ix. Transfer Day
The nurse comes out again.
"Mrs. Bhatt? We're ready for you now."
Ananya stands up. She smooths the front of her green dress with her hands, an architect's gesture, exactness even now. She looks at Aarav.
He stands too.
She says: "You'll be here."
He says: "I'll be here."
She nods. She follows the nurse through the door.
The door closes.
He sits back down.
He looks at the poster again. The numbers have not moved. They will not move. He has known this for three weeks. He has known, since the andrologist explained the protocol, that for a woman of Ananya's age and a man of his particular numbers, the percentage on the wall is roughly the percentage they are looking at.
Just over half.
Just under half.
He thinks: We could be in a parking lot in five weeks.
He thinks: Six lakhs and four months of injections and one car ride home from a clinic and a bathroom door with my wife on the other side of it crying alone.
He thinks: I do not know if I can do it again.
He thinks: I will do it again. Of course I will do it again. If she wants to, I will do it ten more times.
He thinks: None of this is up to me.
He puts his head in his hands. He sits like that for a long time.
After perhaps twenty minutes, the receptionist hums again. He had not heard her start. The song is the same song from earlier. The one his mother used to sing. The one about waiting.
He thinks: I have been waiting my whole life for this to happen and I did not know it.
He thinks: Whatever is happening right now — somewhere inside my wife, a doctor is doing the most important thing that anyone has ever done for me, and I am not in the room.
He thinks: I am not in the room.
He looks at his hands. They are shaking slightly. He has not noticed they were shaking. He puts them flat on his thighs to make them stop. They do not stop.
A child cries somewhere down the corridor — a real child, perhaps one or two years old, brought along by parents who had to bring their first to an appointment about their second. He cannot see them. He only hears the cry. The cry stops. The mother's voice — soothing, half-laughing, automatic — replaces it. He listens to her voice.
He thinks: I have never made that sound.
He thinks: I have never said anything in that tone.
He thinks: That tone is one of the things I have been waiting my whole life to be able to say.
He thinks: Please let her come out smiling. Please let this work. Please.
He does not know who he is asking.
He notices that he has just asked. He notices that he, who has not asked anything of anyone outside himself since he was perhaps eight years old, has just internally asked. He does not have a name for who he asked. He does not have a posture. He does not have words. He has simply, internally, asked.
He sits with this.
He does not understand what has just happened to him.
She comes out twenty minutes later.
Her face is very calm. She is walking carefully. The nurse is beside her, holding her elbow.
She sits down beside him. The nurse says some things — about rest, about not lifting heavy things, about when to come back for the bloodwork.
He nods. Ananya nods.
The nurse leaves.
They sit for a moment.
Ananya turns to him. She says, very quietly: "It went well. The doctor said it went perfectly. The embryo is in."
He says: "Okay."
She says: "Now we wait."
He says: "How long."
She says: "Two weeks."
He says: "Okay."
She takes his hand. They walk out together.
In the elevator going down, she leans her head against his shoulder. She does not speak. He does not either.
The elevator stops at the ground floor. The doors open. The lobby is full of people who have nothing to do with them. The lobby is full of people whose lives are not paused.
They walk through the lobby and out into the morning.
The sun is bright now. The car is parked across the street. He opens the door for her. She gets in. He goes around to the driver's side. He gets in. He puts the key in the ignition. He does not turn it.
He sits.
She sits.
After a moment she says: "Aarav."
He says: "Yes."
She says: "Whatever happens. Just — thank you."
He says: "Thank you for what."
She says: "For being here. From now on we go together. You remembered."
He says: "Yes."
He turns the key. He drives them home.
x. The Stick
The two-week wait is a thing only people who have had a two-week wait understand.
It is fourteen days of not knowing. It is fourteen days of trying not to feel for symptoms. Every twinge becomes a question. Every absence of a twinge becomes a different question. Dr. Nair has told them that the blood test on day fourteen is the only reliable measure, that early home tests are unreliable, that the medications can give false readings, that she should not, under any circumstances, take a home test before the bloodwork.
She does not take one.
For ten days.
On the morning of day eleven — which is a Sunday — she wakes at six AM and lies in bed and listens to Aarav breathing beside her. He is asleep on his back. He has been working long hours all week. She watches him sleep. The lines at the corners of his eyes are deeper than they were three years ago. The grey hair at his temples is a little more than it was last year.
She thinks: He is my husband.
She thinks: That is a complete sentence.
She thinks: Whatever the test says today, that will still be a complete sentence.
She gets out of bed. She goes to the bathroom. She takes the test from the cabinet — the one she bought last week and hid behind the box of tampons she would not be needing for a while.
She does the thing one does with such tests. She places it on the counter. She washes her hands.
She sits on the closed toilet seat and looks at the wall. She does not look at the test. She breathes for what the box says is two minutes.
She counts her breaths. She gets to twenty-eight.
She thinks: Whichever it is, this is the moment before I know it. This is the last moment of not knowing. I want to remember this moment.
She opens her eyes.
She looks at the test.
There are two lines.
She looks at them for a long time.
She does not breathe for what is probably ten seconds.
She breathes.
