Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (27 page)

The drugs eventually calmed my contractions. Seckin and his col
league, another sweet-faced doctor with kind, twinkling eyes named Sam Levin, decided I would get more rest at home. So late into the night I was released. Several days earlier I had given a keynote address at MIT. The Endometriosis Foundation of America had helped to launch a Center for Gynepathology Research there in conjunction with Harvard Medical School. I couldn’t believe I was actually standing at a podium in such an institution. We owed much of that success to a biological engineer and professor at MIT named Dr. Linda Griffith, who had read the
Newsweek
interview about my journey with endo and had reached out by cold-calling Seckin’s office to see if we could partner on something. She was the real brain and fire behind the center. Dr. Griffith had herself suffered from endometriosis, hiding her illness for years. She even had a couch installed in her office so she could lie down without anyone noticing. She had surgery after surgery, but she told only those closest to her for fear of being passed up for tenure and promotions. She said that reading my story helped her to realize the science and research community needed to devote more resources to the disease. I was just lucky to be standing in the glow of her efforts.

I had also competed in a celebrity charades tournament just days before, and my team had won, beating out other really talented actors and performers. I had been feeling really good, great even. But now I saw that my body could withhold information, that it did not always indicate there was any trouble afoot. It could still dupe and betray me. On Christmas Eve, I began to feel uneasy again. Soon Teddy would be leaving for Africa with his sons and Mukesh Ambani and his family. They were going on safari. Teddy wanted at all costs to improve how his company IMG was functioning around the world, and he needed partners as capable as he was to do so. Mukesh was the person he had handpicked in India. He thought the best way for Mukesh to get to know him better was to go on vacation with him and his family. It was of course too late in my preg
nancy for me to fly anywhere, let alone to the heart of Africa. I felt sorry for myself that he was leaving. But my uneasiness took the form of a physical listlessness, a feeling that something was not right. A real growing discomfort. I had trouble getting to sleep and my lower back hurt. There was a general, indescribable ache in my belly, or faint cramping down low. I am not really sure
what
it was that made me feel so out of sorts, so weary and upset. I had been on the phone with Adam a lot, too, in those days, trying to figure things out.

I wound up in the hospital again the day after Christmas with early contractions. This time, I would spend five whole days there. Teddy came to visit me in the hospital before he left. It was the closest I have ever gotten to feeling utterly alone. Manu rode with me in the taxi uptown. As before, I informed Adam. Again, he did not come. My mind was utterly frozen with fear that my child would suffer some defect or handicap due to all the stress I had hoisted upon myself. I felt impotent. I lay there, blinking, with the same belts across my tummy, the fetal heart monitors, the EKG patches, the oxygen and IV tubes.

Sometime after the
New York Post
broke the story that Adam Dell might be the biological father, Adam had decided that he wanted to be fully involved in the baby’s life. It felt to me that seeing the news in the paper or online had been some tipping point for him. While prior to that he had said he didn’t want to be in the birthing room, now he wanted to be there when the baby was born. I found this ridiculous. I didn’t want him in the room. He didn’t know about the pregnancy until after the first trimester, but since then he had been absent during almost all of it.

Now, with the distance of time, I can understand the terrible situation Adam found himself in. But back then I really could not. What did the state of affairs between us have to do with his relationship with his child? What happened or didn’t happen between the two of us should have nothing to do with his own relationship to the small person-to-be already wig
gling around in my belly. Looking back, I can also see that from Adam’s view, all he had known firsthand was a traditional family environment. Both his siblings as well as his parents had married young, stayed together for a long time, and produced several kids, in stable, conventional, and happy homes in Texas. He most likely saw his future unfolding in the same way. Now he was forced to see that if he wanted to be a father to his child, this would not be so.

I started to be disappointed in Adam. Each time I informed him I was going to the hospital, I thought for sure that he would come. I had explained to him the danger of the baby coming too early: his own flesh and blood was in peril of not arriving into the world intact and healthy. I was dismayed that he didn’t see fit to be there. If not for worry about my safety, at least out of worry for his unborn child. I thought his questions when discussing options sounded selfish. They seemed to be focused on his rights, versus what was best for the baby. At one point he suggested that after the baby was born she and I move to Austin, where I knew no one, had never worked, and would be far away from my friends, family, and Teddy, just to accommodate his personal needs.

I suppose it would have been much easier for all if I had never insisted that Teddy and I conduct that paternity test, but
I
had to know. And I had to make sure our child knew the truth. I didn’t want her to grow up not knowing who her father was. It was why, despite everything I still felt, it was vital to have Adam in our child’s life as her father. My own personal history and my paternal abandonment compounded the anger I felt at Adam’s vacillation.

Krishna was born on a Saturday. It was cold and crisp, and my mother had opened the window in my bedroom to let the cool air in. I had been beached on my bed like a whale for the better part of three months. But even with
all the complications and trips to the hospital with fetal heart monitors, et cetera, I felt that I had had a blissful and happy pregnancy. Now I was ready to meet my child, ready to have my body belong primarily to myself again, ready to not sit around like Humpty Dumpty in my bed. Other than my arms, I could only exercise my feet, so I moved them up and down, pointing my toes and then flexing my feet. I did what little I could, but nothing really took away the feeling of being trapped in my own body. I would have jumped out of my skin, except that I was happy for those three months to lie, languorous and perfectly still, a scarab-bodied Cleopatra, because I knew Krishna’s life and well-being depended on it. It was easy to do, but enough was enough. I began making little circles in the air with my toes as the early-spring breeze flitted through and puffed the curtains.

