vi. The IUI Failures
They did two cycles of IUI.
The procedure involves a man producing a sample at the clinic on a specified day, the lab processing the sample to concentrate what is usable, and the doctor placing this through a thin catheter into the woman's uterus at the moment most likely to result in fertilisation. It is medically lighter than IVF. It is cheaper. It is the first thing they try when the male-factor numbers are not catastrophic but are not what they should be.
For Aarav, the procedure was the cup again, and the small clean room with the small refrigerator. He did it twice. He did not get used to it the second time. He did not believe people who said one got used to such things.
For Ananya, the procedure was an examination chair and an instrument and the polite averted gaze of a doctor she had now seen six times. It was, she told Aarav, not painful. It was something else. She did not have a word for what it was.
The first cycle, they had been optimistic. They had told nobody, but they had been optimistic between themselves. Aarav had bought her an absurd quantity of pomegranates because someone on the internet had said pomegranates helped. Ananya had drunk pomegranate juice every morning for fourteen days while waiting for her period not to come.
It had come.
She had told him by sending him a single word over WhatsApp at eleven in the morning while he was in a meeting at work.
Negative.
He had read it. He had put the phone face down on the desk. He had finished the meeting. He had driven home at lunchtime, which he never did. He had found her sitting on the floor of the living room beside the laundry basket, not crying, just folding the laundry very slowly, one item at a time, with an attention she had never previously given to laundry. He had sat down on the floor beside her. He had folded laundry with her for forty minutes. They had not spoken. When the laundry was done she had put her head on his shoulder and he had put his arm around her and they had sat against the side of the couch on the cold tile floor and looked at the wall.
After a while she had said: "Okay. Next month."
He had said: "Yes. Next month."
The second cycle was the one that broke something.
The day she was supposed to take the home test, she did not tell him she was going to take it. He had assumed she would do it on Sunday morning, with him, in the bathroom together, the way they had done it the first cycle. Instead, she did it on Saturday afternoon, alone, when he was at the gym.
He came home at six. He showered. He walked into the kitchen for water. The bathroom door was closed. He thought nothing of this. He poured the water. He drank it. He went to put on a clean shirt. He passed the bathroom door again. He thought he heard something.
He stopped.
He listened.
He heard, very faintly, the sound of his wife crying on the other side of the door. Not loudly. Not the kind of crying she did at funerals. The other kind. The kind she did silently into a towel pressed to her face so that no one would hear her.
He stood in the corridor.
He did not knock.
He did not knock.
He stood there for what must have been three minutes. He stood there knowing exactly what had happened, and knowing that she had chosen to be alone with it, and knowing that to open the door now would be to take from her the one thing she had chosen for herself in the entire process — which was privacy. Which was a few minutes by herself before the next phase began.
So he did not knock.
He walked back to the bedroom.
He sat down on the bed.
He put his head in his hands.
When she came out, twenty minutes later, her face was washed and her eyes were red but dry, and she walked into the bedroom and saw him sitting there and did not pretend.
She said: "You heard."
He said: "Yes."
She said: "You didn't come in."
He said: "I didn't know if I should."
She said: "You should have come in. Or you should not have heard. But you should not have heard and then not come in."
She was not angry. She was, again, only precise. The precision was, by then, something he was learning was her way. She did not get angry. She got exact, which was worse.
He said: "I'm sorry."
She said: "I know. I know you are. I just — I can't, right now. Tomorrow we'll talk. Tonight just — leave me."
He left her.
He slept on the couch.
She slept in the bed alone.
In the morning she came out and made tea for them both and they sat on the balcony and she said: "I think we should go straight to IVF. I can't do this again. I cannot do another IUI."
He said: "Okay."
She said: "It will cost a lot."
He said: "I'll arrange it."
She looked at him for a long moment. She said: "We will arrange it."
It was a small correction. He noticed it. He understood that she was insisting, in that one pronoun, that the financial logistics of saving their family was not a thing he was going to do for her — it was a thing they were going to do together. That she would not, even now, even tired, even crying in bathrooms, allow him to take the burden alone.
He said: "We will arrange it."
She nodded. She drank her tea. He drank his.
The sun came up properly over the building opposite, and the city of Pune began to do what the city of Pune does in the mornings — car horns, the milkman, someone's radio, a dog barking on the third floor. The day began. The week began. The next phase began.
vii. The Decision
The IVF specialist's office was on the fourth floor of a building near Aundh Junction. The doctor was a woman named Dr. Nair — late forties, Malayali, with steel-rimmed glasses and a way of speaking that was so precisely calibrated between warmth and information that Aarav had found himself, within ten minutes, trusting her in a way he had not trusted any doctor before.
She had explained the protocol. The medications. The timeline. The cycle of injections to stimulate Ananya's ovaries. The retrieval procedure. The fertilisation in the lab. The waiting for embryos to develop. The transfer. The two-week wait.
The cost.
Six lakhs, give or take, depending on whether they needed ICSI — which they would, because of the male factor — and depending on how many cycles it took.
