My head hurts. A fierce throbbing that I think will split my skull and smash it into a thousand pieces. I clench my jaw to ride the spasm. There is a narrow chink of light sneaking its way through a gap in the curtains. Even that hurts my eyes. My mouth is dry, and my tongue feels heavy and wooden. I wish Radha was here to shut the chink of light out. I wish Radha was here to fetch me a glass of water and two aspirins. I wish Radha was here to sit at the head of the bed and rub balm on my pounding temples. I wish Radha was that sort of a wife. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much last night.
I sit up. The world swirls. A sledgehammer slams the insides of my skull. I shut my eyes and hold the edge of the bedside table to steady myself. I have a meeting at ten in the morning. I cannot afford to miss it.
I go into the bathroom. In the mirror, I see myself, bleary-eyed and with mussed up hair and greying stubble. I splash water on my face. The smell of toothpaste churns my stomach. I feel last night’s excess push its way into my mouth. I put the toilet seat up and crouch
by the yawning mouth of the bowl. I retch again and again till there is nothing left in me. I can taste the sourness of vomit. I slam down the lid and flush. All the unpleasantness of the past buried, I think grimly.
The throbbing in my head lessens. I splash cold water on my face and brush my teeth again, then I call room service and order a tall glass of lime juice, black coffee and a few Saridons.
I lean back against the pillows and close my eyes. In a little while, the coffee will be here. I will drink it and begin to feel better. Only then will I confront Radha.
The coffee works its magic. I feel my eyes begin to focus again. I shower, dress and splash enough CK One to obliterate the memory of the stench of vomit. I look at my watch. It is a quarter past nine.
I pick up the phone and call home. There is no response. I stare at the phone for a moment. Do I dare to? Then I dial Uncle’s number. Radha answers the phone.
‘Where the hell were you last night?’ I snap. The words seem to have emerged without my volition.
I hear her indrawn breath. When she speaks, I feel as if my head has been thrust into a bucket of ice cubes. Her voice is cold and edged. ‘Here, at Uncle’s. Where else?’
‘I called last night at least half a dozen times. Shanta said she didn’t know where you were. She said you went at sunset.’ I try to explain my impatience.
‘Shanta is an idiot and you are an even bigger one not to have called on my mobile. Uncle has been unwell for two days now and I came here because he refused to come home.’
I hear her, but I am not sure if I believe her. Everything she says sounds rehearsed. Even her indignation.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was unwell when I was leaving? I wouldn’t have gone then. He was all right when we met him the night before.’
‘He seemed to be better when I spoke to him yesterday, in the morning. Then he called to say he was feeling unwell again. So I came here last night. But why didn’t you call here?’
I don’t say anything. How do I tell her that I was scared to? I had tossed and turned the thought in my head a million times: What if she wasn’t with Uncle? What if she was with Chris?
It was then that I began to drink.
‘What is wrong with Uncle?’ I ask.
‘A gastric attack. Vomiting and dysentery. He seems very weak.’
There was no point in checking with him. The old man will admit to rabies if Radha asks him to.
‘I don’t know when I will be home,’ I say.
‘I may need to stay an extra day or two,’ I add. ‘I might even go down south to Trivandrum.’
‘Oh,’ her voice murmurs. I feel disappointment. I had expected her to protest at my absence. Instead, she sounds very matter-of-fact.
‘Do me a favour. Will you check if Padmanabhan has come? And give me a call, will you, to let me know,’ I say. When I am back, I will have a valid excuse to check with Unni about Radha’s comings and goings.
‘Who?’
‘Padmanabhan, the elephant,’ I say.
‘Oh!’ I hear the displeasure in her voice. ‘Anything else? Would you like me to check how many bunches of bananas he ate?’
I ignore the sarcasm in her voice. ‘Yes, there is,’ I say. ‘Have you booked a new gas cylinder? What about the plumber? Has he come? Call him and remind him. And remind Shashi to check the air in the car tyres. Ask Unni to check on the new coconut saplings.’ Each time I go away, I think when I call Radha, I will tell her how much I hate being away. That I feel lost without her. And then all I do is squabble or hurl instructions at her.
‘I am waiting for Shashi,’ I hear her say.
She is going home. I feel a coil of joy unwind.
‘So Uncle is better now?’ I probe.
‘He is. But I will come back in a little while. I don’t dare leave him alone.’
I don’t like this. I don’t even like the thought of it.
‘Is that really necessary? You know how the servants will gossip about your going away in my absence.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Shyam, I am going to stay with my uncle.’
‘I know. But …’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s ridiculous, the way you fuss. Besides, what is there to keep me at home?’
When I put the phone down, I feel the sledgehammer at the back of my head. I swallow one more Saridon and call for a taxi.
I think of what Radha said. The bitterness in her voice chills. What is there to keep me at home? she asks.
How does she know? I have been so careful.
Four years after we were married, I began to worry. There seemed to be no sign that little feet would ever patter about in our home. We made love. Not as frequently as I would have liked, but enough to start a baby.
I wondered if she was doing something to prevent conception. ‘Are you on contraceptive pills?’ I asked.
She had a bemused expression, but she shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Well then …’ I smiled. I felt as if we were starting on a project together.
As project leader, I had certain responsibilities. I rummaged through her bedside table drawer and her vanity case and even among her clothes to check if she was telling the truth. She was. A year later, we were still trying.
We went to see a doctor. She wasn’t a gynaecologist, but we knew her well. She said, ‘Don’t think about it and it will happen.’
Rani Oppol wasn’t so convinced. ‘Maybe there is something wrong with her. You must go to a specialist and get it verified.’
