“Hahnji, yes, whatever you say,” the midwife says. “But now, child, it is time to push.”
She is right. Kavita bears down only a few times before she hears a reassuring cry. The midwife works quickly to clean and wrap the baby. Kavita struggles to sit up, pushes the damp strands of hair out of her face, and takes the child in her arms. She strokes her baby’s matted black hair and marvels at the tiny fingers grasping at the air. She pulls the small body close to hers, drinks in the scent, and then places its mouth to her breast. Once the infant begins to suck in a sleepy rhythm, Kavita slowly unwraps the cloth around its tiny body.
No one heard my prayers. Kavita closes her eyes and her body shudders with silent tears. She leans forward, seizes the midwife’s hand, and whispers, “Daiji, don’t tell anyone. Go quickly, fetch Rupa, and bring her here. No one, you hear?”
“Hahnji. Yes, my child. Blessings to you and your baby. You rest now, please. I will bring some food.” The midwife steps outside into the night. She pauses for a moment, arching her back slightly, then picks up her steel urn of supplies and walks away.
AS THE EARLY LIGHT OF DAWN SEEPS INTO THE HUT, KAVITA awakens and feels the throbbing ache in her pelvis. She shifts her body, and her gaze falls upon the newborn sleeping peacefully beside her. Her stomach groans. She is suddenly ravenous. She reaches for the bowl of rice next to her and eats. Satisfied but still exhausted, she lies back down and listens to the sounds of the village stirring to life outside.
It is not long before the door creaks open and bright sunlight spills in. Jasu enters, his eyes gleaming. “Where is he?” He beckons playfully with his hands. “Where is my little prince? Come, come…let me see him!” He walks toward her, arms outstretched.
Kavita stiffens. She clutches the baby to her chest and awkwardly tries to sit up. “She is here. Your little princess is right here.” She sees blackness cloud his eyes. Her arms tremble as she wraps them tightly around the baby, shielding her small body.
“Arre! Another girl? What is the matter with you? Let me see!” he shouts.
“No. I will not. You are not taking her.” She hears the shrillness of her voice, feels the tension flood into her limbs. “This is my baby, our baby, and I will not let you take her.” She sees bewilderment in his eyes as they search her face for some understanding. She has never spoken to anyone, let alone her husband, with such defiance.
He takes a few steps toward her, then his face softens and he falls to his knees next to her. “Look, Kavita, you know we can’t keep this baby. We need a boy to help us in the fields. As it is, we can hardly afford one child, how can we have two? My cousin’s daughter is twenty-three and still not married, because he can’t come up with the dowry. We are not a rich family, Kavita. You know we can’t do this.”
Her eyes fill again with tears, and she shakes her head until they spill out. Her breath becomes ragged. She squeezes her eyes closed for several breaths. When she opens them again, she looks squarely at her husband. “I won’t let you take her this time. I won’t.” She straightens her back despite the terrible pain. “If you try, if you even try, you will have to kill me first.” She draws her knees up in front of her. From the corner of her eye, she sees the door and envisions the five quick steps it will take to reach it. She wills herself not to move, not to shift her fierce and determined gaze away from Jasu.
“Kavita, come, you’re not thinking straight. We can’t do this.” He throws his hands in the air. “She will become a burden to us, a drain on our family. Is that what you want?” He stands, towering over her again.
Her mouth is dry. She stumbles over the words she has not quite allowed to form except in the distant corners of her mind. “Give me one night. Just one night with my child. You can come fetch her tomorrow.”
Jasu remains silent, looking down at his feet.
“Please.” The hammering sound in her skull grows louder. She wants to scream to be heard over it. “This is our baby. We created her together. I carried her inside me. Let me have one night before you take her.” Suddenly, the baby awakens and cries out. Jasu looks up, startled out of his trance. Kavita puts the infant to her breast, restoring the silence between them.
