All She Can Do Is Wonder

The new mother knows that the baby will be hungry soon.

She has been preparing for this day for the last week, mentally and physically—the first time she won’t be feeding him with her body. This isn’t the way she would have liked it. She’d been scandalized when Farooq suggested it a few months back, and had it not been for the fact that her breasts no longer produce as much as they’re supposed to, she never would have caved.

She is in the kitchen now, mixing up the formula. From the TV in the living room, a Madonna song plays. It’s not the type of music the mother would have preferred either—she quite misses hearing the Urdu songs of home, but she doesn’t mind this one so much. She’d been familiar with Madonna even before moving to America. All her college friends had known who she was, and although she never found Madonna particularly talented, she did think she was very pretty.

The night before, the mother had made sure to study all the instructions both on the tin of powder and in the little booklet that came with the baby bottle. There was no way she wouldn’t do it right—the only thing that could go wrong was the baby not taking to it, or disliking the taste after being used to breastmilk up till now. But she was cautiously optimistic that that wouldn’t be the case. He was such a dear little thing, so agreeable most of the time, and never made a fuss. The friends and relatives she’d left behind overseas swore, every time she called, their voices crackling with static, that it was all due to the care and devotion she poured into him, that she was made for mothering. But she suspected he really was that easy of a baby.

The milk is ready. The mother made sure not to use tap water. She used water from the cooler they had in the kitchen, boiled it just to make sure it was clean, then let it sit out for a while to cool down so that it wouldn’t burn the baby. Everyone boiled their water all the time in India. She was aghast to learn that people here drank water straight from the tap. She’s filled the bottle now and brings it to the baby room, where he’s happily flailing his arms and legs in the cot. There are only two rooms in the house they can use. The smallest one has furniture, rugs and boxes sent after her wedding from Hyderabad that she and Farooq still have yet to unpack.

It’s not quite time to feed him, so she picks up the baby and sets him on his foamy playmat with animal toys. She gets on her knees beside him, petting and cooing. He makes his usual little gurgly noises and gestures. When some saliva starts dribbling down his chin, she wipes it with one of the new dish towels that has unofficially become the thing she uses for this purpose. She makes a mental note to wash it later. Then the mother gets up and pulls the chair in the corner of the room forward, placing a hand over her belly when she straightens up too fast, as though bracing herself. She needs to be careful; there was a reason she’d finally agreed to start bottle-feeding this baby after all.

Her second pregnancy has already started drying her milk out. Farooq had been suggesting that she breastfeed in tandem with the bottle even before that.

“It would be good for him to get used to it,” was his reasoning. “You don’t want him to have a hard time when he’s too old to nurse. Besides, my son mustn’t grow up to be a lalloo.”

She had argued against this, saying it would shock him to go back and forth between feeding methods like that. “And mother’s milk is the healthiest for babies,” she’d pointed out. On this, they were both in agreement. In the back of her mind, she’d thought of how her own mother had never used a bottle for any of her children.

So she held out as long as she could and only buckled once she learned she was expecting the baby’s sibling and that her breasts were beginning to give out by the third month. Her doctor had cautioned her that this might happen. She’d initially been dismissive of this advice. So she was dismayed upon learning that she was not, in fact, built the way her mother was. The baby wasn’t even nine months old yet. It made her sad to think of how he’d been deprived of something he was entitled to. She made sure to make up for it by getting the best, most expensive baby formula recommended to her. She even got a very fancy baby bottle—it had measurements etched on the side, in milliliters, not ounces! She’d gone searching by herself, pushing the baby in his stroller, because Farooq had been late in getting home that day. But she didn’t complain. He worked so hard to provide for the three, almost four of them. This was the least she could do. They only had each other. Well, he did get along nicely with his office colleagues, and while she liked their wives, it wasn’t as though she saw them every day.

The mother picks the baby up and sets him in her lap. She reaches for the bottle and, muttering a quick “bismillah,” puts it into his mouth. For a second, everything seems fine. She’d just let go of her pent-up breath when the baby suddenly releases the nipple and begins whimpering. She sets the bottle on the round side-table by her at once and cradles him to her, rubbing his back.

“Yes, baba, yes,” she hums, feeling sorry for him. I know, she wants to say. I know you don’t like it. It’s the best I can do.

She sets him back down on her lap, picks up the bottle and tries again. A few seconds later, his eyes open and again he starts to whimper and sniffle. The mother is perplexed. Perhaps he just isn’t hungry. Resolving to try again later, she brings him and the bottle into the kitchen, setting him up in his bouncer. She has to get started on dinner; Farooq would be home in a few hours, and she is making palak gosh today. It isn’t complicated, but time consuming: she would have to spend a while stirring the spinach before adding the lamb to the pot.

