19
MATERNAL INSTINCT
San Francisco, California—1985
SOMER
ON THE FLIGHT BACK FROM INDIA, SOMER AND KRIS TAKE TURNS staying awake to watch Asha as she sleeps in the seat between them, holding each other’s hands across her small body. Somer feels a flood of emotion every time she realizes Asha is truly their baby.
Back in San Francisco, Somer searches for that instinct her mother-in-law told her to follow about what Asha needs. But she never seems to get it right: Asha wants to stay awake and play at night when Somer tries to put her to sleep, or she spits out the food Somer offers her. Somer knows there are developmental reasons behind the behavior, but it still feels like a personal rejection when Asha throws her entire lunch on the floor. She’s surprised at how hard it is to follow the advice she gives her patients’ mothers not to get worked up about these things.
On their third night home, Kris works an overnight shift at the hospital, and Somer finds herself feeling anxious about her first night alone with Asha. Sometime after midnight, Asha wakes up screaming. Somer warms a bottle of milk for her, but Asha cries again after she drinks it. OK, I’m a pediatrician, I can do this. Crying child: check temperature, check diaper, check for hair tourniquet around fingers or toes. Panic rises. Maybe she has a urinary tract infection? She examines Asha from head to toe. But there is no medical reason for her crying. In this situation, she is a mother, not a physician, and she feels helpless. Somer sings to Asha, rocks her and paces the floor. For two solid hours, Asha screams, and Somer can do nothing to settle her down. Finally and inexplicably, sometime around 3 A.M., Asha falls asleep on Somer’s sweaty and tear-stained shoulder in the rocking chair. Shaken, Somer doesn’t move from that position until morning, when Krishnan finds them there.
“I can’t do it,” she whispers when he gently wakes her. “I don’t know how to do this. She was up all night screaming.” Somer has always believed that not everyone is cut out for motherhood; she’s seen how some of her patients take to it more than others. Nature already deemed she couldn’t be a mother, and now she wonders if they made a mistake. The rational explanations she strains to hear in her head cannot drown out the doubt welling in her heart.
“What do you mean? You are doing it,” Kris says. “Look at her.”
She looks down at Asha, sleeping in her arms with her mouth slightly parted. Kris strokes Asha’s hair and smiles at Somer. She tries to smile but is thinking ahead to the next night he’s on call. It all seemed manageable in India, when Krishnan’s family was there to help prepare Asha’s food, bathe her, soothe her when she cried. But now, after spending so long trying to become a mother, she doesn’t know how to be one. Somer worries she may never feel that instinct.
She expects it to get better when she goes back to work, but this only raises new issues. Once she returns to her pediatrics practice, Somer only sees Asha for an hour at each end of the day. She is relieved to finally feel competent at something again, but she feels conflicted when Asha becomes so attached to the young Irish nanny they hired, clinging to her in the evening after Somer gets home. At work, every patient Asha’s age reminds Somer of her bright smile or her wobbly walk. The mothers and children she sees in her practice seem so comfortable together. Somer wonders if it’s the biological connection that underpins their confidence, or is it the time they spend together, the time Somer spends at work? Would she know better what to do with Asha if they shared the same blood? Would Asha respond better to Somer if she didn’t look so different from everyone she’d known in her short life?
Krishnan doesn’t understand her anguish over this, and by now, Somer doesn’t expect him to. She can’t face the possibility of failing at this after everything she’s been through. She still loves her work, but she is wary of overinvesting in her career, of placing too much emphasis on something she’s learned will never be enough.
PART II
20
SHAKTI
Dahanu, India—1990
JASU AND KAVITA
JASU SEES HER, SITTING CROSS-LEGGED IN FRONT OF THE FIRE, and stops to watch from a distance. Kavita tosses the rotli onto the cast iron pan nestled in the fire. She wears a serious expression, absorbed with the daily task of preparing food for the entire joint family. Jasu likes it better when she smiles and takes it as a personal challenge to try to distract her from her work. He walks toward her and begins whistling, emulating the birds that sing in the early morning. “Here is my little chakli,” he says with a playful smile. Little bird. He can usually count on this pet name to prompt a smile.