She picks the test up. She walks out of the bathroom. She walks down the corridor. She walks into the bedroom.
Aarav is still asleep. He has rolled onto his side. His arm is across her side of the bed where her body should be.
She walks around to his side. She sits down on the edge of the bed. She puts her hand on his shoulder.
He stirs. He opens his eyes. He sees her face. Something in her face makes him sit up immediately, fully awake, no transition.
He says: "What."
She does not speak.
She holds out the test.
He looks at it.
He looks at her.
He looks at the test again.
He says: "Is that — "
She nods.
He takes the test from her. He holds it close to his eyes. He looks at it for what must be twenty seconds. He turns it over. He looks at the other side, where there is nothing to see. He turns it back. He looks at it again.
He says: "Two lines."
She says: "Two lines."
He says: "Two — Ananya — two lines."
She nods.
He stares at her.
He says: "Two — but the doctor — the doctor said don't — the doctor said wait — "
She says: "I know."
He says: "But — two — Ananya. Two lines."
She says: "I know."
And then he does what he did the night he told her about the report — the same exact thing, in fact, only in reverse this time. He weeps. He weeps without hiding it. He weeps with his shoulders shaking and his hands over his face and the test still clutched between his fingers like he is afraid the lines will go away if he puts it down.
She sits beside him on the bed.
She does not cry.
She is, again, the dry one. She has cried so much in the last three years that she seems to have used up something. Or perhaps it is only that this morning, the thing she feels is not the kind of thing that has tears in it. The thing she feels is something else. Something deeper than tears. Something closer to silence.
She puts her hand on his back. She rubs slow circles between his shoulder blades. She lets him weep for as long as he needs to.
When he finally stops, she takes the test gently out of his hand and sets it on the bedside table.
She lies down next to him. She pulls him down with her. She puts her arms around him. He puts his face against her shoulder. He breathes against her shoulder.
Outside, very faintly, the city is beginning to wake up. Someone is opening a shutter on the ground floor. A scooter starts. A pigeon, very close, makes the soft three-syllable sound that pigeons make.
She thinks: Now we will live in the world as people who have heard those two lines. We cannot go back to the people we were five minutes ago. Those people are gone.
She thinks: I do not yet know who we are now.
She does not tell Aarav this. He is not ready for sentences yet. He is in the part of his life where only feeling is happening. Sentences will come later.
She holds him.
The morning gets brighter. The pigeon repeats itself. The scooter, having warmed, drives away. Pune begins its day.
Inside, on the bedside table, the two lines on the test do not change.
Inside, in her body, something the size of a poppy seed has been placed, and has not fallen away.
The Lord has arranged this.
The two of them, lying in each other's arms, are now three.
xi. What Is Beginning
They will not understand for a long time.
They will think the three years were a delay. They will think the struggle was something they had to get through to arrive at this morning. Many people think this. It is the standard frame. It is the frame the magazines use, the films use, the supportive friends use. Everything happens for a reason. You were being prepared. The wait was worth it. The words are kind and they are not true. They are the modern soft version of a much older thing the words have replaced.
The older thing is harder.
The older thing is that the three years were not a delay. The three years were what was happening. Past activities — from this life, and from lives before this one that neither of them remembers — were ripening in their own time, in the specific shapes those activities had earned. The man's body and the woman's body and the marriage between them were the field in which the ripening took place. There is a phrase for this in the old texts. By one's own activities, under the supervision of the Lord, the embodied being moves through what has been earned. Nothing in those three years was extra. Nothing was wasted. But nothing was choreographed for their benefit, either. The Lord does not stage suffering as a teaching device. The Lord arranges. Karma plays out. Within the playing out, by the Lord's mercy, something else also becomes possible — an availability, a closeness, that human beings tend not to notice when their lives are easy.
They were not paying attention. They were enduring. That, too, is the standard human position.
But within the enduring, in small ways neither of them noticed at the time, the closeness was already there. Aarav, sitting in his car in a parking lot in Baner, reading a piece of paper that broke his life — there was someone with him then, closer than the parking lot, closer than his own breath, who had been with him long before the paper and who would be with him long after. He did not know. Ananya, kneeling on the bathroom floor with a towel pressed against her face — there was someone with her then too, the same one, equally close. She did not know either. Neither of them was looking. The Lord was not absent. They were not paying attention.
This is not a complaint against them. This is simply the situation. It is the situation almost every human being is in for almost the whole of every life.
What has happened this morning, in this bedroom, on this bed, with the test on the bedside table and the two of them holding each other and the pigeon outside — what has happened is the smallest possible movement. A soul has been placed. The placement is by the Lord's arrangement, according to the soul's own karma, into this couple at this time. The soul is here now. It is the size of a poppy seed.
The story you are about to read is the story of the next nine months. Over those months, in the small visible domestic ways available to two ordinary people in Pune, one of them will begin to notice the closeness that has been there all along. The other will take longer. The Lord will not become more present — He cannot become more present, He was always fully present — but the noticing will arrive in them by degrees.
That is the whole of it.
That is the only thing that ever changes between a person and the Lord.
The noticing.
It has begun.
Watch them.
End of Prologue. Chapter One — Month One: "The Secret" — follows next week.