A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

handsome—with his mustache and rugged features. He was tall and built well, like his father had been.
    When she had first married him, two things had struck her: his size and the smell of turpentine and paint. The first day she saw him come back from work, spattered with paint from head to toe, she had been shocked. He had used turpentine to remove the paint while he bathed with water drawn from the well in the backyard that they shared with several of their neighbors. The well was a bone of contention, and people complained about how much water Pratap used to wash himself, especially in the summer, when the well was almost dry. So Asha had started to hide water, store some away each time she drew some from the well in a big white bucket with a lid she had bought for just this purpose.
    Now she was used to the turpentine and the paint, and even his size.
    The woman and Asha chatted all the way to Srirampuram, and Asha was grateful for the company. By the time they got off, Asha knew the woman and her three children’s life stories. The woman knew nothing about Asha. There was nothing to tell. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to Asha was happening to her now, and this she could tell no one.

    The waiting room at Happy Mothers was teeming with life. Besides Asha, there were three women there. One was about five months pregnant, and two looked like they were ready to pop any minute now. Each of them was carrying someone else’s baby. Some would have white babies, some would have brown babies, and some would have half-white, half-brown babies. Asha had been happy to know that her baby would be mostly Indian. Not that it mattered, but a part of her felt that it made more sense for an Indian woman to push out an Indian baby from her womb.
    Kaveri had not seen her white baby after he was born but had seen a photograph months later when the parents sent her a picture. They were standing in front of a decorated tree, two white parents with a smiling white baby. The card said H APPY C HRISTMAS as if she were Christian and celebrated the holiday. It seemed impossible that the baby had come out of Kaveri, who was as dark as coal.
    The parents and the baby boy all looked so joyous that Kaveri had had tears in her eyes. “I made them happy,” she told Asha. “It makes it all worthwhile to know that I gave them so much happiness.”
    Asha had not said that the happiness had cost five lakh rupees plus whatever the parents had to pay Doctor Swati for her clinic and services, which was probably a lot more.
    It seemed wrong to do this for money, but Asha wouldn’t do it if their finances were better, would she? If Manoj had to go to a good school in the city, they needed money, and this was an easy—or, say, viable—way to earn it. That had been Asha’s mother-in-law’s argument. Puttamma had moved out of Asha and Pratap’s house as soon as Kaveri and Raman bought their brick flat with a toilet, the kind with a flush that you could sit on like a chair. No more taking a mug of water and looking for a place to go in the bushes.
    Puttamma had been all for Asha and Kaveri renting out their wombs. “It’s for a good cause, and it’s better than selling a kidney, isn’t it?” Easy for her to say, Asha thought. The old woman cannot have children anymore, so she thinks it’s a picnic for us to have one.
    She looked at Pratap, the only man in the waiting room; he seemed incongruous with his tall, masculine frame against the pink and blue walls covered with baby pictures. He had said he didn’t want to put pressure on Asha to do this, but he had put the pressure on all the same. She knew all he saw were rupees in the bank. She, on the other hand, had worried about it, worried and thought and cried about it . . . and then worried some more. She was still not sure they were doing the right thing. But there was no point broadcasting that fact. The baby was inside her. That was the end of the story.

    When Asha had met