Read Online We Are Not in Pakistan by Shauna Singh Baldwin - Free Book Online

small things?”
    Should Olena tell Galina more? Her inside voice is saying
Oh no, oh no. Speak no further or you’ll lose Galina.
    One second of decision — yes, no?
    The second shivers, then flees into never. Olena is keeper of the memory of her older daughter. She will carry that bitter memory always, like wormwood at her core.
    But no one, not even her Galina, can command her love.
    After her wedding Galina will go with her man from America. And then? Olena and Matushka will live together? Maybe Olena will find a second job, mopping floors in a newspaper office. Maybe Olena will move to another city or Israel and leave Matushka in a home.
    Who will stop her? God? She is not afraid of God.
    But Viktor’s face comes before her — Viktor wearing his you-know-you-love-me look. Love is a trap, a noose. A tether running from Olena’s ankle to his grave.
    She can’t leave old Matushka all alone.
    â€œYou’re right,” she says, and laughs. “It was only a button. You deserve the most beautiful wedding, where everyone who comes is happy for you and cares about nothing but your joy. And believe me, little mushroom, Matushka and I will be friends.”
    For that day.

Naina
    Naina has carried her baby inside her so long she cannot remember the day her fullness began. Dr. Johnson was just out of medical school then, apple-cheeked, without her streak of grey — Naina remembers her, cold disc of the stethoscope pressed to Naina’s mounding stomach, listening, shaking a very solemn head. “Any day now.”
    And there was the due date, Naina’s heels wide apart in stirrups. She remembers every moment of excruciating pain from pushing, pushing, and nothing coming out, not even blood. That she remembers. Then the unwilled dilation, more pushing, more pushing. The brown balloon of her stomach trembling as her baby retreated from light.
    She refused the knife that would have sliced from navel to her mound of spiky black hair. Refused so loudly, signing papers, more papers, and no one from the family with her. She remembers her own voice, fourteen years younger, still imitating Asha Bhonsle’s soprano because that’s all Daddyji ever played on the tape recorder, screaming, “Leave her. When she’s ready, she’ll come,” the pitying whispers of nurses, all the young doctors crowding about her bed, discussing her case.
    â€œI am not a case,” she screamed. “Please, please go away.”
    Naina knew it was a girl from the very beginning. Dr. Johnson didn’t have to show her the pictures — pieces of sky collaged to black plastic. Only a girl would be so comfortable in her mother’s womb that coming out and needing to grow would spoil her world. By then Naina had talked to the baby for so many months — now so many years — that if the baby hadn’t been a girl before she took residence in Naina’s womb, she surely became one.
    Dr. Johnson confirmed it every month, and by now she uses the same words she used last month, last year. “Yes, I can hear her; her heartbeat is regular. Here” — she clips an ultrasound to the light box on the wall — “see where her toes curl, and look at her hands! Still so tiny after fourteen years.”
    Also, every month for the past two years, Dr. Johnson says, “That Chinese woman called again to ask if you want her help.” This woman swears she’s not connected to
Guinness
or the
Globe
or
Star
or
National Enquirer,
but that’s where she read about Naina. She calls herself Dr. Chi and says she was a sinseh doctor, but she’s repeating her whole medical degree and training so she can practise in Canada. “Shall I tell her you’ll think about it?”
    By now all the tabloids have written their pieces, had their say. The journals of medical research have taken note, moved on to the next freak show. They still follow up, once in a while, despite