There are certain days you know will be strange or special right when you open your blurry eyes. And even though I knew I was to give birth any day very soon, the air felt different, charged. In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn’t fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It’s like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience. I didn’t feel any contractions, but I felt a slow, growing discomfort. Nothing drastic, mind you. But something was there. I was listless, a princess sitting on a pea.

My mother came in with a tray of green tea and honey, grapefruit sprinkled with cinnamon, and an egg in a hole, its round, soft center quivering under a shiny green slick of olive oil. Usually the egg in a hole would be topped with a drizzle of hot sauce or a smattering of pickled jalapeño slices, but with the pregnancy I had experienced heartburn for the first time in my life. So a good coarse cracking of black pepper and sea salt was all I could take. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to eat today, even though I was hungry. I was playing with my grapefruit when my mother
started chastising me. “Eat the egg before it gets cold,
kanna.
And put the tea on your nightstand. It’s hot, no? And very full.” No matter how close you are to your mother, having her move back in with you at the age of thirty-nine is challenging. We were two women who had been through a lot. Like most mothers and daughters, we had had our share of fights and feasts. The very instincts that made my mother an excellent professional nurse also made her a Herculean mother. She had a knack for taking over completely and relished the role. All of which was mostly fine with me. It was just that sometimes being bossed around when you’re a bossy woman yourself is a little frustrating.

I was toying with the gravelly pepper and oil with the side of my knife when I felt a swift kick to my side from deep within. I punctured the yolk and as it oozed its golden richness across the plate I could feel the baby shift. Suddenly I became ravenous and began to sop up the golden fat and white albumen with the crunchy edges of the bread. It was so delicious, I found myself ignoring the baby’s kick. Just as I took another perfect bite of egg and toast, olive oil and gritty sea salt, she suddenly decided to shift her body so that I could see my belly literally move under the tray. In a second the tray moved so much that the cup of tea toppled over, sending hot green liquid cascading down the duvet, wetting everything. The cup rolled and bounced off the bed and onto the floor. Damage done, I somehow didn’t care. I kept eating that luscious egg.

My mother came in when she heard the teacup hit the wood floor. “Eh! Are you all right, you didn’t get burned? I told you to put that cup over there.” She rushed in to remove the tray so she could change the wet bedding and rather than thank her, I whined because I wasn’t able to sop up the last of the yolky fat on the plate. She asked me to get up and sit in a chair until she cleaned up, and as I did I felt a twinge, a turning inside. But it could have easily been from getting up too fast, or indigestion. I waited and then returned to bed and the twinge came again. I called Seckin, who
said I should wait until the contractions got more frequent and severe. He encouraged me to relax, and not to eat too much (too late for that). He suggested I swing a bit in the living room.

A year and a half earlier, I had got it into my head that I wanted a swing in the middle of my living room. Traditional old South Indian homes had swings called
oonjuls
in Tamil or
julas
in Hindi. They were bigger than the American playground swings common in parks. Rectangular planks of rosewood or teak, four to six feet long by almost two feet wide, they were held up by four long, ornately carved brass or iron chains, hooked into rings in the ceiling. Most were used to rock babies to sleep or for reading. A vital part of the Indian wedding ceremony was also performed on these types of swings. Before the tying of the Hindu wedding
thali
and just after exchanging flower garlands, the bridal couple would sit, rocking back and forth in the swing (adorned especially with flowers, too, for the occasion), signifying the waves of life the couple would experience together in harmony. All the women on both sides of the couple form a semicircle around the pair. They sing love songs, specific Sanskrit songs that everyone knows, blessing the couple to have a long, happy married life. Usually the women with the best voices get pushed to the front. In places of honor, the mothers-in-law or women really close to the couple slowly wave a plate of flowers, rice with turmeric and vermillion powder, as well as a ritualistic flame round and round in front of the couple.

Rajima’s Tanjore home, nestled between coconut groves and the banks of the Kaveri River, had at least one such swing. I remember sitting on it as she dried my wet hair by smoking it over a small pot of hot coals sprinkled with a fragrant resin called
sambrani,
made from the dried bark of styrax trees, after we bathed in the river with tiny fish nibbling at our toes.
Sambrani
is often burned to calm the nerves and induce tranquility, especially in children, and to prepare the atmosphere for prayer or any auspicious occasion by purifying the air.

I didn’t have any
sambrani.
But I did have a swing. Adam had built me a little wooden one back in 2008, connecting blue velvet-covered ropes into iron rings in my wood-beamed ceiling. So in order to calm myself, and the contractions, I swung. My mother disappeared into the pantry to say a prayer and light some incense at the
puja
altar. I swung, higher and higher in all my roundness. I looked down at the little round shape jutting out from my oblong oval belly, clearly the baby’s butt sticking out to the side. Soon she would be out. Soon there would be two of us. Regardless of what happened, I wanted to savor these final blissful moments. I thought of KCK telling me, “You are American now, you must live like they live,” but inside I still felt very Indian. I sang old Carnatic songs off-key and often with patches of jumbled sounds when I couldn’t remember the right lyrics. This baby would most likely be very American. I could not say how much of my own heritage, diluted by time and geography, would trickle down to her. Would she have my mother’s deep Cupid’s bow upper lip, like I did? Would she have the big, rounded forehead my grandfather passed down to us all?