Aftereffects by Kalpana Narayanan
When I meet Arun’s parents for the first time that September, I bring flowers. On the drive down, he tells me not to worry: his parents will love me. I am an actual woman that he is dating. His mother will probably want to give me some of her jewelry, he says with excitement, as he turns into a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses called The Landings.
But in his parents’ dark, shuttered house, we sit in silence. No jewelry is proffered, and my bubbliness falls flat. A large painting of Michelangelo’s David faces us. Their house is filled with fake flowers, Hindu gods, precious moment dolls, Italian statues of angels: monuments to a life that didn’t quite take off or land in the way they had hoped. They are eager for me to leave.
Later, Arun will admit that his parents advised him not to date me. It would be easy to walk away, they said, because we had only been dating for two months. I was another example of their family being cursed, they said.
It was true that we hadn’t known each other for long. We talked on the phone for the first time that March. Ambika, a childhood friend of mine, had decided she wanted to become a matchmaker for Indians in Atlanta. Like me, Ambika had been unlucky in love, was my hypothesis; now, she wanted to help others. Those who can’t do, teach. I had lost touch with Ambika, but my mother and her had stayed in contact.
One day, my mother said that Ambika had someone she wanted to give my number to. I had always refused to be introduced to an Indian man in this way because it sounded like an arranged marriage. But I had just turned 34, and I wanted children, if I could have them. After ten years in New York, I had just moved back to Atlanta, where no one was interested in me. I had also just gotten out of the hospital. It was a moment in time when I would have said yes to a dog. Ambika didn’t want money. Why not talk to this thickly accented Indian man in Durham?
But Arun, the guy on the other end of the line, did not have an Indian accent. He sounded Southern, like me. It felt almost as if we already knew each other. We did in a way, if shared backgrounds could do the work of backstory, which I suppose was the exact premise of an arranged marriage. We had both grown up eating thick, brown sambhars and thayir sadam mixed with baby mango pickles. We had both attended rival prep schools in Atlanta, two years apart. We were from such a thin lineage of Tamil Brahmins that we were likely related, far down, though why look too closely into that. He was handsome.
I had never been the kind of Indian girl that Indian guys liked, though I was interested in being that girl. This girl had skin a lighter brown than mine, and wore pink eye shadow and long, dangly, Indian-ish earrings. Her hair was straight, but not too straight. She was gorgeous and vegetarian; exceptional at yoga. She had no darkness to her.
The second time we talked, I told Arun I sometimes ate meat. I’d forgotten I’d earlier told him I was a vegetarian. He asked if I was trying to hide my meat eating, and if so, that was weird. I realized I could be myself with him: a vegetarian who had just started to eat red meat, for complicated reasons.
That May, Arun drove down from Durham, where he was finishing a fellowship, to look at apartments. He planned to move to Atlanta that July to start a new job, his first, as a cardiologist.
He suggested we meet and go for a walk. In person, he was tall and gentle, and nervous, with huge, light brown eyes that had nothing to hide. On the walk, I suggested we stop for a drink. He was funny.
I had never been the kind of Indian girl that Indian guys liked, though I was interested in being that girl.
Across a picnic table, he showed me photos of the blue ancestral home outside of Madras that he’d just visited. But he liked the Hawks, hazy west coast IPAs, and Bottle Rocket. A long time ago, an Indian friend had told me it would be impossible for me to meet someone like me because I was too odd a combination of Indian and American. But now that person was here, in front of me.
That July, Arun moved to Atlanta, and we began to go out night after night. We fell in love, giddy with our luck at having found each other after years of meeting people who weren’t right.
I had sometimes had this feeling that if something good happened to me, something bad must happen next—a certain, universal equilibrium to maintain. No one deserved it all. But maybe this would be different.
That February, one month before Arun and I first spoke, I had woken up with a fever. I ignored it, not realizing how sick I was. Three days later, I couldn’t breathe. My sister drove me to the hospital, and in the E.R., a nurse said, “she’s septic.” They stripped me in a back room. I begged for a blanket, but my fever was too high, the nurses said, as they took a mobile chest X-ray. I apologized for not wearing a bra, and the doctor in the room smiled awkwardly. This girl is about to die and is worried about a bra, is what that smile said. A nurse slid a bedpan underneath me.
I mentioned to one doctor that I had been to India the month before, and then no one could let go of that puzzle piece. Had this very anxious girl been to any dirty places in India? they kept asking.
