every day to learn to use the computer. I didn’t learn anything. But this other woman . . . I can’t remember her name, but she did, and they say she got a job in some call center in Hyderabad because of it.”
    “Really?” Asha said. Everyone knew that you got paid well when you worked in a call center.
    “And they also teach you English,” Kaveri said. “I didn’t learn much. But I can say, ‘Hello, how are you this morning?’”
    “What does that mean?” Asha said.
    “It’s just asking someone how they are,” Kaveri said. “And you get back massages if your back hurts. Mine didn’t, but I lied and got a massage every day. It was great.”
    “And when the baby came out?”
    Before Kaveri could answer, Puttamma snapped, “Can you both stop the chitchat and go to sleep?”
    Kaveri and Asha fell silent.
    Asha closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but it was elusive, like trying to catch soap bubbles when she washed the clothes.
    She could remember when Kaveri had left the village; she was just six months pregnant. And then she came back and told everyone she had lost the pregnancy. Everyone had been very sympathetic, and no one had guessed what she had really done.

    The next morning, Asha awoke with a flurry of emotions. Raw and confusing. She had dreamed of the baby that night. One with blue eyes and dark hair. For a moment she was holding it, and the next she wasn’t. She had screamed in her dream and had kept shaking her head when a woman in a starchy white nurse’s uniform like the ones they wore at Happy Mothers told her that there was no baby, there had never been one. She had dissolved into tears, and her dream had ended. But the burst of fear still ached within her.
    As the dream dissipated, leaving behind the slightest bitter tingle in her heart, Asha rubbed her eyes and rolled her neck in a circle. She was just about to get up when she overheard Raman and Pratap, as always, talking about the money. How to spend the money? What to do with the money? They were so preoccupied with it that they didn’t notice her turmoil.
    “Just buy a flat,” Raman was saying.
    Of course he was, Asha thought angrily as she got up.
    “This is my money,” she muttered as she straightened her sari that had come untangled while she slept. “I’m earning it with sweat and blood and pain and nausea,” she added as she pulled her hair together and rolled it with a rubber band into a bun.
    Being able to talk about such large sums of money was such a novelty that Pratap couldn’t stop himself. Raman, for his part, felt that since he’d made such wise financial decisions with the money his wife had earned, he was the best person to offer Pratap guidance.
    Guidance, my foot, Asha thought, her hand at the doorknob.
    Puttamma and Kaveri had let Asha sleep in because the pregnancy was making her tired. Usually, she woke up early to get the children ready for school. She and Kaveri would pack small tiffin boxes, which they’d stuff into the bags the children carried on their shoulders, and run out to catch the green-and-yellow school