They were happy about the pregnancy, but also bewildered—had a sense they were moving several pieces ahead in a game they were playing against (or with?) God: on one hand, they were blessed—who knew how long it might have taken Deepa to get pregnant; on the other, they were unsure if they’d committed an injustice against their dead sons, having a child before the joint pyre had even cooled.
The extended family, of course, was thrilled—thrilled to have news, also relieved that Deepa and Vikas, the epicenter of silence in the crumbling complex, had chosen life. Some of the evil and stillness that had settled over the common areas, on the dusty bushes and trees and the tattered driveway, lifted. The women went over with advice about how to handle the pregnancy. “Don’t worry about your age,” they counseled Deepa. “Dadi-ji was fifty when she had Ashok. What matters is not age, but the amount of stress one experiences.” They brought her special paans, concoctions of halwa and ayurvedic medicine, and recommended a midwife who was good at giving oil massages that developed the brain of the baby in the womb. “Papa-ji, when he and Dadi-ji lost children, always tried to have another child immediately,” Mala said. “It’s the only way to get over this kind of a thing.”
Privately, of course, these relatives were worried. “Let’s pray there isn’t a miscarriage,” Bunty said.
“In my estimation, this is exactly the type of situation in which a miscarriage occurs,” Rana prophesied, taking breaks to puff at his pipe.
There were frights. Deepa fainted three months into the pregnancy only to be diagnosed with gestational diabetes. “Another blow,” Vikas told a friend. Suffering panic attacks, Deepa woke with the feeling of small hands at her throat. She barely slept, except with sleeping pills, which didn’t count as sleep but as a sieve through which anxiety filtered, so that when she woke, she was even more panicked and sweat soaked than before.
Vikas, meanwhile, sank, rose up, lived, sank again—fighting off bomb dreams at all hours. They were not dreams, but upwellings of pain, moments when the fire of recollection and repression got so fervid he felt he might actually explode, which he did, suffering searing headaches, and shouting at Hari the servant (who had also become absent and bereaved) and at drivers who had the nerve to overtake him on the road.
To distract himself from pain, he played tennis at the club with his friend Prabhat, smashing the ball so ferociously that the fibers inside constricted with hurt, like a small heart.
The Ahmeds, when they heard about the pregnancy, were supportive. Afsheen, dabbing her wide-set eyes (set on either side of her face like the understanding eyes of a whale) with a hankie, told Deepa on the phone that this was the only way to preserve the memory of the boys. “And if it’s a girl, who knows, maybe Mansoor can marry her,” she said, becoming sentimental and hysterical.
Sharif, though, found the whole thing depressing. “It’s a mess, horrible,” he told his wife. “Do you think they’ll just have another child and live happily ever after? Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers. If something, heaven forbid, happens to this child—then? What will they do? We’re assuming it’s not a miscarriage, which could happen—remember how many Zaib had?”
“You men, because you don’t go through it, are much more afraid of pregnancy,” Afsheen said. “Women give birth through many kinds of stress. Your view is just negative.”
“What happened is so negative.” And again he thought of how close his wife and he had come to losing everything—their beloved son, her sanity, their marriage—and he shuddered with superstitious disgust about his own good fortune.
The Khuranas had their baby in September, more than a year after the blast. Deepa gave birth to a daughter. It was a relief to everyone, again—to not have to make obligatory comparisons between the new baby and Tushar and Nakul, whose faces had grown distant, consigned to the scrap heap of children’s faces, faces that were never watched closely in the first place because they were destined to be discarded, covered up with the eventual masks of adulthood.
The girl’s name, Anusha, as more than one person noted, compounded the sounds in Tushar’s and Nakul’s names. But Deepa curiously denied this. Otherwise, everyone felt, the parents looked happy. “That’s the thing about them, you know,” Bunty said. “Deepa and Vikas are so mild and they never impose on anyone, but they’re also very tough—Deepa once told me how much effort goes into making these documentaries, the amount of editing you have to do. You’ll be shocked. We think when a thing is effortless, it must have been effortless to make. In fact, those things are the hardest.”
“Quite right, quite right,” said Rana, wheezing without his pipe.
In fact, the Khuranas were happy, but they were terrified about nearing the bend of that word. Deepa was gaunt and tired and exhausted and light-headed from the delivery while Vikas became dreamy around the new diapers.
Then Vikas started having visions.
CHAPTER 9