One week later, I graduated from the ICU to the main floor of the hospital, after rounds of IV antibiotics for pneumonia, and assisted breathing and luck. I remember looking in the mirror (they did not have mirrors in the ICU) and feeling shocked. I had imagined the worst, and I looked much, much worse. I remember wild hair, a darkened, hollowed face.
After I passed a test of walking down the hall with an oxygen tank, I was discharged. I was ten pounds lighter and needed to regain my strength. I began to eat meat. Arun called.
As I recovered, my mother said that I looked better. She was so hopeful for and invested in my health in the way only a mother can be. But I felt scared. I had gone to different doctors over the years, saying that I felt sick, but each had dismissed me as anxious. It felt as if there was something in me that I couldn’t see.
Two weeks after Arun moved to Atlanta, I found a lump in my breast. It was the size of a pea, and hard, like a frozen pea.
The OB I sought out said it was a cyst. She chided me for doing my own self-exam because now, she had to send me for a mammogram. Three hours after my mammogram, I was the last, pink-robed person still in the waiting room. A radiologist came out and told me that they would do an ultrasound and biopsy of the lump, to be safe.
I got dressed and joined Arun, who was in his white coat in the outside waiting room. He had just started work at the same hospital, down the hall.
Another radiologist called three days later, on a Tuesday, to tell me the lump was cancerous. I hung up and called my mother.
“Hi, yes,” she said nervously.
“It’s cancer,” I blurted out.
In the past, I’d had trouble asking my mother for soothing, but in this moment, and in all moments of sickness, I knew to call her. Here, take this piece of information and do something with it. She said she and my father would be there immediately. I asked her if I should tell Arun. Gently, she said, “Yes, you have to call him.”
“What do you fear the most?” Arun asked me in darkness, later that night, in bed, back at his apartment.
We had just returned from my parents’ house. After I’d called my mother, my parents had apparated and brought me to their home. Arun had come straight from work. My parents and sister and cousin had fallen in love with Arun over dinner, despite the subterranean context of the meeting. Now we were alone, back at Arun’s place.
In three days, that Friday, I would find out what stage my cancer was. I could have found out the next day, but I hadn’t wanted to cancel my second class of the semester. I had just started teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor at Emory. It was a dream job for me, and I didn’t want to lose it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You probably haven’t thought about this, but do you want kids?” he said.
“Yes. Do you?”
“I think so,” he said.
“I really want kids,” I said. “That’s my biggest fear, that I won’t be able to.”
“When you meet the surgeon, can you ask her what your options are?” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
Two weeks later is when I went to Arun’s parents’ house for the first time. When I would badger Arun about their coldness, he would assure me I was imagining it.
Arun would later admit to me that his parents believed that their family had been cursed.
But then I’d find a text from his father saying we barely knew each other, so not to get too close to me. Arun would later admit to me that his parents believed that their family had been cursed. His older sister had eloped with a Muslim man. This was the worst thing they, conservative Hindus, could imagine, until their golden son met a girl with cancer.
The words underneath their words being: They didn’t want a daughter-in-law with cancer, who did? What if she’s always sick, his mother would ask Arun.
She cursed me, I yelled back at Arun, during fights later, when I was sick a lot.
A three day wait. A feeling of jet lag, my brain far behind my body, trying to catch up with what my body already knew.
In a tiny room with a surgeon at the end of that week, I hear the words “treatable and curable.” I text them to Arun. I want him to want to stay with me.
“Can I still have kids?” I ask the surgeon. I realize I have no idea how cancer works.
“You will still be able to have kids,” she says and pauses. “You should not have this.”
I ask her if I should freeze my eggs. She says there may not be time for that: The most important thing is for me to get the cancer out of my body. But she hands me the card of a reproductive endocrinologist.
Arun stands when he sees my mother, sister, and I walk back out into the waiting room. My mother, with all the hope in the world, tells Arun that I can still have children.
He smiles gently, as if he has walked through the wrong door. The door he had wanted was the one downstairs: the door to the OB office, where young couples hold hands, waiting to hear their baby’s first heartbeat. But this is the door that opened for him.