“Jasu,” she says, signaling her seriousness by her uncharacteristic use of his first name. “Hear me now. If you do not allow me even this, I swear to you, I will fix it so I can never have another baby. I will destroy my own body so I will never birth another child for you. Never. Do you understand? Then where will you be? Who will marry you now, at your age? Who else will give you your precious son?” She stares at him until he is forced to look away.
4
WITHOUT MUCH EFFORT
San Francisco, California—1984
SOMER
“HELLO, I’M DR. WHITMAN.” SOMER ENTERS THE SMALL EXAMINATION room to see a woman struggling to control a flailing infant. “What seems to be the problem today?”
“He’s been like this since yesterday—crying, irritable. I can’t do anything to console him, I think he has a fever.” The woman has her hair in a loose ponytail and wears a stained sweatshirt over jeans.
“Well, let’s take a look.” Somer glances at the chart. “Michael? Do you want to see my nifty flashlight?” Somer shines the ear probe light on and off until it captures the boy’s interest and he grabs for it. She smiles and opens her mouth wide. When the boy mimics her, she inserts a tongue depressor. “Has he been eating and drinking normally?”
“Yes. Well, I think so. I’m not quite sure what normal is, since we’ve just had him a few weeks. We adopted him at six months.” The mother’s sudden and proud smile almost camouflages the shadows under her eyes.
“Mmm hmm. How about this, buddy? Do you want to play with this cool stick?” Somer hands the tongue depressor to the boy, swiftly picks up the abandoned ear probe, and looks into his ears. “And how’s it going so far?”
“He bonded quickly, and now he always wants to be carried around. We’re pretty stuck on each other, aren’t we, buddy? Even though you were up three times last night,” the mother says, poking a finger into his pudgy belly. “It’s true what they say.”
“What’s that?” Somer feels the boy’s lymph glands for swelling.
“You don’t know until it happens to you. It’s the strongest love you can imagine.”
Somer feels a familiar pang in her chest. She looks up from the stethoscope on the boy’s back and smiles at his mother. “He’s lucky to have you.” She pulls a prescription pad from her pocket. “Well, he has a pretty bad infection in his right ear, but the other one looks clear right now, and his chest and lungs are fine. These antibiotics should clear it right up, and he should be a lot more comfortable tonight.” She touches the mother’s arm as she hands her the prescription.
This is why Somer loves her work. She can walk into a room with a crying child and an anxious mother and know that when she leaves, they will both feel better. Her Peds rotation was the first time she calmed down a hysterical child, a diabetic girl with collapsed veins who needed blood work. Somer held the girl’s hand and asked her to describe the butterflies she saw when she closed her eyes. She successfully drew blood on the very first poke and had the bandage on before the girl was finished with the wings. Her classmates, who did everything possible to avoid the “screamers,” were impressed. Somer was hooked.
“Thank you, Doctor,” the mother says, with visible relief. “I was so worried. It’s hard not knowing what’s wrong with him. I feel like he’s a little bundle of mystery, and I’m just getting to know him a little every day.”
“Don’t worry,” Somer says, her hand on the doorknob. “All parents feel that way, no matter how their children come to them. Bye, Michael.”
Somer returns to her office and closes the door, though she’s already running twenty minutes late. She lays down her instruments, then her head, on the desk. Turning to the side, she sees the plastic model of a human heart Krishnan gave her when they graduated from medical school.
&n
bsp; “I’m giving you my heart,” he said, in a way that didn’t sound as corny as it would have from someone else. “Take good care of it.”
IT WAS ALMOST A DECADE AGO, UNDER THE DULL YELLOW LIGHTS of Lane Library at Stanford’s School of Medicine, that they first noticed each other. They were there night after night, and not just on the weeknights when the rest of the class studied, but on Friday nights, instead of going out for dinner, and on weekends, when the others went hiking. There were only a dozen of them, the Lane regulars: the most studious ones, the hardest workers. Looking back, Somer realizes, they were the ones who had something to prove. Everyone thought of Somer as the odd one out. With her hippie-dippy name and dirty blond hair, it was easy for her fellow students to dismiss her as a lightweight. It used to roil her, that kind of assumption. But she had learned, over the years, to deal with it. She had ignored her high school chemistry teacher’s suggestion to let her male lab partner run the experiments. She had endured the teasing that came with being the only girl in advanced math classes. She was used to being underestimated by others: she turned others’ low expectations into fuel.