After a few minutes of chopping up the onions, she thinks of how much easier this would have been in Hyderabad. She would have had maids to help her with the cooking, servants she could send to run errands for her, relatives who could have kept the baby for a few days at a time while she rested. Her doctor had even warned her that becoming pregnant so soon, only six months after her first delivery, carried increased risks. She’d never heard the term placental abruption before. She was gripped with fear when it was explained to her. She had turned to Farooq silently as he sat beside her, her thoughts plain on her face, and he’d given her a tight smile and said he would be there to make sure that didn’t happen. She had relaxed in the moment then, but was unable to sleep that night. She thought of how her sister had had a few miscarriages before giving birth to her daughter, but her condition had been a different thing altogether. The mother thanked God every day that she didn’t have it.

And she didn’t regret anything. It may have been easier for her to bring her children up in India, but less easy for them. Here, they would grow up with color TVs, an English-medium education, and electricity that rarely if ever went out. No one would stop them from becoming whatever they wanted to be. It would have been nice for them to have the added benefit of a large extended family, though. She hadn’t been able to go back to India for almost a year. She and Farooq had planned on traveling once the baby was old enough, but she became pregnant again before that could happen, and a high-risk one at that. Her mother had made the trip to California in time for the birth and had stayed to help with the baby for a month. It had been a lovely time. But the long, drawn-out flight had been too disorienting and uncomfortable for the aging woman who had never been out of India before, so everyone was in agreement that she should not be put through that again for a while.

Washing her hands and wiping them with a dish cloth, she takes up the baby and the bottle again and, sitting at the kitchen table, resumes her efforts. Almost mechanically, he suckles once, and for the third time that day, his perfectly smooth forehead creases, his poor little eyebrows crumple and he begins to whine piteously, as though he can’t understand why this keeps happening. The mother is growing frustrated. She knows what the problem is. She knows he doesn’t want this, that he wants her milk instead—but doesn’t he understand that she would have given it to him if she had it? How many attempts would it take him to learn what he had to do? She waits a few minutes as she bounces him on her knee. Then she tries again. Dutifully, immediately, the baby wraps his lips around the nipple, gives a suckle, and suddenly breaks into resigned sobs, a sorrowful, plaintive look on his face.

The mother is exasperated. How bad could the formula be? She knows he has to be very hungry by now. It’s well into his feeding time. She would have been done with it by now, ordinarily. Of all the times for him to be picky! He’s never given her trouble before. It is like she’s losing control of him along with her milk.

She rocks him back and forth several times until he calms down and then puts him back in his crib. She needs to be away from him for a while. She is sweating, her arms aching from picking him up so much and continually holding the bottle to his mouth, her neck and back stiff from being hunched over him. Her heels are cracked from being on them so much. Her eyes are still watering from chopping the onions, and she still hasn’t taken her prenatal vitamins. She goes into the living room and turns off the TV; the songs were becoming too loud. She wonders when Farooq will be home today. He might know what to do, and if he doesn’t, he had better figure it out because this was his idea in the first place. He is good with the baby, better than he would be if he spent all day, every day with him. Sometimes the baby even prefers being held by him. She usually loves the way he lights up in excitement whenever he sees his father stooping to pick him up.

They have been married for less than two years, and the time before the baby came went by in a blink. She wonders if times like those would ever return. Not that she is unhappy now. But perhaps she could have gone longer with it being just the two of them.

Shortly before she and Farooq learned they were expecting their first child, they had gone to a Halloween party that his company had held. It was her first Halloween party, and, learning she was meant to be in costume, she decided to dress as a witch. She spent the whole previous day planning her outfit: a black sari, dark purple lipstick, a silver and black bindi, and, she was proudest of, a pair of bat earrings and witch hat she found in a party shop. She spent a long time on her eyeshadow before the party and it paid off—she looked ghastly, but still elegant. All the guests at the party had to look twice at her. Farooq certainly couldn’t keep his eyes off her. As a matter of fact, she felt sure they’d conceived the baby that night.

Now, looking in the bathroom mirror before washing her face, she thinks she looks positively disheveled. Her hair is out of sorts, her color pallid, the kameez she is wearing stained with green from rinsing the spinach. There are grey, bruise-like shadows under her eyes, making her recall, in grim irony, the eyeshadow from eighteen months ago. Here she was, twenty-seven years old and already losing her bearings. Her mother had birthed all six of her children by this age. So had her aunt. Her cousins, too. They were all together right now, rearing the children of today, while she was almost 14,000 kilometers away and half a day behind.