I had been wearing a long silver chain with a locket at the end that had an inscrutable piece of paper stuffed inside. Michael, a white guru that my mom found online, had given me this talisman two years earlier, to ward off evil. Michael practiced Vastu, the Indian version of feng shui, a “yoga for the home.” He had purportedly helped Bill Gates to rearrange the furniture in his first Microsoft office. My mother had asked Michael to shoo out the bad vibes from my Carroll Gardens apartment and open up new doors. I had ended up moving to Atlanta.
“It seems as if this silver pendant isn’t working as well as it could be,” I say to Arun.
In Hinduism, there is always a curse explaining why things have gone bad, and something you can do to try to remove the curse (talisman, short white man flitting around your apartment, using his phone like a compass, drawing yellow dots in corners, busily placing tiny stickers on windowsills.)
My parents’ neighbor used to take her golden retriever on walks in a stroller. My grandmother would watch and say confidently, “The dog must have done something very good in her last life.” There is a karmic equation, and it includes dogs. This slow-growing tumor, that started expanding in me ten years earlier, must have had its origins in some other layer of time.
One day, my father tells me that he’s always believed our family has been cursed, so this diagnosis makes sense to him. Before he was born, my father’s mother gave birth to two sets of twins. Each baby died before turning one. Bai, their family’s housekeeper, knew what to do. Bai was stout and only had a few teeth and was always squatting and washing dishes and speaking Hindi loudly and animatedly.
Bai said that for my grandmother’s next baby (my father) to live past one, my grandmother, a devout Hindu who believed in the holiness of cows, would need to watch a calf be killed. Afterward, Bai would need to sift my father in a banana leaf, like rice separating from its husk. She would need to throw my father up and catch him, like a rice kernel in a sieve. My grandmother would follow these instructions, and my father would live.
I want my cancer and new relationship worlds to stay separate, but they collide quickly.
The first reproductive endocrinologist I meet with, an older, icy Southern woman with perfect make-up, tells me that it is too late for me to preserve my fertility: I am 34.7, and I should have frozen my eggs in my 20s for IVF to work.
The second doctor I meet with, a kinder, older man, tells me that actually, I can have kids at 38, and Indian sperm donors are very popular right now. He says that even though embryos are more likely to end in live births than eggs, I should not freeze embryos with a new boyfriend. I wouldn’t want to end up in Sofia Vergara’s position.
I read online that frozen eggs are fragile and can crack when thawed; embryos tolerate freezing better. The summary of my research seems to be: If you know that you are going to want to have children with someone, freeze embryos.
There is a short, month-long window between my surgery, at the end of September, and the start of radiation, in November, in which I can freeze either eggs or embryos. If I want to freeze embryos, the conversation has to happen now.
One night that week, Arun and I are reading in his bed, which is a mattress on the floor. Since he has moved, our lives have been a storm of new jobs, new love, and new cancer, and our apartments feel like bare boned play sets. It feels as if we are still trying to figure out where things go, and what will stick and what will not, and what is worth investing in.
We haven’t talked about marriage, or children, except for that one quiet question he asked me in bed, the night of my diagnosis. But it feels as if we are heading in that direction.
I turn to Arun and casually ask him if he’d be open to considering freezing embryos with me.
“Do you think that’s wise to freeze embryos after two months?” Arun says, not meeting my eyes.
“I guess not,” I say and turn away and cry.
Of course, Arun is reasonable not to give away his valuable Indian sperm to someone he has just met. But option value, as my father, a finance professor, would say. The example of option value my father always gives is: Just bring the umbrella. If you bring the umbrella, you have the option of using it. That does not mean you have to use it.
What I want to say to Arun is, why not ensure our future happiness with those embryos in the bank? We are in love, we both want a family, and we are both morally fine with destroying embryos if we ever broke up. The clinic requires that we find a lawyer to draw up a contract stating this, since we are not married. I cannot see any downside to freezing embryos, only a greater possibility of having a family down the line with the person I love. I feel deep in my bones that we will stay together, and that this is our shot.
A few days later, we are eating tacos at Arun’s long, stainless steel kitchen island left behind by the apartment’s previous tenants. His apartment has become our world. The lucky bamboo plant that he gave me while I waited for my biopsy results sits on the island, next to a thick packet of my Livestrong paperwork. Livestrong provides financial aid for fertility preservation for cancer patients, but they only allow you to apply once, for either egg or embryo freezing. My application is due in two weeks. Chemo may permanently affect my fertility, but I will have to make this decision before I will know if I have to have chemo.
Pushing past my fear of difficult conversations, I bring up the option of freezing embryos again.