“Food will be ready soon. Hungry?” she asks.
“Hahn, starving,” he says, patting his belly. “What are we eating?” He tilts the flat stainless steel lid of a covered vessel.
“Khobi-bhaji, rotli, dal,” she replies in staccato fashion, reaching over to stir the cabbage.
“Khobi again?” he says. “Thank goodness my wife is such a good cook, she can make cabbage taste good day after day. Bhagwan, I miss ringna, bhinda, tindora…”
“Hahn. Me too. Maybe after harvest.”
“Chakli,” he says, lowering his voice so his parents in the next room cannot hear. “Harvest is not going to be good. We will be lucky to get by this year.” Jasu tries to keep the anxiety he feels from showing on his face. Crop yields and market prices have been getting worse every year since they got married. He couldn’t afford to keep his workers, so for the past two years, both Kavita and Vijay have been helping him in the fields.
“Vijay!” Kavita shouts through the open archway to where their five-year-old son is playing outside with his cousins. “Time for dinner soon. Come in and wash up.”
“Kavi.” Jasu feels the heaviness come over him. “I can’t think of any other way. We must go.” He rubs his forehead, as if to help the lines there disappear. “We will find better fortune in the city. I will get a good job. You won’t have to work like this anymore, day and night.”
“I don’t mind working, Jasu. If it helps you, us…I don’t mind.”
“But I mind,” he says. “In Bombay, we won’t have to break our backs every day. Imagine, Kavi, you can do cooking or sewing—no more working in the fields, no more of…this!” He grabs her thin fingers, and runs his thumbs over the calloused tips and scraped knuckles, her weathered hands exposing his failings.
“There must be something we can do. We can try planting cotton like your cousin.”
He looks down, shaking his head. How can I make her understand? Every cell in his body tells him they must leave this place now, the only home either of them has known. They must go away—from the crop fields that signal his failure as a man, from the family he can’t seem to forgive, from this house they share with his parents, his childhood home in which he can’t be contained any longer. Bombay beckons to him like a glittering jewel, promising a better life for them, and particularly for their son.
“Kavi, it’s not like here, where everyone is scraping by all the time. Every day, I hear, truckloads of new people arrive, just like us. Hundreds of them, and there are homes and work and food for all of them!”
“But everyone we know is here. Bombay is not our home. What good will it do to have all the money in the world there, but no family?” Kavita begins to cry.
He moves closer to her. “We will have our family. You and me and Vijay. He can go to a good school, a proper school. He won’t have to work like us or live like this…” Jasu gestures with his hands at the modest home they share with his family. “He can finish school and even get an office job. Can you see that? Our little Vijay working in an office one day?” He is trying hard now to make her smile. Please, Kavi. He holds her face in his palms and wipes away her tears with his rough thumbs. “Good morning, would you like chai, Sahib Sir?” Jasu mocks, gently prodding the corners of her mouth into a reluctant smile with his finger and thumb.
“How will he manage, being around strangers in that city?” she says. “Here, everyone care
s for him. This whole village is his family. We had that. I want him to have that too.”
“I want him to have more than that, Kavi. Our family will always be here, they will always love him.”
“And what about us? No one there can help us if something happens.” Her voice catches with emotion. “At least here, we have help when the harvest is poor or Vijay is sick.”
“We won’t be the first ones to go.” Jasu folds her small hands in his. “My cousin’s neighbor, and that sugarcane farmer—we’ll find them. Kavi, I just want a better life for us…” He trails off with this thought and presses his forehead to their tightly clasped hands. Then it comes to him. In a single moment, he knows what to say to her, this woman who is a mother before anything else. He looks up abruptly. “Look at all your parents have done for you, how much they have sacrificed. Isn’t this the right thing to do for our son? Doesn’t Vijay deserve the best? It’s our obligation as parents. It is our turn, chakli.”
