Book Excerpt: 'It Happens for a Reason' by Preeti Shenoy

Prologue

There are many ways in which your life changes. Sometimes, these changes happen slowly. Like a sapling growing. You notice that a seed has sprouted but you never pay much attention to it. Suddenly, before you realise, it is a little plant, firmly rooted, with leaves, stems, buds and it is growing, slowly but steadily, changing every single day, with small seemingly imperceptible changes which all later measure up, add up and contribute to it.

Sometimes the change happens overnight. Like a phone-call which changes everything and you can never go back to what was before.

But it is rare that both these changes can happen together. Well, they haven’t exactly occurred at the same time but they have happened one after the other. I usually do not think much about it and I am not one to philosophize, but for the past day and a half, lying in this hospital bed, I have had plenty of time to think. 

The hospital is as unfriendly a place as can be, with its stark rooms, antiseptic smell and the spartan pieces of  functional furniture—just what is essential and nothing more—do not help.  It is run by Dr.Shylaja who is 64, and a spinster. She wears starched cotton sarees, as stiff as her unsympathetic heart and runs the hospital with the precision of a military sergeant. She is extremely good at her job, and one of the best in the country. Perhaps that is why my parents thought it would be a good idea to get me admitted under her care. Whatever it is, I am here now. And it feels like a nightmare.

Except it is no dream. The IV drip is real. So is the little rubber tube that goes into my right nostril.

‘It is for the oxygen, so that the oxygen levels do not fall. It might be a little uncomfortable but you will be okay soon,’ smiles a nurse in her heavily accented English that screams she is from Kerala, as she inserts the tube in my nose.

The intravenous drip attached to my left arm, hurts a bit, but when the nurse asks if it hurts too much, I shake my head. I have been admitted here since last morning. Dr.Shylaja has visited twice. There are nurses walking in and out and writing down all sorts of things and every now and then checking if I have ‘dilated enough’. They also keep checking my temperature, my blood pressure and assure me that I am ‘doing fine’

How can my life change so drastically in less than a year? Yet it has, and it is a choice that I made. Ten months back, I was on the cover of Glamour, which is a no mean achievement. And even though my parents have never approved of my modelling career, I know my mother boasts about it to the ladies in her circle. Privately they have ticked me off, castigated me, tried to knock some sense into me (in their words) and tried to make me use my intelligence, instead of my body. But I don’t see anything wrong in what I did. My mother has never been around for me. Nor has my dad. 

Agreed they have given me every single thing that money can buy. There is nothing I have lacked, including an expensive boarding school education. But I don’t think my parents really cared for me. The only time I got a chance to see my parents was for the two months of summer vacation, which I hated. Dad was always travelling, and for mother I was just a minor inconvenience that got in the way of her very hectic social life. As an eight year old, once I had walked into my parent’s bedroom and climbed into the bed between them. My mother had woken up and screamed at me and told me to go back into my own room. I had pretended to, but I was just outside the door when I heard a hushed whispers and the male voice was not my dad’s.

‘Shit—do you think she knows?’ he had asked.

‘I don’t think she realised but I think you better leave,’ said my mom.

After that time I had never wanted to come home for summer vacation. Being popular in school, I always got invited by one friend or the other, to spend the summer holidays with them.  It was always Suchi’s house I chose.

Suchi with her loving, large family of three older brothers, a mother who stayed at home and most importantly parents who loved each other, and had time for their children, was everything that I craved for but didn’t have.

I wished she was here with me now, instead of the US, where she was doing her bachelors. While in school, the grand plan was that we would both study together. But life has a way of getting in between promises made when you are twelve, no matter even if they have been made with total sincerity and earnest.

Had Suchi been here, she would have understood. Unlike my parents who never could figure out why I needed to have a career in modelling when they could give me all the money in the world. There is something that is unexplainable, which no amount of money can buy. It is a feeling, a bond, a deep connection with something larger than oneself---heck, I can’t even begin to explain all this to my parents. Besides, I don’t think they will have time even if I try to.

Now lying in the hospital bed, I think that never in my life have I felt this helpless, this out of control, this dependent, this scared. I wonder what the hell I have let myself in for. But it is too late to go back now or turn back the clock. This is my decision and I am sticking to it, no matter what.

Dr.Shylaja walks in again and asks the nurse to get the CTG machine. She does not bother to explain to me what it is, or why she is doing it. She never speaks a single word more than is necessary to a patient. Any questions are met with a frown or a nod of the head. The nurse applies a gel to my tummy and then places an elastic belt around it. It has two round plates, about the size of a tennis ball and it feels cold as it makes contact with my skin.  I wince. To distract myself I look at the machine and try not to look at Dr.Shylaja’s face. The machine starts printing out what I presume to be heartbeats on a paper that looks like a graph paper, the kind we use in math class, but this one is way longer and smoother.