“I didn’t realize freezing embryos was a possibility,” Arun says, as if astounded by the technology that could make this possible.
I am astounded that he does not remember our earlier conversation. I realize at this moment that I do not know him at all. At two months, you can feel as if you know someone, but you can’t really know anyone without time.
He says he needs more time to think about it, and that he would like to involve our families. I suddenly don’t want him to be the perfect Indian son anymore. He walks to his balcony and sits alone.
I am trying to tether my fate to a stranger’s. We are orbiting on our own planets.
At night, we continue to meet each other’s friends at different noodle houses along Buford Highway, Atlanta’s long road of ethnic food stalls. We cheer on the losing Hawks and walk down the winding Beltline, admiring other peoples’ dogs. We both have career ambitions and work to make small marks at our new jobs.
I am astounded that he does not remember our earlier conversation. I realize at this moment that I do not know him at all.
I choose to have a lumpectomy surgery, in which my surgeon will remove my tumor, but leave the rest of my breast intact. After that, I will freeze eggs, or embryos, and finally, undergo radiation. When the surgeon takes out my tumor, the pathology lab will run a test on the tumor to see whether it responds well to chemo.
Before my lumpectomy, a nurse starts me on an IV of anesthesia, and I wave goodbye to my family. A moment later, I am awake again, facing Arun, in the post-op recovery room. I throw up.
“You look beautiful,” Arun says.
Back at my parents’ house, my father and I stand a few feet apart in the kitchen and play catch with a tiny, Vicodin pill. Things feel light. I love anesthesia.
A few nights later, Arun tells me my breast actually looks better. I look in the mirror. He’s right, my left breast is slightly more perfectly round, perkier. A science breast.
The weight of whether we are freezing embryos or not is still on top of every word we say. But I try to stay breezy and wait for him to bring it up again. I try to be as nice as I can, as if that might help.
An old couples counselor once told me that I tend to demand things angrily instead of asking for things softly, a more emotionally intelligent, subtle approach to negotiation.
The night before my Livestrong application is due, Arun and I are on opposite ends of his stiff, blue velvet Ikea couch.
“If you don’t know, you know,” I say finally.
Arun pauses and shifts.
“You’re right,” he says finally. “I’m not ready. You’re asking me to be a father and I’m not ready.”
“You have the option of being with someone else, years down the line, and having kids,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, as if that’s exactly right. “This feels equivalent to me asking you to marry me. I’m not ready for that,” he says and is strangely cold, and I am glad to know he doesn’t want to marry me.
“I’m going home,” I say then, getting up from his couch.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he says, getting up.
“I want you to say that you want to be with me. That this doesn’t affect how you see us or what you see for us in the future.”
With no other option, I choose to freeze my eggs and embrace injecting myself.
Later, as I will recover from my egg harvesting procedure, I will call to tell Arun that they retrieved 26 eggs. I feel proud of my body. “That’s great!” he says, and he will mean it.
I will try hard to push down any resentment I have.
That October, my mother, sister, and I wait to meet my medical oncologist, a young Indian woman who will go over my tumor’s pathology. A young Indian man storms into the office first, unannounced.
“You got pneumonia, and then cancer? What’s the connection?” he demands.
My sister and I make eye-contact and try not to laugh. Who is this kid-detective in an oversized suit?
Now, after having had years of lingering symptoms, I wonder about what that resident asked. Why wasn’t any doctor, including my doctor boyfriend, trying to connect the dots between my illnesses?
I want Arun to be my doctor, but he often doesn’t want another patient. He has trouble asking me how I am feeling when I am sick, which goes against my fantasy that it is his passion to uncover the source of my health issues and help me to regain my health. This seems as if it should be a built-in perk of dating a doctor: the ultimate concierge medicine.
But Arun will admit, deep in the throes of couples therapy later on, that it’s hard to be with someone who sometimes just has to sit on the couch instead of cleaning the kitchen because she is exhausted, again.
He has trouble believing that something more systemic could be happening in the underworld of my body. He says I do not look sick, unlike his actual patients, who are dying of advanced heart failure. Maybe there is a comfort in hoping and pretending as if the person closest to him, the person that he loves most, is healthy.
Maybe it is that he is a doctor, and he is used to death. Life moves on. I am still getting to know him and learning to understand what his silences mean.
My oncologist comes into the room and tells me that my tumor pathology has come back. I do not need chemotherapy.