At one point she had said: "Mr. Bhatt. I will tell you something I tell everyone. You can do everything right. You can take every injection on time. You can produce a perfect sample. We can retrieve excellent eggs. We can create excellent embryos. We can transfer in the optimal window. And it can still not work. This is not engineering. It is not your fault when it doesn't work. It is not your wife's fault. It is biology. Biology has a remainder. The remainder is what makes it possible at all, and also what makes it unpredictable."
He had nodded. He had thought he had understood her.
It would take him almost a year to actually understand her.
Ananya had said, on the drive home from that first IVF consultation: "I liked her."
He had said: "Me too."
She had said: "She did not promise us anything."
He had said: "No."
She had said: "I trust people who do not promise me anything."
He had thought, on the rest of the drive: I have been promising her things for three years. I have been promising her every month that this month will be the one. I have been promising her with my body, by being optimistic, by being upbeat, by bringing pomegranates. I have not, in three years, been honest with her about what I actually know, which is nothing.
He had thought: I am going to stop promising.
It would be one of the better resolutions he made in the IVF process. He would keep it. From the day of that drive forward, he would never again say to her this time it'll work or I have a good feeling about this one. He would simply do the next thing that needed to be done.
She would notice, much later. She would not name it. But she would notice. And it would change something in how she looked at him.
viii. The Injections
The protocol began on a Tuesday in February.
The kit arrived from the pharmacy in a small refrigerated box. Inside were the vials and the syringes and the alcohol swabs and a printed schedule that Dr. Nair's nurse had gone over with them twice.
The first night, neither of them spoke much.
Ananya laid out the supplies on the dining table the way her mother laid out the supplies for a pūjā — careful arrangement, things in rows. The syringe. The vial. The swab. The sharps container. The schedule sheet.
She washed her hands. She came back. She lifted the edge of her t-shirt up over her stomach. She looked at Aarav.
She said: "Will you do it, or should I?"
He said: "Whichever you want."
She said: "I'd like you to."
He said: "Okay."
She showed him how. She had watched a video. He drew up the medication into the syringe — his hands trembling slightly, more than he had expected — and tapped out the bubble. He swabbed a small spot on the side of her stomach, two inches from her belly button. The skin there was paler than the rest of her, faintly translucent. He had not, until that moment, looked at her body in this particular way — as a kind of cooperative geography that they would now be conducting medicine across.
He inserted the needle. He depressed the plunger. He withdrew the needle.
She said: "That was good."
He said: "Was it?"
She said: "Yes. Better than I would have done."
She lowered her t-shirt. She kissed his forehead. She said: "Thank you."
The first night, that was it. It was almost ceremonial in its quietness. He thought, afterwards, washing his hands at the kitchen sink: I have done something for her tonight that nobody else can do, and that nobody outside this flat will ever know I did.
He had thought, before, that the texture of love between husband and wife was made of large dramatic gestures — anniversaries, vacations, the public moments. He had been wrong. The texture of love was made of small private acts of care that no one would ever see. The whole world of marriage, he was learning, happened in rooms with the doors closed.
The days went on. The injections continued. By day four her stomach had begun to develop small bruises around the injection sites. She had laughed at them. She had said: Look. I'm becoming a leopard. On day six, in the bathroom one morning, he had caught her looking at her stomach in the mirror with an expression that was not a laugh — was something else — and she had seen him in the mirror behind her and had quickly smiled and said good morning, and he had understood that the leopard line had been for him, and that what she actually felt about the bruises was a thing she would not, even now, give him to carry.
He had begun to leave small notes for her in the mornings on the dining table. He did not know why he had begun this. He had never been a man who wrote notes. The notes said small things. Picked up your prescription, on the counter. Don't forget to drink water today. I love you. I love you. I love you.
She had begun to leave the notes in a small stack on her side of the bed. She did not throw them away. She had not commented on them. He had not commented on her not commenting.
On the morning of the retrieval, they had driven to the clinic in silence. The procedure had taken forty minutes. He had sat in the waiting room — the same pistachio green walls, the same humming receptionist, the same poster with the same numbers — and he had not, for the first time in three years, read a single thing on his phone. He had simply sat. He had simply waited.
Dr. Nair had come out smiling.
"Fourteen eggs," she had said. "Beautiful response. Beautiful."
He had nodded. He had thanked her. He had wanted to ask: Now what? But he had remembered her line. Biology has a remainder. He had not wanted to be the kind of man who asked Dr. Nair to remove the remainder.
Three days later, the embryologist had called.
"We have four good embryos," she had said. "Two are excellent. One is good. One is borderline. We can transfer in five days if Ananya's lining looks ready."
Ananya had said: "Just one. Transfer just one."
The embryologist had said: "That is what I would recommend, given your age."
Ananya had said: "The best one."
The embryologist had said: "Yes. The best one."
And so the transfer had been set for the morning of February 24th, at seven-forty in the morning, in the waiting room of the Sahyādri Fertility Centre in Aundh, which was the room they had been sitting in when this prologue began.
To be continued — Part IV: The Two Lines.