karmaṇā daiva-netreṇa jantur dehopapattaye striyāḥ praviṣṭa udaraṁ puṁso retaḥ-kaṇāśrayaḥ
Under the supervision of the Supreme Lord and according to the result of his work, the living entity, the soul, is made to enter into the womb of a woman through the particle of male semen to assume a particular type of body.
— Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 3.31.1
I want to know if you can stand in the rubble of your own life and still call it sacred.
— paraphrase, in Madhav's handwriting in the margin of his Gītā
A soul is being placed.
Not chosen. Not invited. Not arrived at by mutual decision between the soul and the people whose lives it is entering. Placed. By the Lord, according to the soul's own past activities, into the body that those activities have earned. The Lord arranges. Karma is precise. The placement is happening now, in a flat in Baner, in the body of a woman who does not yet know it.
The man beside her does not know it either. He is sitting in a clinic waiting room with her, looking at his shoes, counting the minutes the way men count things when they have nothing else to do with their hands. He has been a husband for three years. He thinks he is waiting for a child. He is not wrong. But the child is not arriving as he imagines it is — through his choice, his planning, his good intentions, the careful arrangements of his good life. The child is being placed. The Lord is arranging. The man is one of the two bodies through which the arranging is happening, and he does not see this yet, and he will not see it for a long time.
The woman beside him is more attentive. She has been crying in bathrooms for three years. She has begun to suspect that her life is being moved by something larger than her own intentions. She does not have language for this suspicion. She does not know that the language exists. She thinks she is failing.
She is not failing.
She is being lived through.
Both of them are.
It will take nine months for one of them to begin to see this, and many more years for the other, and the story you are about to read is the story of those nine months — the small visible part of a much larger arrangement that has been underway since long before they met.
Watch them. They do not know they are being watched.
i. The Waiting Room
The waiting room of the Sahyādri Fertility Centre in Aundh is painted a soft pistachio green. The colour was chosen, Aarav suspects, by someone with a degree in interior psychology — the kind of person who knows that women on the worst mornings of their lives need walls that do not shout at them. The plants are real. The magazines on the low teak table are recent. The receptionist hums very faintly, a film song from many years ago, and does not seem to know she is doing it.
It is seven-forty in the morning.
Aarav is sitting in the chair closest to the window. Ananya is in the chair beside him, but she has angled her body slightly away — not enough to be a statement, just enough to read her phone without him reading along. She is scrolling through Instagram. She has been scrolling for eleven minutes. Aarav has been counting in the careful, useless way men count things when they have nothing else to do with their hands.
On the wall opposite him is a poster he is trying not to look at. It is a chart titled SUCCESS RATES BY AGE GROUP. He has memorised it without meaning to. Twenty-six to thirty-four, fifty-eight percent. Thirty-five to thirty-seven, forty-nine percent. He thinks, not for the first time, that whoever printed this poster did not consider what it would feel like to read at seven-forty in the morning of an embryo transfer.
He looks away. He looks at his shoes. They are the shoes he wears to work, the leather ones, slightly too formal for a clinic. He thinks: I have dressed for this as if it is a meeting. He thinks: Perhaps it is.
A nurse opens a door across the room and calls a name that is not theirs. A couple stands up. The woman is a little older than Ananya, maybe thirty-five, in a pale blue salwar; her husband is taller than her, paler than her, holding her bag for her in the way men hold their wives' bags in moments like these. They walk together through the door. The door closes.
Ananya does not look up.
The receptionist hums. The song is from the early nineties. Aarav cannot quite place it. The melody is familiar in the way old songs are, the way they live somewhere underneath one's actual memory.
He looks at Ananya. She is wearing the green dress she has worn here twice before. He has been with her for three years now. He has been with her at hospitals, at restaurants, at her parents' house, at his parents' house, at the small registrar's office in Pune where they signed a paper that made them officially what they had already been for a year. He has been with her at funerals. He has been with her at weddings of friends. He has never seen her look the way she looks right now.
She looks like someone who has stopped expecting anything from the day in front of her.
He wants to say something. He has wanted to say something since they left the flat at six-thirty. He cannot find the sentence. Every sentence he tries dies in his throat before it reaches his mouth, because none of them are the truth, and he has reached the part of his marriage where he can no longer say things that are not the truth, even kind things.
He reaches over and takes her hand.
She does not look at him. But she does not pull her hand away. After a moment, her thumb moves, just a little, against the back of his hand — the small involuntary motion of someone who has been holding a thumb still for a long time.
It is the most he has had from her in three days.
The door opens again. The nurse comes out. She is a young woman, maybe twenty-six, in pale pink scrubs. She is holding a clipboard. She looks at the row of chairs and finds Ananya.
"Mrs. Bhatt," she says. Her voice is professionally warm in the way only the voices of nurses at fertility clinics can be. "We're ready for you in a few minutes. Just one more form for the consent."
Ananya stands up. She takes the clipboard. The pen is a cheap clinic pen attached by a chain. She begins to read the form, but Aarav can see, from the angle of her head, that she is not really reading it. She is doing the thing she has been doing for three years: looking at words on paper while her mind is somewhere else entirely. Some part of her, he thinks, has been somewhere else for so long that he is no longer sure how to call her back.