The next week, I break down when I find out that the surgeon has to redo my lumpectomy because my tumor had positive margins. In every moment lives a recalculation: How many more days do I have to give to get my old life back. I don’t want to have to play Vicodin catch again. That night, I ask Arun to explain positive margins to me. He brings up something called micro metastases, and I beg him to stop. He pauses.
“Do you want me to talk to you like a patient or a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know, both,” I say.
On the back of a magazine, he draws two circles: the tumor and the circle the surgeon cuts out around it. The circle the surgeon cuts out should be larger than the tumor. Clear margins mean the excised tumor has healthy cells all around it. If the excised tumor has even one cancer cell on any edge, that means that there may still be cancer left in my breast. After my re-excision, my breast has been shifted a little wayward to the right, as if its sculptor’s priorities have shifted too; but the cancer is gone.
For the last six and a half weeks of my treatment, I lay daily on a mat as radiation techs, like Cinderella’s mice—if Cinderella had cancer—shift my clothing and hair and arms so I am in the perfect position for the radiation to hit. I watch other patients finish their final rounds of treatment and one by one ring a silver bell in the hall labeled “radiation vacation.”
On one of my last days of radiation, I spot a pre-med writing student of mine nearby, on Emory’s basement radiation floor. I run around the corner to hide.
I want my teaching world across Emory’s campus to stay separate from my sick, shadow, hospital world. I have a deep shame around having cancer, as if I have failed in some metaphysical way. As if, if no one knows about my diagnosis, I can still be perfect: a joke. Maybe the curse talk has settled in.
After my last session, the front desk attendant, Fatima, claps her plastic clapper hands and yells hahahaha with insane joy. My parents film on their cell phones as I ring the vacation bell, as if I am a radiation influencer now. My mother brings out a cake. I blow out the candles. Arun surprises me and shows up for the weird, joyful basement party.
They let radiation patients valet for free at the hospital. By the end, I realize why—there are no free rides. I can barely walk. The fatigue that comes with radiation crescendos, and is cumulative; you are most exhausted in the month after treatment. I begin to take tamoxifen, an estrogen blocker, which I will take for ten years; I wake up every night with hot flashes. But I made it. My job now is to rest. I am on vacation.
Around then, Arun and I go to the holiday party of an acquaintance, who stresses as her grandmother’s special cocktail glasses are broken one by one. I quickly have to leave because I am exhausted from standing. I had told Arun I was too tired to go, but relationships are always this negotiation between who we want our partners to be, and who they are. I could tell he really wanted me to try, so I pushed myself. Now I feel resentful.
In the parking lot, Arun runs to get his car and drives it as close to me as he can. He gets out of his car then and runs to me, picks me up and carries me back to his car. Back at home, he carries me to bed, wheezing the whole way. It’s an image and feeling I’ll never forget.
Through all of this, I won’t miss teaching a class or tell anyone outside of my immediate family and friends about my diagnosis. I only use my cancer to ask for a break once, when I’ve been asked to, for free, read through hundreds of essays for a writing prize I won the previous year. This reading period coincides with my radiation fatigue. I nervously call the founder of the prize and admit to him, with shame, that I have breast cancer and am too tired from radiation. “I’m so sorry I can’t do it.”
He pauses. Then he tells me, actually, he also had breast cancer and went through radiation. It actually made him really want to read, so it’ll help me to get through the radiation to have this reading work.
I laugh.
It’s as if the universe is saying—you’re lucky—you’re one of the lucky ones—don’t ask for breaks. I am one of the insanely lucky ones.
I select a few essays.
That New Year’s Eve, over enchiladas at a divey Mexican restaurant, Arun takes my hand. It’s been five months and a lifetime since we started dating. He tells me that he wants to buy a house, and he wants us to move into it together. He says he wants us to get engaged before we move in, and he wants us to get a dog. I think about those frozen eggs. My dreams are coming true, but in a different way. Why couldn’t he have decided all of this two months earlier?
If the excised tumor has even one cancer cell on any edge, that means that there may still be cancer left in my breast.
That summer, I email Ambika to tell her we’re engaged and to thank her for setting us up. I tell her that we’d love to invite her to our eventual wedding. She writes back within minutes and says that she’s not available to attend our wedding that doesn’t have a date yet, but she’ll add this to “her files.” I have this strange feeling that Arun and I were her only matchmaking experiment and that she is maybe a little sad that it worked. But I am grateful to her.