“Summer, like the season?” Krishnan said when she introduced herself. “Winter, spring…like that?”
“Not exactly.” She smiled. “It’s S-o-m-e-r.” She waited while he considered this. She liked being a little bit different. “It’s a family name. And you’re…Chris?”
“Yes. Well, Kris with a K. It’s short for Krishnan, but you can call me Kris.”
She was taken right away with his British-infused accent, which sounded worldly compared to her nondescript Californian tone. She loved hearing him answer questions in class, not only for his alluring accent, but also because his answers were unfailingly, beautifully correct. Some classmates thought he was arrogant, but Somer had always found intelligence to be a turn-on. It wasn’t until later she noticed his dimples, at Gabi’s house party in the spring. Somer sipped her rum-spiked tropical punch slowly. She knew how that type of drink could sneak up on you. Kris, on the other hand, appeared to have consumed several drinks already by the time he approached her.
“So, I hear Meyer also asked you to work in his lab over the summer?” His speech was slightly slurred as he leaned toward her, sitting cross-legged in the plastic white lawn chair.
Him too? Somer’s heart skipped a little. An invitation from Professor Meyer was one of the most coveted prizes for a first-year. “Yes, you too?” she asked, trying to sound neutral. She could sense Krishnan’s eyes lingering on the tiny bells trimming the neckline of her peasant blouse and was glad she had taken time to change.
He shook his head and took another big gulp of his pink drink. “No, I’m going back to India for the summer. Last chance I’ll get before rotations. My mother will have my head if I don’t.” When he smiled then, his dimples appeared. She felt a tingling travel from the pit of her stomach up to her head and wondered if she’d had too much punch already. She fought the urge to reach out and smooth the tousled black hair falling into his eyes, which made him look like a little boy. As he would tell her later, he was smitten with the way her green eyes sparkled in the light of the tiki torches, and how she laughed at everything he said that night.
They began studying together every evening, drilling each other before exams, pushing each other to do better. Kris enjoyed sparring with her intellectually and didn’t seem to mind when she occasionally outperformed him. It was a pleasant change from her last boyfriend who, after two years of struggling through premed classes and preparing for the MCATs with her, had dumped her once she got into Stanford and he didn’t. It had taken Somer years to realize that she wasn’t the one who should feel badly about this.
As much as she enjoyed sharing the intensity of school with Kris, it was his tender side she loved most: the way he spoke, when they lay in bed at night, about missing his brothers back home, or walking along the ocean wall with his father. “What’s it like?” she would ask him repeatedly. India sounded intriguing. She envisioned tall swaying coconut trees, warm tropical breezes, and exotic fruits. She had never traveled outside the country except to Canada to visit her grandparents. She had always longed for a big family like the one he described: the two brothers with whom he did everything, the pile of cousins that formed an impromptu cricket team at family gatherings. As an only child, Somer had a special relationship with her parents, but she couldn’t help feeling she had missed out on the camaraderie of siblings.
Those early years of medical school were blissfully simple, when they spent their days and nights in a tight circle of friends. They had a single purpose, and they were all students living the same modest lifestyle. They studied all the time, and their whole world was contained within the outer limits of the Stanford campus. Vietnam was over, Nixon was out, and free love was in. Somer spent hours showing Kris how to drive on the right side of the road. Later, he would tell her how much he appreciated that she didn’t make him feel self-conscious about being different. But the way she thought about it, they were more alike than they were different: she was a woman in a man’s world, just as he was a foreigner in America. Besides, they were both struggling med students before anything else.