His words bring a flush of shame to her cheeks, and she begins to cry again.
“Just think of it—can you, chakli? Can you see a new life for us? Trust me, Kavi.”
His eyes are hopeful and bright. Hers are shiny with tears.
WHEN KAVITA FIRST TELLS HER PARENTS SHE AND JASU ARE moving to Bombay, she can barely get the words out without crying. “Ba, Bapu.” Kavita buries her face in her mother’s lap. “How can I leave you? What will become of me in that place?” She remembers Bombay: the hot pavement under her feet, the way people looked at her with shame.
Her mother wipes at her own eyes, clears her throat, and then gathers Kavita in her arms. “Beti, you will be fine. Jasu is a good husband. He must have his reasons.”
“A good husband? He’s taking me away from you, from Rupa, all my relatives and friends, my home, my village.”
“Beti, we will always be here for you. But your life is with him. You must trust in him. Your husband and son need you. If the mother falls, the whole family falls,” her mother recites from a traditional poem. “You must be brave for them.”
Kavita remembers the first farewell she shared with her mother—standing outside the temple after she was married, her body draped in layers of silk, flower garlands, and jewelry, her face heavy with bridal makeup that made her look more like a woman than the girl she still was. She wept that day as she went off to her new husband’s home, feeling as if she were saying good-bye for the last time. Yet she went back home each time she was expecting, and again after Vijay was born, relying on her mother’s care so she could learn to be a mother herself.
Now, her mother lifts Kavita’s head up out of her lap and holds her face, hot with tears, in her cool hands. “I am glad it is you who is going,” her mother whispers.
Kavita looks up at her with shock.
“I won’t worry about you, Kavita. You have strength. Fortitude. Shakti. Bombay will bring you hardship. But you, beti, have the strength to endure it.”
And through her mother’s words and her hands, Kavita feels it—shakti, the sacred feminine force that flows from the Divine Mother to all those who have come after her.
IT IS A COOL SEPTEMBER EVENING WHEN KAVITA AND JASU gather together with their families and friends to say good-bye. The first sparkling stars are just beginning to show themselves in a deepening blue sky, like the glimpse of a diamond earring beneath a lock of dark hair. Kavita has worn one of her best saris for the occasion, a vibrant blue chiffon with the tiniest of sequins sewn onto the edges with silver thread. As the sky darkens, Kavita’s cousins, with whom she has grown up as sisters, carry out large vessels of food. They spoon it onto several large banana leaves, laid out in a large circle on the ground. Each person—each family member, each childhood friend, each lifelong neighbor—takes a seat in front of a leaf. As always, the men gather around Jasu on one side, and the women flock together with Kavita on the other.
Jasu’s booming laughter erupts from the men’s side. Kavita turns in time to see Jasu throw back his head, and one of his brothers slap him on the back. A shy smile spreads across her face. He has been full of life these last few weeks as they have prepared for their move, and this has brought her happiness too. Her parents’ blessing and their reassurance that her rightful place is alongside her husband have helped her see things differently. She has begun to envision a new life with more comfort, less work, and a home away from her stifling in-laws.
“What kind of work will Jasu bhai do, Kavita?” one of the women asks.
“First, he will work as a messenger or tiffin carrier, a dhaba-wallah,” Kavita says. “There is plenty of that work, and they pay every day in cash. Then once we are settled, he’ll do some less strenuous work in a shop or office.”
Rupa nods agreement. “And they already know so many people in Bombay. Just last night, Jasu bhai was telling us. It is exciting, bena,” Rupa says, squeezing Kavita’s arm.
Kavita forces away the ache that rises in her heart at the thought of being so far away from her sister. “Hahn. Jasu says we will have a big flat to ourselves, with a bathroom inside and a big kitchen. And Vijay will have his own room to study and sleep.” She looks over to where Vijay and his cousins are chasing one another, each trying to grab the hem of the others’ shirts. Whenever one falls accidentally, he sends up a new cloud of dust and prompts gales of laughter from the rest. “I worry about him most. He will miss his cousins,” Kavita says. “God willing, we will make our riches in Bombay and come back here quickly, futta-fut.”