For the next twenty minutes, the mother focuses on preparing dinner. She rinses the lamb (watching American cooking shows taught her that goray people didn’t wash their meat, which she couldn’t conceive of), slices off most of the fat (how she missed the butchers back home!) and douses it in the ginger-garlic infused yogurt marinade. She counts the seconds as they pass. She knows enough time is passing for the baby to grow ever hungrier, and perhaps that’s the trick to get him to stop being so picky. Once he was famished, he would stop giving her trouble.

By the time she is finished, it is well past feeding time. She goes to the baby room with the bottle once again. He is lying in his cot with his head to the side, just looking exhausted and at a loss, or perhaps she’s just projecting. She takes him out of the cot, lays him on his lap, and, reciting every dua that comes to mind in the moments before doing so, places the bottle in his mouth again.

It was like clockwork. At once, he began to suckle, and the very same moment, began to cry as though heartbroken, his tiny pearly teeth on full display.

The mother finally hits her breaking point.

“Kya?” she cries, distraught. “What is it? Why? Why won’t you at least try?”

He continues to sob wearily, fat little tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, tears she would seldom ever see to begin with, and which tear at her now. The mother bites her lips so hard it feels like she might split the skin in two.

“Amma ku itna kyun satara, baba?” she bursts out. “Don’t torment me so. I’ve done everything right. All you have to do is eat! Can’t you do this much for your poor mother?”

The baby opens his eyes, still amid weeping. His eyes take after her own, which used to bring her joy, but now only anguish her more. He reaches out with a chubby hand towards her face, sniffling most pitiably, as though trying to answer her questions despite not being equipped for words. The young mother is by now too harried to thaw at this. She suspects she knows what he’s asking for, and her mounting failures have rendered her frantic.

“I don’t have any more!” she shouts. “There’s nothing left in my body for you. This is all I can do. Drink it! Please!” More wails, and why is she even trying? He has no idea what she is saying. “Ziddi!” she finally cries. “Spoiled! Lalchi! Greedy! Fickle! Khudgarz! You won’t be happy no matter what I do. All you want is what you want, and you don’t care if there’s no way I can give it!”

She flings down the bottle on the side table too hard, and it slips and clatters to the floor. Once it lands, something clear and cone-shaped flies off the top and rolls away to the foot of the crib.

The mother freezes in her seat, baby still curled onto her knees. She stares at the thing on the ground for almost a minute before tremulously leaning forward to pick it and the bottle up. A firm, plastic cap sits in her palm. She turns to the bottle in her other hand. There it is, the filmy colorless nipple that she’d been so confident had been in her baby’s mouth each time. Hardly breathing, she touches it with a finger, and it’s soft and rubbery just as it should be. She can even see, in the nib on the very tip, a tiny creamy droplet of white, ready to be consumed at the slightest suction. She looks back at the plastic cap, and suddenly remembers them: the words safety cap in the instruction manual, which she had taken to mean that the whole cap in itself was safe, and not that there was an additional part covering it that needed to be first removed!

A crippling sense of remorse engulfs her. Looking her blameless child in the face, she bursts into tears and snatches him up in her arms. Clutching him close, she rocks back and forth in the seat, howling in distress at what she has put him through.

“Sorry baba,” she whispers. Sorry baba, sorry baba, Amma ku maaf kardo. The baby’s hand is placed on her cheek, and he is calm now. Her other cheek is pressed against his, and he makes his usual gurgling noises. Somewhere, she hopes that this means he understands, that she is forgiven. She resolves to throw out the now-tainted and abhorred formula, wash the bottle clean, and make him a whole new, fresh bottle, which is exactly what she does. The baby drinks it without complaint, as she knew he would have if his mother had only not been so inept!

The new mother has yet to find this out, but, months later, when her second son is born, God will take mercy on her and fill her breasts with ample milk. They will not dry out for this baby, or another, or the one after that. She will make sure to thank Him for this daily. But she will never quite forget how it is now too late for the first, too late to make up for that painful afternoon, which he will have no memory of but will weigh on her heart every time she recalls it.

Even thirty-five years from now, although both she and Farooq will agree that their oldest son is no lalloo, that he is strong and sharp and capable, sometimes, she will wonder about him. She will wonder, why Faraz? Why was it for Faraz that her body betrayed her, but no other? She will wonder why he, once such an angelic infant, is slower to affection, quicker to anger than the others. And, though she knows that it defies all logic and wisdom, the mother will wonder if it had anything to do with that day, the day she had deprived him of sustenance, had hurled such abuses at him, the day that pierces her like a dagger to remember. She hopes it has nothing to do with it. She has to believe it doesn’t. But she will wonder.