Wordlessly, Dr.Shylaja studies it, and then tells the nurse ‘She will need prostaglandin. Start it. Call me when dilation is 6.’  The she walks out, without a word to me. As though I don’t exist. Most of the time I don’t care, but this time I want to yell at her and scream, asking if she has a heart. Can’t she see I am worried, scared, but trying to put up a brave front?

I wish I had just someone here with me, to reassure me that things are going to be okay. Now I wish I had told Manav to come over. I know he would have had I asked him. But I didn’t want to.

The nurse performs a vaginal examination. I hate it. 

‘Hurting?’ she asks kindly.

It really doesn’t hurt. But it kind of humiliates. I don’t think she will understand that though.

‘I will be putting catheter. This is for gel,’ she says and without a warning I can feel something being inserted into my vagina, and that is when I start crying.

Wordlessly.

I don’t think the nurse realises it though. She leaves it there and assures me that everything is going to be okay.

I am so exhausted that I don’t care anymore. I lie on the hospital bed, in the hospital gown, my legs spread out with a tube down there going inside my body, a tube inside my nose and a IV drip in my hand. More than the pain it is the helplessness of the situation that I am in which gets to me. I just want this to be over as quickly as possible.

And after about six hours of this, it starts. The tearing pains. I am barely aware of what is happening anymore. This pain is nothing like I have ever experienced. I feel like I am going to die. It comes in waves. Barely does one wave of pain subside, than a fresh one hits me.
 
I try not to scream, but it is hard. I can vaguely hear the nurses running, asking for Dr.Shylaja.

She arrives. By now I am sweating profusely. It comes again and I scrunch my face in agony and dig my own finger nails into my hand.

‘You have to push... Push hard... else I will have to cut you up,’ she says.

That does it. After all of this, I cannot bear the thought of going under a knife.

I push hard with all my might, and suddenly it is over.

I lie back in relief, exhausted and out of the corner of my eye, I can see the doctor holding up my baby. And even before the doctor says anything, I know it is a boy.

My son. He is beautiful. Covered in blood. Scrunched up. Wrinkled. Tiny. And he cries.

I am too stunned to do anything but stare in a daze.

I have just given birth to a baby boy. I cannot believe it. I am no longer a girl now. I am a mother.

This is my very own baby.

I weep, half in relief, half in joy and half because I am so glad.

The baby is kept on my chest and amazingly starts to suckle. I am shocked at how instinctively and naturally the baby is doing this and how comfortable I feel.

They take him away for cleaning up and I am cleaned up and told to lie down with my legs close together, one on top of the other. After spending the last 6 hours with my legs wide apart this feels odd. I am told that the hospital has a policy of bringing the baby only during feed times to the mother, so that the mother gets complete rest and time to recover.

I am taken to the room, and the nurse asks me to call her if I need anything.

I nod. Out of sheer exhaustion, I fall asleep.

After I sleep a while, I want to see my baby and so I call for the nurse. This is a new nurse, a middle aged one whom I have not seen before.

‘Can you please bring him to me?’ I ask.
She smiles and says she will.

She brings him wrapped in a blue towel, and there is a little tag on his hand. His hand is so small, it is tinier than my forefinger. I cannot help marvelling at him, as the nurse places him on the bed beside me.

‘Are you alone? Nobody staying with you? ’ she asks.

‘No—am on my own,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ she says. She is silent for a minute.

‘Do you want me to stay for a while? I am on night duty today.’

Somehow I am glad about her offer. It is like I want to share this magical moment with somebody.  Anybody really. And this nurse seems so motherly and protective. I find myself warming up to her instantly.

‘Yes, please, thank you, ‘I say as she smiles and settles down on the attendant’s cot.

‘He is very sweet. Does not trouble at all,’ she says as she gazes at my son, who has begun stirring in his sleep.

She shows me how to hold, sit on a chair and feed him. I learn quickly.

I ask her how often she had night duty and she says that she prefers night duty, as she is all alone in her house. She has lost her husband many years ago, and she has only one daughter, who lives outside India. Most of the nurses have families and young children, and she is happy to be on night shifts, she informs me.

‘So are you working?’ she asks.

‘I used to. Now I am not,’ I say.

‘Oh—what does your husband do?’ she asks.

How do I answer that? That the child’s father does not even know that I have given birth? That my parents wanted me to give up this baby for this very reason. But I went against their wishes, and decided to throw away my career, my studies and everything that I had, just to have this baby. 

‘Ummm, I don’t know,’ I say and she nods.

I think she understands it.

‘Not so easy to raise a child alone. I was nineteen when I had my daughter and her father passed away when she was four months old. Bike accident,’ she says and there is a faraway look in her eyes. 

I nod. I am simply too delirious to be having my own baby. 

And what I do not tell her is that I am nineteen too.

Excerpted with permission from Westland Books.

Book: It Happens for a Reason
Author: Preeti Shenoy
Pages: 280 pages