With his mouth full of bakarkhani flatbread, Hamid Sanghavi turned around and said to his wife, ‘Where is Joya? If she doesn’t hurry up and come down for her breakfast, she’s going to be late.’
Farita turned over the spicy omelette that she was frying. ‘Let me finish cooking your eggs, and I will go up and see why she’s taking so long.’
‘I won’t be able to wait for her. I have to open the shop at 6:30 sharp for the papers to be delivered. If she doesn’t hurry, she will have to catch the bus.’
‘She told me last night that she wasn’t feeling too well. Maybe she’s coming down with a cold.’
‘Well, she can always take some Lemsip, can’t she? I am going to need her today. I have a whole heap of deliveries coming in from Amar’s, and Ibrahim won’t be able to come in to help me until this afternoon.’
Farita turned off the gas and came over to slide the omelette on to Hamid’s plate.
‘You work her too hard, you know, poor girl.’
‘Well, it keeps her out of trouble. Keeps her away from those good-for-nothing boys like Rusul and Attaf. And once she’s married to Faisal, I won’t have her to help me anymore, will I? So I might as well make the most of her while she’s still living at home.’
‘Attaf is dead, Hamid. Don’t speak ill of him.’
‘He wasn’t all bad, I’ll give you that. But that was the price he paid for going out with Joya. He should have had the sense to realise that a respectable marriage was going to be arranged for her by her parents.’
Farita said nothing. She knew about Joya’s pregnancy, and her abortion, but she had never said a word about it to her husband. She had not been a virgin herself when she and Hamid were married, but she had kept that a secret from her own father and mother, and from him. On their wedding night she had cut her finger and wiped blood on the sheet of their hotel bed, so that Hamid believed that he had been the first man to penetrate her.
She left Hamid eating his breakfast and went upstairs. When she reached the landing, she heard Joya softly groaning. She went quickly across and opened her daughter’s bedroom door, to find Joya kneeling on the floor in her nightgown, rocking backward and forward and clutching her stomach.
‘Joya? What’s wrong?’ she said, but then Joya sat up, and Farita saw that the front of her nightgown was soaked in blood, and that her hands were bloody, and that the pale-green carpet all around her was spattered with blood, too. A six-inch kitchen knife lay on the floor next to the chest of drawers.
‘Mama,’ Joya whispered, holding out her hand. ‘Mama, I can’t get it out of me.’
Farita dropped down on to her knees beside her and lifted up Joya’s sodden nightgown. Her stomach was sliced open from side to side and her intestines were bulging out, some of them cut open, too. Blood was still pouring out of her, and her thighs were slippery with it.
Farita screamed, ‘Hamid! Hamid! Call for an ambulance! Hamid! Call for an ambulance now!’
There was a long pause, then Hamid called back from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Ambulance? What are you talking about? What’s wrong? I’m trying to have my breakfast.’
‘Joya is hurt! She’s badly hurt! Call for an ambulance now or she could die!’
Hamid came stamping up the stairs and across the landing. He took one look at Joya and Farita kneeling beside her, both of them smothered in blood, and his mouth opened and closed in shock.
‘Hamid!’
‘What has happened? Who has done this to her?’
‘Nobody! She did it herself! Now call an ambulance, or you will lose your daughter forever!’
Hamid hesitated for a moment, still bewildered, but then he turned around and blundered back down the stairs. Joya moaned and then coughed, and dribbled a long string of bloody phlegm. Farita took hold of her shoulders and gently turned her over so that she was lying on her side. Then she straightened her legs and laid her on her back. Her stomach was gaping so Farita unwound her beige headscarf, hurriedly folded it into a pad, and pushed it into the wound to try and stop the bleeding.
‘It’s all right, Joya, your father is calling for an ambulance. Stay quiet and calm. I love you, my darling, please don’t die. Why did you do this to yourself?’
Joya didn’t answer. She had lost consciousness now, although she was shivering as if she were feeling desperately cold. Farita’s scarf was rapidly being soaked dark red, and Farita knew enough about first aid that if Joya lost more than two litres of blood, she might be past saving.
