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

Naina’s unlisted phone number.
    Naina turns wide eyes upon Dr. Johnson, and the bindi above them is a third eye that has become wary of the word “help.” “My baby will come when she is ready,” she says, as she has said every month.
    Dr. Johnson paces. “What is it in your genetic makeup
    â€” what is preserving this baby?” Her tone says Naina is being stubborn, refusing to provide critical information. “All the specialists I’ve referred you to, all the psychotherapists … I can’t think what to do next.”
    Naina opens her mouth. Dr. Johnson breaks in. “I won’toverride your wishes, Naina. Unless I think the child is at risk — amazing that all the tests show no danger there. Just amazing. Well, if it’s not hurting you or hurting the baby, I suppose there’s no harm. Two can live as cheaply as one. But upon my word, it’s a strange phenomenon!”
    Naina pulls her heels from the stirrups and rises from vinyl padding. Dr. Johnson leaves her alone to dress.
    In the reception room, Naina folds the legs of her salwar about her calves and jams her stockinged feet into moon boots. She struggles into her coat, draws the scratchy wool of her scarf across her neck as if she were adjusting a dupatta across her shoulders. Dupattas are passé in India now, her cousin-sister Sunita says, but Daddyji insisted she wear one growing up in Malton; the scarf has become a substitute dupatta.
    Every time, it’s no different. The weight of her belly pressing against maternity underwear, the baby’s pull on the placenta coiled within her. She waits at the bus stop for a while, till her nose feels frozen; then she trudges to the subway, emerges three blocks from the boulangerie.
    André, the landlord, is coming down the staircase, a tray of petits pains levitating over his head as he descends to meet her. “Want one?”
    â€œNo. Merci, André.” His apron leaves flour streaks on her coat as he brushes past.
    The day Stanford moved out, André didn’t offer her petits pains. “You could lose a little weight, a young woman like you. Get a haircut, buy some sexy clothes at the Eaton Centre. One date with a jeune homme, you’ll forget all about Monsieur Stanford. I’ll talk to Valerie, she’ll know a few good guys.” He meant to be comforting. When reporters besieged the boulangerie, Andrésaid, “They’re good customers.” But when they came snooping for Naina, he met them stone-faced, arms folded across his chest, on this very staircase — “No trespassing, mes amis.”
    Busy in her loft studio, Valerie, André’s wife, never found Naina a few good guys but instead counselled her in brief appearances on the landing, holding hands mottled with clay out from her denim smock. “Ça ne fait rien, Naina, mon amie! Some things, they take years. This one I work on now — a lifetime. I try and I try, mais … it resists me. Maybe I resist it.” Valerie’s sculpture is realist, the figures so lifelike that when a caretaker statue she sculpted was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, people stopped to ask it directions.
    Mothering, Baby Care, Working Mother
— magazines besiege Naina’s door. She doesn’t remember subscribing; money is not for spending on subscriptions, money is for saving. But the magazines still arrive. Do their senders somehow know she hasn’t delivered yet?
    Delivered.
    She has delivered so many other things in her thirty-five years, why can she not deliver the girl? Delivering is giving, from the sender to the receiver, the woman who delivers just the conduit. One job she had, soon after Stanford left, was delivering parcels. She discarded her bright salwar kameez for the drab brown slacks and shirt of a UPS uniform. Perched high above cars in her cab, long hair wound into a tight bun and hidden away under the cap. Till the dispatcher