By the time of their first board exams, Somer had fallen deeply in love. It was the first thing in her life that had happened without much effort on her part. Soon, they were so intertwined in each other’s lives she could not imagine a future without Krishnan. When their final year of school arrived, they began discussing their choices for residency programs—pediatrics for her, neurosurgery for him. The University of California at San Francisco had good programs in both, but it was competitive.
“What are our chances?” Krishnan asked her.
“I don’t know. Six spots for my program, maybe fifty applications? Ten percent for me. Definitely lower for you.”
“What if we applied together?” he said. “As a couple. A married couple.”
She looked at him. “I’d…say…our chances would be better.” She shook her head a little. “Wait, so…is that what you want?”
He wore a hint of a smile and shrugged. “Yeah, don’t you?”
“Yes.” She smiled as well. “I know we’ve talked about it, but now?”
“Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s just a matter of timing, if we’re both sure.” He took both her hands in his and looked into her eyes. “And I am sure. I’m sorry I don’t have anything to make it official. I know it’s not the most romantic proposal.” He smiled.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need any of that.”
“I know.” He kissed her hands. “That’s why I love you.”
They made a quick trip to the courthouse, with plans for a proper wedding later. After graduating, they found a small flat near the UCSF hospital, eager to start the next chapter of their new life together.
A LOUD KNOCK COMES AT HER OFFICE DOOR. “DR. WHITMAN?”
“Yes.” Somer replaces the model heart on her desk and stands up. “Be right there.”
5
A LONG JOURNEY
Dahanu, India—1984
KAVITA
THE LIGHT OF MORNING HAS BARELY BROKEN WHEN KAVITA AND Rupa set out from the village. Kavita’s wounds are fresh and her body is still recovering, but despite her sister’s concerns, she is determined to make this journey. Yesterday, Rupa agreed to take her to the orphanage in the city. Rupa had four children in six years already, so last year, when the fifth was born, she found an orphanage in Bombay. Kavita knew, though no one in the village spoke of it. She begged Rupa to take her, despite the risks involved. Even if they survive the journey and the city, they will have to face the ire of their husbands when they return.
It is already quite warm and the dirt roads have absorbed most of the rain, with only a few telltale puddles left at their edges. These too will be gone by the end of the day, sipped up by the sun’s waking rays. Traveling to the city could take several hours by foot, but they are fortunate to get picked up in the
next village by a man in a bullock cart carrying his rice crop into town. They ride in the back, amid a dozen burlap sacks, using the loose corners of their saris to cover their eyes and mouths from the clouds of dust kicked up by the animal’s hooves. The unpaved road is bumpy, and the blistering sun beats down on them as it rises higher in the sky.
“Bena, lie down for a little while. Take some rest,” Rupa says, reaching out her arms for the baby. “I’ll hold her. Come, give her to masi.” She offers a weak smile.
Kavita shakes her head and gazes at the fields. She knows her sister is trying to spare her the pain of what lies ahead. Rupa has told her how difficult it was to give up her own baby at the orphanage last year, and she had four children already. She has confided to Kavita that she still thinks about that baby when she lies in bed, her own child lost somewhere in the world. But Kavita won’t give up the little time she has left. She will endure whatever she must in Bombay, but not before then.
EVEN WHEN THEY WERE GROWING UP, KAVITA BEHAVED MORE like an adult than other children. Instead of frolicking in the first downpours of the monsoons, Kavita ran to fetch the clothes hanging on the lines outside. When they found a stack of cut sugarcane at the edge of a field, Rupa grabbed as much as she could carry and chewed on the fibrous stalks all the way home. Kavita merely took one piece and used it to prepare afternoon tea for her parents. When it came time to find a matrimonial match, Kavita’s family did its best to compensate for her plain looks. “Don’t forget,” Rupa reminded her sister as she carefully lined her eyes with dark kajal, “when you meet him, look up ever so slightly, not so much to meet his eyes, just enough so that he can see yours.” Her sister hoped the prospective groom would be intrigued by Kavita’s best feature, her striking hazel eyes.