What is Behind You by Sadia Khatri

Once again God shows up as my aide. My co-conspirator. Sends both my parents into quarantine before the two pink lines are revealed. I laugh with Hajra’s bewilderment. Can it be true? I won’t have to face them. Between us, a shut door, and the distance of a new secret. I am in their kitchen, cooking their food; in their lounge, disinfecting the counters; on my phone, looking up ‘Misoprostol side-effects.’ God has my back. God agrees: not all revelations are meant for everyone. God knows I fear. If they see me, they might sense the livewire in my belly. My mother somehow just knows things. My mother scares me. Her wispy dreams and irrational fears, tied only to her children. Her premonitions and prophecies, true only for her children. She can’t know. Every fear of mine is rooted in this woman who I love, sometimes it seems for no reason, beyond reason. My mother, who carried me in her womb for nine months and has no idea that I too, have carried and killed something in mine.

She admits it, admits she wasn’t the best at raising us. Didn’t know much about these things. The thing was to get married, then birth a child, then another. Four of us she birthed. Four stars that insist upon straying away from her orbit. But then I fall pregnant and want to fling myself back into my mother’s radius. I want to tell her: Surely it is something of your heat. That lets me decide the music of this, too. Surely you didn’t raise us all that badly, if I can choose this.

I want to ask: Were you terrified? Did you feel as lonely as I do? What deviousness will life demand of me, ma, to survive this decision? Often, my mother surprises me. Says exactly what I need to hear. When I fuck up a lot, she says: It’s a manufacturing fault.

Ginny as a mother was all instinct. My sibling found her one morning, licking her brand new kittens with brand new love. Asked, how does she know to do that? For weeks we marvelled at it: Ginny now leading the stumbling kittens to their litter, now training them to lick one another. Where did she learn to do that?

Where did my body learn to do that? Grow a whole damn thing. On its own. Did not even consult me. Like a plant I felt. A plant in growth. Just wanted to watch myself be watered. Sit under the sun. Instead, I found myself anxious in overly-lit hospital waiting rooms, pretending to be someone else. Wife of a man away in another city. Wife of the friend pretending to be my husband. Someone’s wife, at least; someone’s embarrassed, apologetic wife: We can’t keep the baby, you see. Each scene I had to maintain terrified me, each sentence had to be willed to the tongue. I was changed. By the knowledge of what happens to a heart when the body has to hide its truth. The heart changes its shape, that’s what happens. Comes home all misshapen and discordant. Finds little comfort in familiar voices. Recognises choice as the contrived lie it is.

I send a photo of my ultrasound to my best friend. Caption: Plot twist, plz pray u don’t become uncle. In the days I cannot tell my mother, I tap into new secrets: one’s chosen family is best identified at a time of crisis. Abortion is legal in Pakistan. There is a secret network of women behind any successful circumvention of trauma. Every second friend I call says: It happened to me, too. The first thing out of her mouth is an involuntary noise – like a sigh when pricked. A deep, long, knowing. Not sound as response, but sound as recognition.

Then: WhatsApp missed calls. Audio notes. Call Marie Stopes. What about that clinic X went to? Just pretend you’re married. Misoprostol might work. Yes, twelve pills. Yes, three intervals. Yes, you can smoke a joint. It will be over soon. What, still no blood? Wait, I have a friend in Lahore. Wait, she’s asking her doc friend in Islamabad. Wait, wait, wait. We’ll figure this out. Let’s get another ultrasound. Let’s try inserting the pills vaginally. Bismillah. It should work now. Any sign of blood? Shit, what a stubborn zygote. We got this. We’ll get this thing out, inshallah. I’m praying for you. I love you. I know.

In the Qur’an, the People of the Heights are neither here nor there. Some place between heaven and hell. Precarious or prepared. Some say they await their verdict; others say they have transcended it. They look upon heaven and hell both, but where will they fall? The People of the Heights, the Arifeen, the ones who Know.

What do I know.

I come out of the abortion jealous. Jealous, jealous, jealous. Hate everyone who is partnered, anyone with a kid. Burn at the sight of happy couples. Suddenly, everyone’s decided to have a baby. Cute pic, I comment under their posts, Congrats!!!!!!!!!!!

My mother is out of quarantine. Which means she can make me chai again. No one makes chai like my mother. It is not just the measure. It is the sight of her pushing the mug towards you, the smell of warmth, the city from her balcony. Amidst her dying and blooming plants, I wonder: Will we fall to heaven or hell? My mother says, What’s wrong with you? I am ready, armed with lies. Lying, I follow her, on her balcony, in her kitchen, in her territory. Can she see it in my eyes? The pills, the clean steel doors, the anaesthetist’s kind eyes. The ended music. Does she sense it? Am I also not her territory?

Secretly, I want her to know. Spend three days sleeping and dreaming in her house. What I cannot tell her awake I trust shows up in dreams. One night I dream of a daughter. Mine? Hers? In a swimming pool. Learning to swim. I grab a plastic tube. The kid doesn’t need it. The kid keeps getting rid of it somehow, and I panic, and my mother, and her mother, and every mother down our line is there, panicking. The kid laughs. Scurries away. The kid knows its way through water better than us. Water is all she has ever known; she never made it to the other side.

There is another image. From waking life, a lifetime ago. An art exhibit in New York. I had gone with my sibling. A strange installation in a small room. Thick strips of metal, welded into a skeleton. Not a recognisable creature but carrying the echoes of several. You could bend your mind and give it a name that made it familiar: wayward dinosaur, dragon, bloated lizard. It sat there, lifeless metal, and I thought that was it.

Suddenly, it came to life. Heaved. Sighed. Was breathing with us. Its breath filled the room. Instinctively I moved back. I wasn’t scared, but in awe. It required some effort to convince my brain that this thing was not conscious. That it did not have a heart. No heartbeat, is what the doctor said to me when I asked what a foetal trace was. No heartbeat. But it took some convincing for the brain.

Something was inside me until it was not. I need new coping mechanisms. Not instinct but invention. So, I cook. Daadi’s halwa, ammi’s hari chutney. I borrow my mother’s shawls, keep them close. Wear painful jewellery: earrings that hurt, karas that bruise. Each time I’m cut, I thank the glass bangle. The world, it insists on feeling me, even when I am numb.

I watch movies. Old, devastating movies from my childhood. Movies like Mann and Khamoshi, which left 8-year-old me wrecked though she did not understand why. Only the texture of the images she understood. So much of it was mysterious. The mystery made it sadder. When her mother asked, she did not know what to say. She did not have the words to tell her mother why she was sad. Did not trust her mother to be able to hear them.

The mother said, Don’t worry. Manufacturing fault.