Dawning

Savitri held her breath as she chewed the fish to prevent its smell from assailing her nostrils. She hated to throw it down the bin. Her mother had fried it until it got a crunchy golden coat; pitter-pattered it with thinly chopped tomatoes, onions and coriander, and meticulously measured pinches of jeera, dhania and red chili powder; then sunk it under just enough water to channel through the rolling landscape of fine-grained rice in the other Tupperware box. She recalled her mother’s raised eyebrows when she had tried to concoct excuses against carrying lunch from home and mumbled that she would buy a thali from the canteen as she did on most of the days. It was not every day that her mother, stricken with various age-related ailments, could rustle up a meal before she dashed out of the house at 7:30 AM to catch the chartered bus.

A bearded man, about a decade older than Savitri, appeared across the table. He pulled back a green plastic chair, thudded his multi-chambered steel Tiffin box on the seat of another chair and called out to the cleaner to wipe off the spilled dal from the white table surface. She glanced at her watch. It was 1:10 PM in India; hence 9:40 AM in the UK. She could not afford to spend an entire day pushing down her throat the remaining rice soused with fish gravy. Mr Robert Graves, the programming manager of her client organization, expected her to start the online demonstration at 10:00 AM sharp. Trashing the contents of the Tiffin box with more than a little sense of guilt, she turned on the tap of the washbasin to rinse her hands. She spread out her fingers under the electronic drier, listening intently to the drone of the machine to interrupt her mishmash of thoughts.

Back in her cubicle, Savitri positioned the land phone right next to her keyboard and dialled Mr Grave’s office number. She navigated to the online meeting site while waiting for him to answer. As the webpage loaded into her view, she copied the password from the meeting invite email and clicked on a dark blue button to join the session.

“Hello.”

Savitri heard her client’s crisp voice at the other end of the line. She also noticed the small diamond shaped icon blink beside his name in the chat window, indicating he had joined the meeting. The session went on for over two hours: Savitri logged into various interlinked applications, typed in fresh sets of data and hit several buttons to show the outcomes of the different operations.

As the presentation ended, Savitri, brimming with satisfaction, clicked the oval green button on her chat window to stop her computer screen from being displayed on her client’s PC. She rose from her seat and traipsed to the balcony without stopping at the coffee vending machine. She could hear it growling out bittersweet coffee into her teammate’s personalized mug. On other days, when she stood against the railing overlooking the street and the lake beyond, her fingers would be curled around the handle of a porcelain cup imprinted with her company logo. The steam would weave into her breath and the thick liquid ripple at her puckered lips that were hesitant and eager at the same time for the first scorching sip.

Savitri took a deep breath. The leisurely sunlight drew glittering spines along the curved backs of the orderly waves. Squeezed by the swirling grey clouds, the sky had shrunk into snaky passages and muddy blue blots. On finding sudden openings across the murmuring waters, it canopied over the skyscrapers and laced the frilly eucalyptus tops. The strip of reddish sunlight from the horizon to the centre of the lake reminded her of the concluding pink line in the PregaNews kit. She typed the good news to Rohan instead of calling him as he could be in a meeting. Even with her comfort flung on the carousel of nausea and her plans enmeshed by apprehensions, she was swept over by a happiness which knocked at the deepest of her thoughts like one knocks on her friends’ doors to invite them for a gambol. An intensifying excitement sprinkled over the slow burning tension and then there was sheer bliss rooting itself unchallenged through the layers of consciousness and subconscious.

Rohan had cooked garlic chicken for her. And served it with warm, round chapattis. They had slumped on the floor soon after dinner. The day had been dizzied with activities. They had tripped to an overcrowded, newly restored fortress, visited a museum whose appeal of unending displays lay in the intimidating weight of history, and strolled in a Mughal garden dotted with fountains and decked with tiers of seasonal blooms.

The cooler purred as they sprawled on a floral-patterned mattress, chuckling at the memory of being denied a room in a hotel as they were not married. He had not bothered to buy furniture for his temporary home. His books and CDs remained stacked against the wall. His laptop occupied the pride of place a couple of feet behind his pillow, which was darkened in the centre by its daily eight-hour tussle with his nightmares and dreams. Picking up the knick-knacks strewn across the floor, Savitri had assembled them on top of the cooler, the larger objects behind the smaller ones. These included a sequined notebook from his ex-girlfriend, pocket-sized mementoes from his former office colleagues, a copper amulet from a relative, a matchstick house he had bought at a fair and the tiny stone animals he had carried back from a trip.

“I don’t want to have any morning-after pills. It’s high time we have a baby,” she said, fiddling with the holy chain he wore around his waist.

