Baby comes home

We brought you home from the hospital wrapped in the soft, pink blankie your grandmother found among my old things. You were tiny, so tiny that your head fits into the palm of my hand, curls and all. Your fingers were so little and pink, as were your toes. I wanted to be overwhelmed by love when I held you.

Instead, I felt fear, crippling waves of doubt, that made me want to throw up and cry (and I did). You were so little, so incredibly helpless. And I was supposed to be your primary caregiver. Me. A twenty-three-year-old girl with a half-completed graduate degree and a husband, I was in the process of getting uncoupled from. I wasn’t ready for this, for you. I didn’t know how to do it. I mean, I could barely function without my pills and my weekly visits to the therapist.

“Don’t worry, I’ll help,” said your grandmother, one of those capable, cheery women who were always on top of everything.

“Will you hold her?”

I thrust you into her arms and stumbled out of the cab, yet again.

I threw up in front of the Chettiar house; the only house left standing on our street. Developers had colonized everything else: all those pretty houses with their airy courtyards and gardens filled with warbling birds and soft, fleshy garden lizards.

Instead, there were lines of flats named after various mythological places-- Dwaraka, El Dorado, Avalon—with smooth white walls, long glass windows and uniformed security guards.

Natesan, our security guard, refused to let the cab inside, at first. “Owners vehicles only,” he told the weedy, young man who had driven us there.

I had reached out for the door handle, was all ready to scramble out in my oversized cotton nightgown with its vomit stains and wet patches when your grandmother came to the rescue.

“I’ve been an owner here for thirty years,” she told Natesan. “Do you want me to call the building secretary to prove it?”

Natesan looked at her, at her eighty-five kilos wrapped in starched cotton and rightful indignation, at the string of pearls around her neck and the big red bindi on her forehead, at the iPhone she brandished in her hand and the baby(you) sleeping on my lap.

“One time only, madam,” he told her and waved the cab inside.

My girlhood still lay curled up in my bedroom, a fetid, furry beast that had nowhere else to go. I walked past shelves crammed with Blyton and Dahl, writers I had loved before realizing they wouldn’t have loved me back. (I was too brown for them). Past my collection of Barbie dolls with their unrealistic proportions, painted faces and plasticky high heels. Sepia-toned photographs, a Backstreet Boys poster and a calendar your father had given me the year we started dating.

I put you down on my bed, on a sheet printed with springs of flowers and the odd butterfly, and prayed that you wouldn’t fall off or pee.

“Wait,” said your grandmother, resourceful lady that she is.

She spread out a plastic sheet, placed two pillows on either side of it, and then set you in the centre.

You looked uncomfortable.

You started bawling.

“I think she’s hungry,” said your grandmother. “You need to feed her.”

I whipped open the buttons of my filthy nightie. My breasts—bigger than ever, with dense brown nipples-- were leaking; they had been for a while now.

I offered you a nipple.

Most people, I know, don’t hesitate to help themselves to nipples.

You turned away and continue bawling.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked your grandmother.

She said nothing. Instead, she guided your mouth to my nipple.

You clamped onto it.

It hurt.

Not bad, but it did.

“How long will I have to do this?” I asked your grandmother. “I don’t think I can take it.”

“You’ll learn to,” she told me.

I lay back on my girlhood bed and watched you feed off me.