By the time the adults finish eating, Vijay and the other boys have returned, dirt ground into their clothes. Jasu comes over to Kavita, broaching the male-female divide that has separated them all night. “Challo, it is getting late, I think we better say good-bye.” And with those words, Jasu breaks the spell that has permeated the evening: the illusion that this is just another large gathering of their loved ones that happens for any reason, or none at all. Slowly, a cluster of people crowd around them to say their good-byes. One by one, they clutch one another, whispering wishes of safe journeys and promises to visit soon. Gradually, the well-wishers slip away until only Kavita’s parents are left.
Kavita falls to her knees and touches her forehead to her mother’s feet. Her mother pulls her up by the shoulders and holds her close, embracing her tightly. She says only one word to her, although she repeats it many times. Shakti.
21
AN UNEASY PEACE
Palo Alto, California—1990
SOMER
SOMER HEADS TOWARD THE RECEPTION DESK IN THE LOBBY OF Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital to find her patient’s room number.
“Somer Whitman?” A tall doctor approaches her, rolling a suitcase behind him. “Somer, how are you?” He extends his hand to greet her.
“Peter,” she says, recognizing him from UCSF. He was an intern when she was a senior resident. “My gosh, I haven’t seen you in, what, ten years?”
“Yeah, must be,” he says, running a hand through his thick brown hair.
“I heard you went into infectious diseases. What are you up to now?” Somer remembers him being bright, going places. He reminded her of herself in that way.
“Well, I did my ID fellowship in Boston and tropical diseases at Harvard for a couple fun years. And I just got recruited as division head here, so it’s good to be back.”
“Wow, Peter, that’s great,” Somer says.
“Thanks. I’m heading to Istanbul for a couple days to give a talk. I’ll be jet-lagged for the next week, but hey—the work’s interesting, and it’s better than dealing with coughs and colds, right? How about you, you were interested in cardiology weren’t you?” He looks at her with genuine interest. She recalls how well they got along, how she encouraged him to pursue a subspecialty.
“Well,” she says, bracing for his reaction, “I’m working over at the community medical clinic in Palo Alto, so lots of coughs and colds.” There is simply no way to make it sound sexy. The cases are routine, there is little continuity of pati
ent care, and the clinic never has enough resources. “But hey, I can pick up my six-year-old daughter from school every day.” She smiles and shrugs her shoulders. Is that a trace of disappointment in his eyes?
“That’s great. We have two boys, six and ten. Keeps you busy, doesn’t it?”
“Sure does.”
“Hey, I’ve got to head to the airport, Somer, but it was great seeing you. By the way, I never forgot that great diagnosis of neonatal lupus you made when I was a junior resident—I must have relayed that story a dozen times through the years, but I always credit Dr. Whitman.”
Somer smiles. “Dr. Thakkar now, actually. But glad to hear it. Good seeing you, Peter.”
AS SHE RIDES THE ELEVATOR, SOMER WATCHES THE FLOOR NUMBERS light up in sequence. Where have the years gone, and what happened to that ambitious medical student she used to be? She recalls that desire to work up interesting clinical cases, do research, ascend in academia. Now, she barely keeps up with her medical journals. Her career choices have meant losing pace with her peers, and yet even in her unassuming clinic job, she can feel like an imposter.
Then she rushes to pick up Asha from school, where she is known only as “Asha’s mom” by the other mothers, who seem to all spend a lot of time together. Somer has no time for the PTA and bake sales. She has no time for herself. Her profession no longer defines her, but neither does being a mother. Both are pieces of her, and yet they don’t seem to add up to a whole. Somer didn’t know that having it all, as she always believed she would, would mean feeling like she’s falling short everywhere. She tries to reassure herself that life is about trade-offs and she should make her peace with this one, though more often than not, it is an uneasy peace.