Rohan opened his eyes and stroked her face, tracing the specs-depressed ridge of her nose and skidding down the slope of her lipstick-smudged upper lip. “Whatever you wish,” he responded, “I’ll marry you within a month if you conceive.”

“If I don’t, we can wait a year longer for your parents to come around,” she added, flushed with happiness that he had accepted her wish without a fuss. The windows of a neighbouring house thwacked open. An orange glow chasmed the sweaty darkness through a hitherto unnoticed gap between the hurriedly drawn curtains.

Rohan’s parents had been delaying their marriage on one pretext or the other. It seemed they wanted Savitri to buckle under the tremendous pressure on a woman to get married within a certain age, and leave him for a man who could wed her sooner. Or they hoped that his interest in her would wane over the years and he would call off the relationship eventually.

Soon after arriving at her office in the morning, Savitri had dropped her bag on her desk and rushed to the washroom. With a little brown paper bag clutched within her trembling fingers. Pimples had erupted the day after returning from Rohan’s flat: her face had felt like Braille paper against her probing palms. Her limbs had been aching since the following week and the nausea started on the fifteenth day. When four days had passed since the expected date of her periods, she got a married friend to buy her a PregaNews kit. An unmarried woman buying one could have caused tremors in the medicine shop.

A single beep in Savitri's mobile phone announced the entry of a new email. The design for the railway ticket booking system had been finalized. Hurrying back to her quadrant, she swiped the electronic card dangling down her chest and swung open the glass door. Struck by a sudden shot of exhaustion, she paused. After settling in front of her PC, she downloaded the design document from the mail, turned open the cap of her bottle and took a few sips of water. The complex specifications and the elaborate block diagram gave rise to questions. Once satisfied with the explanations provided by her project lead, she maximized the window of her development tool and proceeded with the coding. The busy cursor occasionally tapped open the old folders to check on certain programming syntaxes.

The techie lifted her eyes from the screen for a few more sips of water, wondering when Rohan would call. Whom would the baby resemble? Her mind drifted to a video from his childhood: Rohan was propped against the tub wall, his light eyes blinking through the transient waterfall from a tilted bucket, his front teeth clamped on the handle of the bathing mug while the soap-suds on the floor gathered into a foggy island beaded with bubble-domes.

Her eyes trailed the glow on the white table back to the screen, her palm enveloped the mouse and was about to click when the mobile phone, lying next to her handbag, began to ring.

“Can you go to some place where you won't be overheard?” Rohan asked.

“Sure.” Savitri almost leapt from her ergonomic chair, but reminded herself that she should not move so fast for the next nine months.

A couple of men were sipping coffee on the balcony. She scampered out of it and took the lift to reach the topmost floor. Another flight of stairs took her to the terrace. She rested her elbow on the upper edge of the parapet and pressed the mobile phone to her ear.

“We can’t have the baby,” he said softly.

      For several seconds, his words remained stuck in the moist air around her like a decree paper on a wet wall.

“What?” she managed to utter.

“I can’t marry you now. My mother will turn hysterical and my father may have a heart attack.” 

“You said you will marry me even if they raise objections and it was oblivious that they would.” She was surprised at her ability to argue, even at the peak of her benumbing indignation.

“I’ll marry you, but not so soon.”

The entire impact of his decision finally seeped in. Her breathing stopped for a moment as if all her orifices were blocked by the scattered parts of an exploded promise.

“I didn’t lie to you that I’m popping the pill. It’s not exactly a shock for you,” Savitri shrilled through the silence of the terrace which was swiftly being sheeted into a box-like enclosure by the lowering clouds.

She heard a deep sigh at the other end.

“The time we had spent in my flat was so beautiful and magical that I had agreed to the impossible,” he said after a long pause. A pause which seemed to Savitri like the opening mouth of a prehistoric animal she had assumed to be extinct.

“It was my mistake,” he continued, “I’ll make you forget about it by being a great husband someday. You will conceive again after our marriage. I’ll be a great father too. You will see...”

“Why can’t you marry me now?” she asked, steadying her voice. A voice made wooden like the furniture one ducks under to shield from a rain of glass smithereens.

“There are no auspicious dates for marriage in the coming four months,” he blurted out.

“Who cares?” Savitri hissed.

“My parents do. They will never accept a marriage solemnized on any random day. Moreover, we have so many relatives. It will take several lakh rupees to arrange a wedding reception at such a short notice and invite all, and if I don’t, my parents will lose their face. You know my father has to pay off his house loan and I have my education loan to settle,” his words tumbled out at breakneck speed, leaving no vent for breathing.

“You mean a feast for your relatives is more important than our child? What will they lose if we don’t invite them to our wedding?” Savitri reasoned by groping at the moorings of her wavering composure.

