Shelter

I remained so involved, so preoccupied with my lover that I tended to be forgetful of everything else (even the baby inside me). To be in this state of surrender kept me happy and healthy. To feel good by foregoing reality. However, at that time I did not meet with him often. Morally, it pricked me. At the end, I stopped worrying about it, fearing that it would affect the baby.

A few days before the baby was born, I had a dream where I had a pair of twins. All very beautiful. But one of them died immediately after birth. I sat with the dead baby in my lap, my insides burnt to cinder, fruitlessly trying to bring it back to life.

I was desperately stuffing a breast into its mouth, hoping against hope it would start sucking, that it would spring to life. But its head merely lolled to one side. I woke up and felt alive again, alive only because it was a dream, and put my hand on my belly to gauge the baby's heartbeat. It's alive! It's kicking! At that moment I felt that there was nothing more dear to me in this whole wide world than this baby. I began to take care of myself even more than before, placing my feet carefully in front of me while walking so as to not cause it any problems.

Of course I was very irritable during my pregnancy. I would pick quarrels with my lover (poor thing!) all the time. But his patience was boundless. He would not react to my screaming and shoutinga screaming and shouting that only served to heat the cannons of my mind so as to fire them on others. As if handling a sick, impatient, restless child, he refused to yell back at me. And yet my temper would not cool down.

I would scream abuses at my husband too. And if my temper really flared up, I would hurl and break things. He, an avatar of patience too, tried to reconcile himself to me, but sometimes lost his patience and got into fights with me. One day it got physical. I hit him, he hit me back, our two children shrank back in fear and began to cry. It felt as if I would self-abort right there, as if I would faint. When I hit him, he hit back at me harder; I scratched him, pulled at his hair. We shouted obscenities at each other--at one stage he stormed out of the house. I contemplated suicide, but then thought of the baby, that I could die, but how could I put to death the baby I had carried to almost full term? I put a hand over my belly and saw that its heart rate had risen, was pulsing irregularly. I called my lover. Wept tearfully, my anguish softening like molten wax. He comforted me, said don't be insane. The crying and the comforting went on for a long time--afterwards, till the baby was born I stopped the quarrelling and the fighting.

It was a girl, brought to me by the nurse on a steel tray, her whole body covered with what seemed to be dried moss. A little later she was brought all fresh and clean swaddled in a towel--a tiny slice of the moon! I felt like the wind, weightless, as if I could fly if I wanted to. She would blink up at me, when hungry open her mouth like shalik fledglings in a nest, and go to sleep when I put a breast in her mouth. I thought nobody on this earth could ever have given birth to a more beautiful baby than this.

I had hoped that my lover would come once to see the baby. But he didn't. Enquired over the phone. Though of course one could not really expect him to come visit us since this had further complicated matters for him. My husband, though, was ecstatic, and became a different man overnight. If he could, he would have purchased the whole world for me.

I met my lover again almost a month-and-a-half after my daughter's birth. I wanted desperately to show him the adorable doll-like baby, but he said no, told me 'the baby will catch cold outdoors, let her grow up a bit. Besides, I am afraid of holding a baby.'

Lover, husband, baby, all these kept me in a trance the whole time. I disliked not being in such a trancelike state. The spell would lift only when the baby was sick. Then, like the Ganges, I would fall from heaven to earth. The earth, to be roped to her bosom like Gulliver by tears, sweat, blood, anguish, fear and doubt. When the baby would recover from the fever, I would slip into my tranced existence again.

Almost a month before my maternity leave expired, my boss informed me that there was an offer of a training course in America, asked me whether I wanted to go. I was in a swirl of confusion. My eldest daughter was in class four, the boy in one; who would look after them the six months I would be gone, help with their homework, see them off to school? The biggest issue was that the youngest was still being breast-fed, how was she to be weaned off it? But this was my first chance to go to America, and who knew, perhaps my last too. Surely my mother-in-law could look after the eldest two for six months.

At first my husband, my mother-in-law all made noises about having to wean the baby off my milk. But in the end it was my mother-in-law who said, 'It's not every day you will get a chance to see a new country. Besides, your baby can be bottle-fed. No problem, I can raise it.' To her, my going to America was a huge leap in status. Going to America is always a status thing. Plus some money could be shaved off from the training package. And the baby really did pull on the bottle quite well. Ah, I felt like I was back-and-fro on a swing!

Yet something would tear inside me when I would look at her. A vast empty space inside of me. Would my daughter blame me when she grew up? Well, I reasoned, let her. What we sacrifice for children they do not return a fraction of it to us. Do not. There are many couples who have grown distant from each other yet live under the same roof only for the children's sake. Yet her face, her laughter were obstacles on my path. I feared that at the end I'd think of her and stop. But at last, everything packed and sorted, when I was ready to go I did not feel any particular sorrow. All feelings were trampled underfoot in the excitement of going. Besides, at that time my lover had already supplied me with the necessary resolve.

On the plane, when under pressure of milk my breasts swelled up like a boil about to burst, the pain, the baby's mouth, guilt, all drove me nearly insane. I would slip into the bathroom every once in a while and relieve myself of the milk, then cry. I hadn't brought a breast pump with me. Oh, to waste my baby's bounty like this!

The first thing I do in New York is buy one such pump, but whenever I use it I turn blue with repentance. I call home and find out that the baby is doing fine. Feeding well. Even then I find everything intolerable, shut myself up in my room and wail. When I am doing classes, I manage to remain peaceful. But the moment I return to my room, I close the door and scream and cry. I call my lover, confess to him that I am in extreme distress over the baby. He makes me understand, comforts me greatly, gives me courage'Not everybody gets a crack at such a prestigious training program, but you got it. You're very lucky!'

He calls me regularly. Little by little his love makes me forget the baby. Slowly I adjust to my new environment, even if at every turn I feel as if I am an uninvited guest.

Paper presentations, excursions, sightseeing, I keep myself busy with these things. The biggest balm is my lover's telephone call; without those calls I couldn't have managed to shut myself off and keep up with the training. The pressure of continuous study, the fatigue---in all this the one ray of light is that telephone. That phone surrounds me with music, prevents melancholy and depression from brushing up against me.

One day I learn that the baby got hurt after falling from its cot. A cut beneath its chin that required four stitches. A lot of bleeding. Again, I am beset by restlessness and guilt. Again, I begin to burn inside. Did she cry out for her mother when she got hurt? Wouldn't my girl blame me when she grew older? I had read that if infants were not fed mother's milk their minds got dull. Would she be slow in her studies? If it did happen, how would I live with myself? My lover offers me solace, 'What idiotic thoughts you entertain! So many babies who are not fed mothers' milk grow up fine. And she's a baby, little accidents are bound to happen.'

In the midst of this my lover has to travel to Europe on business. He also comes here for a week. I am delirious with joy, swept away into dreamland. Then after he leaves, I dive again into my books. Lover, baby, husband, family, there is really no time to think too deeply about those things. Nowadays I feel quite free, answerable to none, no returning home at a certain hour, no complaints from anybody. I like it very much. I have managed to get admitted to a master's course. I talk to my children, my husband, my lover over the phone, write them emails. In my free time pore over photos of my lover, of the children. It's only when I come across a photo of the baby that my heart tugs at me: oh, to think that once I didn't want her to be born!

Rashida Sultana is one of Bangladesh's younger women writers.