A Suitable Boy(456)

‘Ma –’

‘What is it, darling?’

‘I think – I think the bed is wet.’

Mrs Rupa Mehra woke Maan and sent him to get the nurses on duty.

The bag of waters had broken, and the contractions began coming very fast now, every couple of minutes or so. The nurses took one look at the situation, and wheeled Savita into the labour room. One of them telephoned Dr Butalia.

‘Where’s my mother?’ asked Savita.

‘She’s outside,’ said one rather abrupt nurse.

‘Please tell her to come in.’

‘Mrs Kapoor, I’m so sorry, we can’t do that,’ said the other nurse, a large, kind, Anglo-Indian woman. ‘The doctor will be here very soon. Hold on to the railing behind your bed if the pain is too bad.’

‘I think I can feel the baby –’ began Savita.

‘Mrs Kapoor, please try to hold on till the doctor arrives.’

‘I can’t –’

Luckily the doctor appeared almost immediately, and the nurses now both exhorted her to push. ‘Hold on to the spring and handle above you.’

‘Push, push, push –’

‘I can’t bear it – I can’t bear it –’ said Savita, her lips drawn apart in agony.

‘Just push –’

‘No,’ she wept. ‘It’s horrible. I can’t bear it. Give me an anaesthetic. Doctor, please –’

‘Push, Mrs Kapoor, you’re doing very well,’ said the doctor.

Out of a haze of pain, Savita heard one nurse say to the other: ‘Is the baby’s head coming out first?’

Savita felt a tearing sensation below, then a sudden warm gush. Then more stretching and such pain that she thought she would pass out.

‘I can’t bear it, oh Ma, I can’t bear it any more,’ she screamed. ‘I never want to have another baby.’

‘They all say that,’ said the abrupt nurse, ‘and they all come back next year. Keep pushing –’

‘I won’t. I’ll never – never – never have another child,’ said Savita, who felt herself being stretched beyond endurance, almost torn apart. ‘Oh God.’

Suddenly the head slipped out, and she felt a sense of immediate relief.

When, after what seemed a long time, she heard the baby’s cry, she opened her eyes, which were still hazy with tears, and looked at the red, wrinkled, black-haired, bawling baby, covered with blood and a sort of greasy film, that the doctor was holding up in his arms.

‘It’s a girl, Mrs Kapoor,’ said the dreamy-eyed doctor. ‘With a very powerful voice.’

‘A girl?’

‘Yes. Quite a large baby. Well done. It was a difficult birth, as such things go.’

Savita lay exhausted for a couple of minutes. The light in the labour room was too bright for her. A baby! she thought.

‘Can I hold her?’ she asked after a while. ‘Just one minute more, and we’ll have her cleaned up.’

But the baby was still quite slippery when it – she – came to rest on the cradle of Savita’s slack stomach. Savita looked at the top of its head, adoringly and accusingly, then held it gently and closed her eyes with exhaustion once more.





13.12


PRAN woke to find himself a father.

‘What?’ he said in disbelief to Imtiaz.

But seeing his parents sitting there by his bedside, something that would not normally have occurred outside visiting hours, he shook his head and believed it.

‘A girl,’ added Imtiaz. ‘They’re upstairs. Maan’s there too, quite happy to be mistaken for the father.’

‘A girl?’ Pran was surprised, perhaps even a little disappointed. ‘How is Savita?’

‘Fine. I’ve had a word with the obstetrician. He says the birth was a little difficult, but nothing unusual.’

‘Well, let me go to see her and the baby. I suppose she can’t move.’

‘No, she can’t. Not for a couple of days. She has a few stitches. And I’m sorry, Pran, you can’t move either. Neither movement nor excitement will conduce to your recovery.’ Imtiaz spoke with the slightly severe formality that he found worked best with patients when he wanted to ensure their compliance.

‘This is ridiculous, Imtiaz. Be sensible. Please. I suppose you’re going to tell me that I can only see photographs of my baby.’

‘That’s an idea now,’ said Imtiaz unable to resist a smile, and rubbing the mole on his cheek. ‘But the baby, unlike the mother, is a transportable item, and she can certainly be brought to you here. It’s a good thing you aren’t infectious, or even that wouldn’t have been possible. Butalia guards his babies as if they were something of value.’