“It will affect my parents’ reputation. I don’t mean to sound harsh but that is more important to me than a child who is not yet born,” Rohan replied, emphasizing the last few words.

Savitri slowly climbed down the stairs with her hand on the balustrade. Pressing the button, she slumped against the wall and watched the floor position flash beside the closed doors of the lift. Her gaze shifted to the sacred red thread her mother had made her tie around her left wrist to protect her from all sorts of illnesses and other perils. Inside the elevator, she stared at the grey floor carrying her downwards, backtracking through the ecstasy of wish fulfilment, the nail biting anticipation since the last three weeks, the glimmer of hope when the symptoms started to show and the warm satisfaction of finding her thoughts and Rohan’s fitting in each other’s grooves in the rented single room flat.

Didn’t he notice the rapture in her voice when she was talking about her symptoms? ‘The child not yet born.’ The phrase rang in her ears. Didn’t she tell him about her office party before the nausea began? She had refused her favourite dish. As it was sprinkled with ajinomoto – a spice considered harmful for expectant women. Instead, she had gobbled up the tasteless temple prasad on her way home, wondering if prayers were sometimes, at least sometimes, answered. His tone had been indulgent too. But now that it was confirmed...

Back on the third floor, she lifted her head, straightened her shoulders and marched down the corridor while imagining her colleagues glimpsing her three months old bulge and nudging each other, then glaring at her five months old bump and whispering loud enough for her to hear. At seven months, they would invent flaws in her work; at eight, they would discuss how girls like her are degrading the county’s culture by aping the West. Finally at nine months, when she would meet the HR to get her maternity leave approved, he would survey her from head to toe as if she were an alien.

Savitri halted before the door of her quadrant, but swivelled around and nipped to the balcony. It was packed like the Monday morning trains transporting office-goers from the suburbs to the core city. There was a power-cut. The AC had been turned off to reduce the load on generators that allowed the computers and elevators to function as usual. Employees had poured out of their stifling cubicles to feel the gusty wind rush through their sticky shirts and skim across their tired faces. They looked over the railings as the breeze pounced on the plants thriving along the edge of the lake, tossed the water into alligator shaped creases and rolled the rusted cans out of the makeshift shops. The surge of nausea had abated. Savitri wondered if it would remain lulled for long. Moreover, a sickening sensation still lingered in her throat. She turned to her mobile phone. So fast were her fingers that it seemed an entire cavalry had descended on the device.

“I know you are upset but....” Rohan began.

“I’m having the baby,” she said. The lady standing near her swung around, adjusting her golden framed spectacles.

“Now darling, I’ve already apologized for my mistake and I’ve explained to you the reasons why we can’t...” Rohan proceeded in the manner of a guardian speaking to his ward.

“Mistake?” Savitri cut him short. “Agreeing to have a child and then aborting it is not the same as scribbling wrong information and erasing it.”

By now, Savitri could sense not one but several gazes in her direction.

“I don’t need to marry you,” her voice oozed with the self-assurance she had acquired over the years. It seemed every pat she had given herself for every tiniest of accomplishments had returned as the beat of a dauntless song. Raindrops lashed at her. She stepped back from the wet railing to avert the risk of falling ill.

“You want to be an unwed mother when all your unmarried friends still pretend to be virgins?” he sounded incredulous. “Do you think you are in Europe-America?”

“I’m aware of where I am. The law of our land does not discriminate between married and unmarried women, even if our society does,” she responded. The men huddled in the middle of the balcony exchanged glances, fingers frozen on their coffee cups, mouths dropped open like wilting poppies.

“Why is this foetus so important? Who will stop us from having children after our marriage? Why can’t you wait till then since you have already waited so long...” The shower of questions rivalled the rain.

“Because it is not an accidental pregnancy. I’ve wanted this baby. And so it matters that it's from a particular sperm you will never release again and an egg I will never produce again.”

Thrown together in the balcony, some people shuffled their feet. Some others even pricked their ear-holes with their little fingers as if to scrape out the objectionable words like ‘sperm’ and ‘egg’.

“Rohan, my decision is final. You can call me later if you want,” she spoke loud enough to be heard above the rumble of clouds. The centrally controlled lights in the balcony had been switched on to combat the growing darkness. All glances intersected on her when she paused for a moment before striding out of the balcony, her back to the railing, her five feet tall frame braced against the silvery wall of incessant rain. Since she would face those stares for the rest of her life, she wished to get used to them from this moment itself. Then she walked to her quadrant, her impending isolation challenged by her multiplying images on the glass walls. Her footsteps resounded on the square marble slabs like introspective clicks on folders stowing her individual and cultural past. She imagined tomorrow’s dawn, when the little patch of earth just outside her threshold would be matted with newly sprouted grass and threaded with runnels of melting hail.