ASHOK AND PARVATI

They do not know if it is a boy or a girl, because it is illegal to find out, and so they choose names for both. They have moved out of their anonymous-looking cooperative apartment, not into the sky-high towers but into a small flat on the campus of Parvati’s university. The new apartment is cramped and hot after the monsoon that came in fits and bursts and died out too soon. It is hard for Parvati to even steam idlis in the tiny new kitchen. And it is hard for her to go to college with her morning sickness or take road trips with Ashok to beautiful places like Khandala anymore. But they are too excited about the baby to care. If the baby is a boy, they have a long list of names. But if it is a girl, Ashok will name her Kavita, which means “poem” in Sanskrit. It is the name with the closest meaning to “writer” he could find.

Ashok has stopped writing ever since Parvati got pregnant again. After he sent off his book to agents, he never heard back from any of them. He tells himself he should stop trying. I have to give this up now for the baby, he thinks. The second stage of life: the householder, or family man. The kutumpa peyar should continue. The family line should not end.

Still, Ashok keeps his writer’s journal. He remembers the Marathi saying about marriage, that “at first it’s painful pleasure, but after the poison seeps in, it’s only pain.” He thinks that this maxim isn’t true once you learn that you are having a baby.

Parvati makes jokes now that do not have an edge to them, and Ashok joins in. They joke that there are one billion people in India and that they should get in trouble for adding one more. There are actually 1.3 billion now. On days the baby doesn’t flutter kick, Parvati jokes that she is upset she can’t feel him—so upset that she might cry. But she does not have crying jags anymore, and they both know that she is better. She does not keep a journal for dark or wild thoughts, and she does not talk of her “past.” Instead, they talk of how their baby will almost certainly be a boy.

Ashok’s belief in a boy is based on gut feeling. Parvati’s is based on the fact that boys are less work than girls, and—because Ashok came into her life, and Ashok turned out to be a husband who does not require work—then that means her baby won’t either. There is also the fact that both sets of parents consulted their astrologers, and both astrologers said it would be a boy. Still, they have names for both. After the birth, Parvati plans to get the baby’s horoscope written for his or her marriage one day.

Parvati does not cry anymore, but sometimes her past comes back to her. It comes and goes like she remembers the waves do on Chennai’s beaches: drifting in and out again, a steady tide. But with the odd monsoon this year, the waves in the Bay of Bengal broke unusually high against the city. Chennai faced heavy floods, and many of the IIT Chennai students left college. Eventually, the floods receded. Parvati does not allow herself to think of the past for long. She does not often think of Joseph. She doesn’t speak to him much either. They are both busy with their lives.

But one day, Joseph calls Parvati to tell her that his wife is also pregnant. It turns out that both women are due in mid-August. Parvati hopes, a little sheepishly, that she is the one to give birth first. Joseph tells her that his baby is a boy, which he knows with certainty because in Germany it is not illegal to learn the gender of the baby.

“If you have a girl,” he jokes over the phone, “probably we can finally get together this way.”

“No,” says Parvati. “I’m not going to let my girl marry a Christian boy.”

Joseph laughs, because he assumes that Parvati is joking. But she is serious. She is surprised at how much she has become like her father.

At night, before she goes to sleep, Parvati sings her baby a lullaby. Her belly has already become so big. She sings “Omanathinkal Kidavo,” a Malayalam lullaby she learned as a child, which was composed by a nineteenth-century queen to put the baby king to sleep. There had been great pressure on the queen to produce a boy, because a colonialist policy meant the birth of a girl could lead to annexation of the royal land by Britain. Fortunately, as the royal family hoped and prayed for, a baby boy was born. The lullaby is a song of relief.

“Is this sweet babe,” Parvati sings in Malayalam, lying on her back in bed, her hand on her belly, “the tender leaf of the kalpa tree, or the fruit of my tree of fortune?” The kalpa tree, the wish-fulfilling tree, which once granted the goddess Parvati a child, relieving the loneliness she’d once felt. “Or a golden casket to enclose the jewel of my love?”

Parvati finishes the lullaby slowly, watching the ceiling fan spin around and around. Inside her bedroom, it is dark and cool. Outside, over the city’s many millions, it is a starless night.