A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel Read Online Free

pancreatic cancer, and as soon as she was diagnosed at the government hospital, the doctors had told them that she would have just a year or so to live. Asha’s parents immediately started to look for a boy for her—her mother wanted to see her married before she died.
    They didn’t have enough saved up for a dowry, and they knew this meant that they couldn’t find Asha a good match. Asha’s brother, Venkat, was supposed to get married and receive a dowry, which would then be used to marry off Asha. But Venkat had fallen in love with another clerk in the bank he worked in. Asha’s parents didn’t like the idea of a love marriage, but Venkat had always been headstrong. No one could tell him what to do, and he had gone and married the woman he loved without taking any dowry, ruining Asha’s chances of finding a good husband. The best they could’ve done was a painter. Pratap’s family was not mercenary (after all, they had no daughters to marry off) and had asked only that the wedding be arranged well and that the girl come with the basic jewelry: gold bangles, a gold chain, and gold earrings.
    Venkat and his wife, Prabha, now lived all the way in Vizag. Asha rarely saw them or their two daughters. She had visited them once for her father’s funeral. Her father had moved in with Venkat after their mother died. He had not survived much longer; a heart attack claimed him just a year later.
    It had been strange to meet the brother she had grown up with, with his own family. A family he cared more about than his own sister. But that’s how it was supposed to be. They wrote letters once a year to each other for Ugadi, the Telugu New Year, but beyond that, Asha knew that Pratap’s family was now her only family. Her relationship with her brother died alongside her parents. It was probably for the best, Asha thought. She doubted her brother would approve of her getting pregnant with another couple’s baby for money. And she would be ashamed if he ever found out.

    It was a strange day—a day of anticipation, a day where everything, their entire lives, would be altered completely. Asha and Pratap’s neighbors, an elderly couple, were taking care of Manoj and Mohini for the day. They treated the children like their own grandchildren, and Asha knew they would be heartbroken when she and Pratap left the village.
    Asha had kissed her sleeping children before leaving. Mohini was nearly two, a tiny princess, and the joy of Pratap’s life. And Manoj, such a beautiful, smart boy—just five and he could already read. It was scary that he could, both in English and in Telugu! When his teacher told them that he was one of those very intelligent boys, Asha and Pratap had known that they had to do something. They couldn’t give Manoj an education in a big-city school with what Pratap made as a painter.

    Pratap made a sound and shifted in his sleep. He wasn’t comfortable in the jerking bus—but he was sleeping. Here she was pregnant with some other man’s child, and he was fast asleep, like a baby, Asha thought angrily. She wanted to wake him and make him see the atrocity she was committing.
    This was his fault anyway. It was Pratap’s brother, Raman, who had planted the idea. Last year, Kaveri, Asha’s sister-in-law, had given birth to a bald, blue-eyed baby for a British couple living in Nottingham in England. Asha hadn’t even heard of a place called Nottingham until Kaveri and Raman had told them. The parents had paid five lakh rupees to Kaveri for having their baby. Five lakh rupees! Pratap’s eyes had almost fallen out. And when the teachers told them about Manoj and how he needed to go to a better school, Pratap had started to talk about it with Asha. She couldn’t blame him entirely, not really, because five lakh rupees was a lot of money, and it had made her think as well. Could she? Could she do what Kaveri had done? And now she had done it, just like Kaveri.
    Asha wondered if there had ever really been a choice