I Would Advise You Not to Travel
Three weeks later, in New Delhi, the little blue line appeared in the window—making a positive out of the negative sign. Already? April was the first month Paul and I had physically spent time together since I went off the pill. I counted backward, calculating that conception must have happened the week Tim and Chris were killed in Libya—the week I had let my ever-present guard down. I cursed the genetics of my reproductively inclined Italian family and crawled back in bed with Paul, placing the plastic stick with our future on the pillow next to his head. I hated him at that moment. He had been pushing and prodding me to get pregnant since the day we got married. He even announced his intentions during a live interview with CNN anchor Ali Velshi while I was missing in Libya. On the third day of our captivity, Paul told Velshi that the New York Times had speculated that we might have been abducted by Qaddafi’s soldiers, but no one really knew if we were alive or dead. Velshi asked what Paul would say to me when we had the opportunity to speak again and Paul replied, “I’m going to say, you know, you gotta come back here because, you know, we gotta have kids.” Paul knew I would have been mortified at the thought of my husband announcing on live TV that he wanted to get me pregnant, but it was an emotional moment. Usually he made no secret of his desire to start a family. He even contrived with my oldest friend, Tara, to decipher my ovulation chart in the weeks after Libya and put the dates as a reminder in his BlackBerry. He did all this with his characteristic sense of humor and never flagged in his support for my work. But he knew he had to push me.
When Paul finally woke up, I showed him the pregnancy test, and we took another just to be sure: positive again. “You got your wish,” I said. “I can’t believe it happened so fast. I think my life is over.”
Paul knew better than to answer. He had his coffee, got dressed, and went down to the bookstore at Khan Market, near our house in New Delhi, and bought What to Expect When You’re Expecting. He came home and presented me with this encyclopedic book of gestation. I took one look at it, with its grinning, baby-bump-flaunting woman on the cover, and was terrified. I was not at all ready to give up my life, my body, my travels. I stared at the glowing woman with a watermelon-sized stomach. Was that really going to be me in nine months? That huge? And she was so happy. Wasn’t that woman conflicted about her career? How was I going to keep shooting? My thoughts shifted to my colleagues—mostly men. What was everyone going to think? Kidnapped in Libya, husband made an announcement on CNN that he wanted to start a family while wife was still missing, and less than two months later she’s already knocked up! Surely it was the most predictable outcome of my entire life. I tried to imagine my life as a mother—struggled to envision a female role model in conflict photography—and I couldn’t think of a single female war photographer who even had a stable relationship. There were journalists who had taken time out to have children, like Elizabeth, who had a baby and managed to keep writing; photographers were different. What would the MacArthur Foundation say? They honor me with an incredible fellowship to foster my career as an international photojournalist, and I get pregnant.
A few days later I sat in the OB/GYN waiting room at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi. The ground floor was swarming with Afghans who traveled to India for medical tourism—men with long gray beards looking disoriented and out of place in such a modern hospital, trailed by women in full hijab. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t handle sitting in a room full of Afghan beards and head scarves as I waited for my first official visit to the doctor as a pregnant woman. Bollywood videos played on a flat screen mounted on a pink wall festooned with stencils of pastel-colored mushrooms, flowers, caterpillars, and ladybugs. Screaming Indian and Afghan children tore across the waiting room floor. Their parents sat idly by, smiling proudly and exercising zero discipline, as I waited for Dr. Sohani Verma’s secretary to call my name. I prayed that the two pregnancy tests were wrong as I clenched the results of blood tests she had requested in my hands. The secretary called out my name. The doctor was a stern, old-fashioned Indian woman in a sari. She looked over my chart and introduced herself.
“I’m Dr. Verma,” she announced, with no enthusiasm. “Everything looks fine.”
“Am I really pregnant?” I asked.
“Yes, you are.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have any questions?” she asked.