With apologies to The Namesake
2006
On a wet August monsoon evening two weeks before her due date, Jennifer Ninnington stands in the kitchen of a Pali Hill apartment, combining Bournvita and Horlicks and crumbled chocolate in a bowl. She adds sugar, flour, egg whites, wishing there were yeast to pour into the mix. Jennifer has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the brownies sold for two bucks in New York cafés and at large train stations throughout America, spilling from saran wrap. She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her denim shirt. Her swollen feet ache against speckled white marble. She reaches for another chocolate bar, frowning again as she pulls at its crisp gold wrapper. A curious warmth floods her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe she doubles over, gasping without sound, dropping the chocolate bar with a thud on the floor.
She calls out to her husband, Andy, an MBA candidate at IIM-Bombay, who is studying in the bedroom. He leans over a card table; the edge of their bed, a queen mattress under a pastel blue pinstriped twill spread, serves as his chair.
At dawn a taxi is called to ferry them through deserted Pali Hill streets, past the Bandra railway station and down Linking Road, to Lilavati Hospital. She is asked to remove her Banana Republic denim shirt and khakis in favor of a plain white gown that, to her mild embarrassment, makes her look fat. A nurse offers to fold up the denim shirt and khakis but, exasperated by the no-wrinkle denim, ends up stuffing the material into Jennifer’s Wal-Mart suitcase. Her obstetrician, Dr. Jamshedpur, gauntly handsome in a George Clooney sort of way, with fine slate-colored hair swept back from his temples, arrives to examine her progress. She searches for Andy’s face, but he has stepped behind the curtain the doctor has drawn. “I’ll be back,” Andy says to her in English, and then a nurse adds: “Don’t you worry, Mr. Ninnington.”
Now she is alone, cut off by curtains from the three other women in the room. One woman’s name, she gathers from bits of conversation, is Balvinder. Another is Leela. Kunti lies to her left. “Hai rabba, hai rabba,” she hears one of them say. And then a man’s voice: “Jai mata di.” She wishes the curtains were open, so that she could talk to the Indian women. Perhaps one of them has given birth before, can tell her what to expect. But she has gathered that Bombayites, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and sitting in obscene postures on the Lands End rocks, prefer their privacy.
She wonders if she is the only American person in the hospital, but a gentle twitch from the baby reminds her that she is, technically speaking, not alone. In America, she thinks to herself, women go to an HMO to give birth.
She has been instructed to time the duration of the contractions and so she consults her watch, a bon voyage gift from her parents, slipped over her wrist the last time she saw them, amid airport confusion and tears. It wasn’t until she was on the plane, flying for the first time in her life on a Boeing 777 whose quiet ascent four members of her family had watched from the gate at JFK Airport, as she was drifting over parts of America she’d never set foot in, and then even farther, outside America itself, that she’d noticed the watch among the cavalcade of cheap electronics on her arms: Timex, Casio, Fossil.
Indian seconds tick on top of her pulse point. She calculates the American time on her fingers. It is nine and a half hours behind in New York, still morning, seven o’clock. In the kitchen of her parents’ flat on W. 82nd St., at this very moment, her sister is pouring morning cocktails into cut glass tumblers, arranging toast on a tray. Her mother, very soon to be a grandmother, is standing at the mirror of her dressing table, fluffing a silver perm with her fingers. Her father hunches over his glass table by the window, building model ships, watching the History Channel. Her younger brother, Mike, plays Xbox on the bed. For an instant the weight of the baby vanishes, replaced by the scene that passes before her eyes, only to be replaced once more by a brown strip of Mahim Bay, thick green treetops, autorickshaws gliding up and down the Western Express Highway.
In Bandra it is four thirty in the afternoon, still lunchtime in the hospital’s relaxed day. A tray holding warm Frooti, kheer, masala chai, and cold dal chawal is brought to her side. Antonia Gonzalves, the friendly nurse with the diamond engagement ring and a fringe of henna’d hair beneath her cap, tells Jennifer to consume only the Frooti and the masala chai. It’s just as well. Jennifer would not have touched the dal chawal, even if permitted; Indians eat their dal chawal with their hands, though Jennifer has recently found a kind retailer on Lamonton Road willing to sell her a cutlery set.
Nothing feels normal to Jennifer. For the past eighteen months, ever since she’s arrived in Pali Hill, nothing has felt normal at all: motherhood in a foreign land. She is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so teeming and overflowing.
“How about a little walk? It might do you good,” Antonia asks when she comes to clear the lunch tray. Jennifer looks up from a tattered copy of the New Yorker magazine that she’d brought to read on her plane ride to Bombay and still cannot bring herself to throw away. The printed pages of English type, smooth to the touch, are a perpetual comfort to her. She’s read each of the short stories and poems and articles a dozen times, a view of the Upper West Side skyline sketched one snowy February morning.
“Yes, all right,” Jennifer says. After a minute they continue on, toward the nurses’ station. “Hoping for a boy or a girl?” Antonia asks.
“As long as there are dus ungali,” Jennifer replies. Antonia smiles, a little too widely, and suddenly Jennifer realizes her error, knows she should have said “dus ungaliyan.” This error pains her almost as much as her last contraction. Hindi had been her subject. In New York, before she was married, she was working toward a college degree. She used to tutor neighborhood schoolchildren in their homes, in their duplexes and coops, helping them to memorize Tagore and Narayan, to pronounce words like kshatriya and kshitij, to understand the difference between Maoists and Naxalites, between the CPI, the CPI(M) and the DIC(K). But in English, to say “fingers” only takes one additional letter.
Andy was born twice in America, and then a third time, in India. He does not thank God; he openly reveres Deepak Chopra. Instead of thanking God he thanks Nabokov, the Russian writer who had saved his life, when Antonia enters the waiting room.