My favorite moment of our large, joyful three-day wedding will be napping with Arun in a dark hotel room, in between our 8 am ceremony, and 5 pm reception. I was supposed to have washed and dried my hair in that time, but I would have shown up with the greasiest hair in the world to our reception (and I did) to lay there in Arun’s arms, allowing the weight of the last two years to fall away.
We finally reach that miraculous point where we can try. I temporarily go off of tamoxifen, a teratogen that can cause birth defects if on it while pregnant. But tamoxifen is what prevents my cancer from recurring, so my OB says I should get pregnant fast. If, after three months, I am not pregnant, I should use my frozen eggs.
We try for three months, and I have one chemical pregnancy. I call my reproductive endocrinologist. This time, together, Arun and I will fill out paperwork and begin the process of making embryos with my previously frozen eggs. These embryos will be different from the embryos we would have made.
Everything I had thought would matter does not, due to sheer luck. 25 of my eggs fertilize, and ten of our embryos grow to “day five,” when the lab freezes them. After genetic testing, we will end up with six chromosomally normal embryos. Six perfect little embryos waiting to be born. I imagine a girl with pigtails, though I know they are just cells.
I get pregnant after my first embryo transfer. A few weeks later, Arun will come into our bathroom one night and find me keeled over, bleeding a lot. I will always remember his face—like one of those Italian pentimentos: underneath this sad face, a secret, sadder, more heartbroken face. So much is unspoken; if we can just have this baby, we can put the past and all of its darkness and resentments behind us. At an ultrasound the next day, a doctor tells us that the embryo’s heartbeat is low, but possibly viable. We take the ultrasound image home but do not know whether to tape it up or stuff it in a drawer. Two weeks later, the ultrasound tech can no longer find a heartbeat.
Though it isn’t like us to cope well, we decide to drive up to Asheville for the weekend. We hike through rolling green hills and drink wine. Back at the hotel, while we watch basketball in bed, I begin to have rhythmic, unbearable pain. Instinctively, I know these are contractions. Arun drives me to an E.R., and just as they are about to give me morphine, a red, palm-sized sliver slides out of me: the last of that embryo. The pain is gone in an instant, a switch turned off.
At home, I ask the IVF clinic to send me my file. I want a project. In the file, the clinic accidentally includes a sheet of paper with a list of the genders of our embryos, a byproduct of genetic testing. We had told the clinic we did not want to know the genders. Now I see that the one I lost would have been a girl. We had both wanted a girl, so much so that we had named her: Lalitha. Was it the embryo, or was it me, or was it Arun’s decision years ago that has brought us here? Maybe those other ghost embryos would have worked. There is no counterfactual.
Later that summer, another transfer. This time, I get pregnant with M: my firstborn, my little soulmate.
For the last two months of my pregnancy, Arun and I live separately because it is March 2020, and Arun is potentially exposed to Covid in the hospital every day.
We reunite for M’s birth, and it is our best date. He swims out as “Under Pressure” randomly plays on my playlist. I am shocked that my baby has ten fingers, ten toes, and huge inky black eyes, and that he is perfect, and that we got here.
Two and a half years later, after another transfer, I have K: my angel baby. They lift K’s dark, brown, writhing body out—and hold him up over a blue curtain for me to see. He cries out.
There is no curse, I think as I watch them carry my baby away. There is no curse, I whisper to my baby on my chest, when we are reunited.
Everything I dreamt of for myself has come true.
When K is a newborn, I watch the other mothers at M’s preschool drop-off. The ones with babies wrapped to their chests like koalas, or babies cradled in the crooks of their arms like footballs. I am envious. I never want to let go of K, but find myself panting when I have to bring him with me.
We had told the clinic we did not want to know the genders. Now I see that the one I lost would have been a girl.
I watch these healthy mothers toss their children into car seats with ease: mothers whose arms and legs are strong and sculpted and young. I watch these mothers push their toddlers in double strollers and wagons, up and down the light hills of our neighborhood. Their silk shirts fill with breeze, like sails with wind, as they bike their children around town. They are free, and so their children are free.