She signs the form. She hands it back to the nurse.
The nurse smiles in the way of someone who has handed out a thousand such forms and watched a thousand such couples not read them, and says, "Wonderful. Just a few more minutes. You can finish your tea."
Ananya sits back down. Her tea has gone cold. She does not drink it.
Aarav looks at the poster again. The numbers have not changed.
He thinks: Three years.
He thinks: Three years, and somehow we have arrived at the morning we did not believe we would ever arrive at, and we are too tired to be glad about it.
He thinks: Whatever happens in there, we have already lost something. I do not know yet what. But I will know later.
The receptionist hums. The melody finally surfaces in his memory — it is the song his mother sang while making chai in their old house in Nagpur. He had been five or six years old. He had been sitting at the kitchen table with a slate and a piece of chalk, copying letters his mother had drawn for him. The song had been about waiting for someone who was not coming home.
He had not understood it then.
He understands it now.
ii. The First Year
It had started, like many things in their marriage, as a joke.
This was the first year. They had been married for ten months. They were in the small kitchen of the rented two-bedroom flat in Baner that they had taken just before the wedding. Ananya was making poha at the stove. Aarav was sitting at the breakfast counter reading something on his phone. Ananya had said, without turning around: "So when are we having a baby?"
It was a Sunday morning. The light through the small kitchen window was the particular Sunday-morning light of Pune in October — clean, slightly cool, with the smell of the building's bougainvillea drifting in.
Aarav had looked up. "What?"
"A baby. When are we having one?"
"I — now?"
"Not today. But — generally. When?"
He had thought about it. He was thirty at the time. She was twenty-seven. Both of them were doing well at work. They had just bought their first car together. They had finished paying off her father for the wedding. They were comfortable in a way that felt new and slightly dangerous, the way comfort always feels when you are not yet certain you have earned it.
"Whenever you want," he had said.
"That's a very smart answer."
"I'm a very smart man."
She had laughed. She had laughed easily then, in those days. The laughter had been part of the texture of his life, an ambient thing, something he had stopped noticing was there until later, when it stopped.
For the first three or four months, nothing happened, and they had not minded that nothing happened. Their lives were full. Aarav was leading a new product launch; Ananya was on a complicated heritage-restoration project that required her to visit a wāḍā in Nashik twice a month. They had time. They had not actually wanted a baby yet, only wanted to have started wanting one.
By month six, Ananya had downloaded a pregnancy-tracking app. Just to know my cycle better, she had said.
By month nine, she had downloaded a second one.
He had teased her about it. Are you tracking three different things? he had said. Are you the CEO of your own ovary?
She had laughed. But she had not put the apps away.
By the end of the first year, let's see what happens had begun to develop a small ache underneath it. The phrase still sounded casual when they said it to each other. But when she said it now, late at night, after another month of nothing, the what in the sentence had begun to be a specific what. The what had begun to be a child.
She did not tell him this. She did not need to. He knew. He just did not have anything useful to say about it.
It was the easiest year of trying. The year before anyone began to be afraid.
iii. The Second Year
The fear arrived quietly, on a Wednesday afternoon in October of the second year.
Ananya had gone alone to Dr. Patwardhan, the gynaecologist Sushma had been seeing for thirty years. The doctor herself, a small woman in her sixties, had asked the usual questions, smiled in the usual way, and said, "Beta, it's been more than a year, na?"
Ananya had said yes.
"How long, exactly?"
"Fourteen months. Almost fifteen."
The doctor had nodded slowly. "Let's do some tests."
The tests were standard. Hormones. Thyroid. An ultrasound. They had taken two weeks. They had all come back normal.
"You are perfectly healthy, beta," Dr. Patwardhan had said, looking up from the file. "Your ovaries are functioning beautifully. Your hormones are fine. There is no reason why you cannot conceive."
Ananya had nodded. The doctor had then leaned forward slightly and asked, with the casualness of someone who had asked the question several thousand times: "Has your husband been tested?"
It was the way she said it. Aarav had not been there to hear it, but Ananya had told him later, that night, in their bedroom, and the way she said it back to him — that small even pause before your husband — had been the way the doctor had said it.
The doctor had not been accusing. She had been routine. But for Ananya, who had spent fifteen months and several thousand rupees on tests of her own body, the question had landed like a small bell ringing in a quiet room. Has your husband been tested? No one had asked her this. No one in her circle of friends, no one in her family, no one in her own head. Even the apps had not asked. Even the books had only really discussed her body, her fertility, her cycle. The husband had been a kind of background variable. A thing that was simply assumed to work.
She had told Aarav that night, and he had said, "Sure. I'll go."
He had said it the way one says sure, I'll go to the office today. He had not understood, then, what he was agreeing to.
A week later he had gone to a different clinic, alone, because the idea of going with her had embarrassed him in a way he had not been able to name. He had filled out a form. He had been led to a small clean room with a chair, a magazine rack, and a small refrigerator. The whole thing had taken twelve minutes. He had walked out of the clinic afterwards with his ID card and his payment receipt and a small piece of his pride that he had not realised, until that moment, was located in his pocket like a wallet.
He had not told her about the room. He had only told her that it was done and that the report would come in three days.
The report had come in three days.
To be continued — Part II: The Parking Lot.