‘Hamid?’
‘I’ve called for an ambulance. I still have them on the line. They say ten minutes.’
Hamid came back upstairs, holding his phone to his ear. ‘They say to put pressure on the wound, not to worry about cleaning it. Also to raise her legs. How is she?’
‘She’s lost so much blood. Oh, please, tell them to hurry.’
Farita pressed harder on Joya’s stomach, but when she did, she felt something squirming inside her. It reminded Farita of the time when she was nineteen weeks’ pregnant, and Joya had first quickened. She pressed deeper with her fingertips, and she could definitely feel a lump – a lump that was rolling from side to side, as if it were trying to escape from the pressure she was putting on it.
‘She has something inside her,’ she told Hamid. ‘I can feel it. Something alive.’
Hamid knelt down beside her, still holding his phone to his ear. He laid his other hand on Joya’s forehead.
‘What do you mean, alive?’
‘Alive like a baby.’
‘No, no, it can’t be. She has never been with a boy, not in that way anyway. What you can feel, that must be just her muscles twitching. She’s in shock. She’s so cold, and so sweaty.’
The emergency operator spoke to him, and he said, ‘Yes… yes. I will look out for them.’ He leaned over and kissed Joya on the cheek, then he stood up and said to Farita, ‘They are telling me five minutes, maybe sooner. I will go downstairs and open the door for them.’
‘Hamid, something is inside her, I swear to you. I can feel it.’
‘Maybe it’s a tumour. I read about that, a girl who thought she was pregnant, but she gave birth instead to this massive tumour.’
Farita was about to answer him when Joya jolted, as if someone had violently shaken her, opened her eyes and let out an agonised scream. Farita screamed too, so that both of them were screaming in chorus. Out of the gaping wound in Joya’s stomach, a small bloodstained hand had appeared, like a baby’s hand, only with sharp curved claws. It had torn apart the muscular wall of Joya’s womb, and now it was tearing at Farita’s scarf, trying to rip it aside. Farita snatched at it, and even though it clawed at her fingers, she started to pull it out of Joya’s body.
Hamid came back into the room and dropped down beside her. Without hesitation, he pushed up his sleeve and plunged his right hand into Joya’s bloody wound. He grunted and struggled for a few seconds, but then he managed to drag the creature completely out from the ragged tear in her womb and slap it down onto the carpet.
Joya by now had lost consciousness again and was lying motionless, her face drained white and her lips blue, although her chest was rising and falling, indicating that she was still breathing.
‘What is that?’ said Farita, in a haunted voice. ‘How could that have been inside her?’
Hamid could only shake his head. The creature that he had pulled out of Joya was about the size and shape of a baby squirrel, but it had no tail, and instead of four legs like a squirrel, it had two stunted arms, with tiny five-fingered hands, with curved claws. It had two stunted legs too, and on each side of its body, connecting the arms and the legs from wrists to ankles, there was a web of semi-transparent skin.
It lay on the carpet, smeared in blood and amniotic fluid, not moving. It looked as if it could be dead.
‘Get it out of here,’ said Farita. ‘Please. Get it out of here and throw it away. Where is that ambulance?’
Hamid stood up. ‘I think we should let the ambulance people take it. The doctors will want to know what happened to her, and how can we explain it, otherwise, except by showing it to them?’
Almost as soon as he had spoken, the front doorbell rang, and he hurried downstairs to open the door for the paramedics. Farita kept up the pressure on Joya’s wound, pressing it even harder now that the creature had torn her flesh open wider still, but by now her scarf was totally sodden with blood.
‘Oh, Joya,’ she said, as softly as a prayer. ‘Please don’t leave me. You are so young, my darling.’
As if it had heard her, the creature opened one pale-blue eye and then the other, and stared at her. She stared back at it, too unnerved even to shout to Hamid. But then two paramedics bustled into the room, one of them carrying a large jump bag and the other a defibrillator, and the creature slowly closed its eyes again.