My dream came true, but I wonder about my children’s dreams. I assumed the doctors would cut out my cancer, and I would move on and finally be healthy. But I realize on many days that I am still not healthy. I have two wide-eyed, brilliant creatures and am not able to take care of themin the consistent, epic, daily way I had imagined. I try as hard as I can, but I have to pace myself. One day there will be an army of us older, frailer mothers who got here, but who are struggling. And one day after that, an army of our children wondering how to navigate their adult lives without us.
When I was pregnant with M, my therapist told me I was brave to have M, which made me feel brave. Later, I wondered what she meant by that.
Another therapist leans toward me on my computer’s Zoom screen, and says, “You must think about it, as a writer, how cancer is inside of you.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“Well it’s metaphorical, there’s a darkness in you, some people would say.”
“No,” I say. “I disagree, I would not say that.”
I leave that therapist, but wonder about what she said.
My aunt in New Delhi was the first to tell me I have a “black tongue” because I have dark spots on my tongue, like the goddess Kali (and chow chow dogs). In South India, dark spots on your tongue mean that the negative things you say about other people will come true. One time, as a child in the Madras airport, at baggage claim, I said with my black tongue that my sister’s suitcase would not show up. Then, it did not show up. My sister still brings this up.
My mother tells me I projectile-vomited every day until I was two months old. A doctor in New Delhi discovered that the passage between my stomach and small intestine was blocked and corrected this with surgery. But maybe my body lost a way to rid itself of something.
When M is born, Pati, my mother’s mother, warns me about “drishti”: the Tamil word for the evil eye. Indian mothers will line their babies’ eyes with black kohl so that drishti, or the evil eye, will bounce off the darkness of this kohl. The darkness protects.
Pati tells me not to take or post too many photos of M: This will invite envy on the part of others, which will curse M. When M comes down with a cold at one month, and his tiny nostrils struggle to breathe, though we are quarantined because of Covid, Pati says this is drishti. My baby is sick because I sent photos of him to too many friends, and they all said how cute he was.
Arun plays hard with our boys, who are now five and three years old. He wrestles them during their self-coined “tumble time,” plants trees with them, stays up late to cook for them. He takes our rescue dog Sambhar, whom we named after the brown gravy we both grew up eating, on late night walks.
He is still unable to help me with my health, but I can see better now that he would if he knew how. Doctors are trained to look for certainty. Uncertainty is more vexing. He has gotten better about asking me how I feel.
At night, M’s small hands reach for mine. I ask him if he knows how much I love him. He says: yes, more than anything in the world. I tell him yes, and I will love him this much forever, and in my mind, I think, unless I die.
Sometimes I imagine M and K, older, stumbling toward the edge of the earth, looking for their mother and not remembering me and our every day that we have now. Was she nice? Was she mean? Did she love me more than life itself? Did she wonder if she was making the right decisions? Was she a good mother? Did she struggle a lot? Was she happy?
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
I write to rid myself of, and embrace, the darkness. I am trying to be more free.
On one date, after Arun and I are already married and are trying to get pregnant, I down a glass of red wine. I tell Arun, “Let’s imagine your second wife. She’ll be so nice, give you blow jobs, never criticize you, be so nice to your parents, always want to visit them, and they’ll be nice to her of course because your second wife won’t have cancer.”
“Stop,” Arun says, and I burst into tears.
I asked my old oncologist at some point, when I could consider myself cancer-free.
“Whenever you decide,” she said.
She meant never, technically.
A few years ago, I decided to make my original diagnosis date my “cancer-free” date.
That’s when I started fighting cancer, one therapist said.
With slow-growing tumors, it is the fifth through tenth years that they are more likely to recur. I am now in year ten. I write to rid myself of, and embrace, the darkness. I am trying to be more free.
The embryos Arun and I made were different from the embryos we would have made. The babies we have are different from the babies we would have had. M who whispers with excitement, “Mama, there’s a new shape!” and tells me about the square with slanted, parallel sides that he learned about, is mine, for a little while. K, who asks Alexa to play Enya, and says, “Let’s relax, Mama,” and sways his arms, and whispers that he’s so relaxed. Who comes home in leggings and bursts out, “Mama, you forgot to give me pockets today!” These are the only children I could ever want.
A curse is one way of saying someone in the past has done something that will affect you. Biology is another way of saying that. Our dog Sambhar recently went blind, seemingly overnight, while we were away on a trip. In the mornings now, M raps on each step of our staircase, while counting aloud, “One, two, three . . . ” Sambhar tiptoes down, following M’s lead, into his new, dark world.
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