Rani Oppol was angry with Radha that day. We were spending the day in my mother’s house and I discovered that staying in Radha’s house had spoiled me. I was used to clean tiled bathrooms, and found the bathroom in my house dingy and even a little smelly.
I thought of what Radha would think when she saw the clothes wedged over the tap. There were petticoats and saris, bras and panties, and my brother-in-law’s Y-fronts. ‘Do you have to keep these here?’ I asked Rani Oppol.
Rani Oppol frowned. I saw the anger on her face. ‘I suppose she asked you to tell me this. You can tell your wife that my daughter and I wear saris and we have that many more garments to wash. Not all of us are like her, wearing the same pair of jeans for months together, and as for those little blouses, I wouldn’t let my ten-year-old daughter wear them. Every time she raises her arm, it shows her midriff. And all that hair left loose …The girl has no sense. And what about you? How can you let your wife dress like a slut?’
I kept quiet. If she knew Radha had nothing to do with this, she would be even more wounded. My sister is a very sensitive person. ‘So now my brother doesn’t like me any more,’ she would say. There might even be tears. At the moment she was merely angry at being criticized. It was preferable to her being hurt. So I let it be.
Rani Oppol was right, of course. If we went to a specialist, we could find out exactly what was wrong. But I didn’t have the courage to broach the subject with Radha.
So I read up as much as I could on conception and began to keep a calendar of her menstrual periods.
I knew Radha would be furious, so I didn’t let her know what I was doing. Then one morning she came into the office room to ask me about a magazine subscription. ‘I have a feeling that it ran out last month,’ she said, drawing the desktop calendar towards her. I felt my insides shrink and shrivel.
‘What is this?’ she asked, frowning at the red crosses that appeared on every page. Then she understood. Her mouth tightened. She flipped the pages rapidly. When she looked at me, the expression in her eyes scared me.
‘Isn’t anything sacred to you?’ Her voice rose. ‘These red crosses are my periods, aren’t they? Why are they here? On your calendar? If anyone should keep tabs, it should be me. Why are you like this, Shyam? You seem to want to rule me. You won’t let me breathe. It isn’t right.’
I heard the sob in her voice.
‘It isn’t the way you think it is,’ I tried to explain. ‘This way I know when you are ovulating and that’s the best time …’ I finished lamely.
The anger in her eyes unnerved me. I dropped my gaze, unable to meet hers.
She stood there for a moment. When she spoke, the distress that had run through her words was replaced by fury.
‘I was pregnant once. So it isn’t that I can’t conceive. Perhaps you need to find out if you can father a child,’ she said before walking away.
I was stunned. I did not know what stunned me more. The thought that she had been pregnant once, or the possibility that I could be sterile.
I chose to go to a fertility clinic in another city. I wanted the
investigations to be done as quietly as possible. The doctor who had been recommended to me was one of the finest. She had an enviable track record and if anyone could help my cousin, it would be her, I was told. I had had to invent a fictitious cousin while I made my enquiries about a gynaecologist with experience in this field.
On my way to meet her after the tests, I stopped at the Kadampuzha temple and made an offering. Santhana-muttu. A coconut for a child. If the coconut split in neat halves, all would be well. The priest broke the coconut and it cracked evenly. I offered a prayer of thanks. All would be well now.
The doctor’s smile gave nothing away. ‘It is not good, but it’s not bad either,’ she said, shuffling the sheets.
‘What do you mean?’ This woman might look old enough to be God’s mother, but she wasn’t God. And God couldn’t be wrong.
‘Your sperm count isn’t very high. It is about sixteen million spermatozoa per ml of sperm. It is not bad, but it isn’t great either. Also, low sperm counts could be a temporary affliction. What is more serious is the sperm mobility—the sperm’s ability to move. If the movement is sluggish or not in a straight line, it will have difficulty in getting past the cervical mucous or penetrating the hard outer shell of the egg.’
Why am I not surprised? Radha has not let me penetrate her soul in nearly six years of marriage, so what chance has my sperm to penetrate her egg? The fortress walls she hides behind are beyond my sperms and me.
‘It is not uncommon. A recent study suggests that fifty per cent of men with infertility problems have double defects like you do.’
I looked at my reflection in the glass that covered the top of her table. I felt axed. How could it be? How could I have an infertility problem? I didn’t even approve of her using that word. Women were infertile, not men.
‘There are a few things you can do to improve your sperm count,’ she said. ‘Wear looser underwear for one. When you wear tight briefs, there is no air circulation and the heat is not conducive to sperm mortality. In fact, the testicles are outside the body because the body temperature has a direct effect on the sperm’s chance of survival. You will be interested to know that Eskimos have the highest sperm counts because the cold temperature allows their sperm to live.’
I felt a sheepish grin fix on my face. This was surreal, I thought. Here I was sitting with a strange woman, discussing the state of my balls.
‘Cut out smoking and drinking, avoid bicycling, but get plenty of exercise. All this should help.’ I looked at her face. How could she not be embarrassed? I was so mortified that I couldn’t even meet her eyes.
‘I suggest you come back in a month’s time and we will do a sampling again. Please do bring your wife. I need her to be present. Both partners have to be willing to co-operate. Only then can we start planning how we can make you parents.’
I took the reports, and on my way home I bought a medical textbook.
Sperms have to have an oval head and a long tail, I read.
The descriptions of abnormal sperms reminded me of the freak babies preserved in formaldehyde in specimen jars in the anatomy department of medical colleges. As I read, the word sperm blurred to become baby. Babies with extremely small, pinpointed heads. Babies with tapered heads and crooked heads. Babies with twin heads. Babies with kinks and curls in their limbs. What chance did a sperm with these defects have?