A Necessary Matter

Later, when she had taken down the posters from the Maida Vale flat and packed up what remained of the tea set, she would think about the sea and how it had failed her that day, how it had told her absolutely nothing of what was coming. They had pulled into the resort too early for dinner and too late for tea, and with nothing else to do they had gone walking on the beach. Even in high tide it was a silent sea, a lady of sorts, and as the first flat waves came over to kiss their feet Mithun had turned toward her with a flushed face, the same tomato-red that it had been when he was wrestling with the tin trunk he had insisted on carrying upstairs himself.

“I know it’s . . . it’s not much . . .” he had stammered, as though she had not known so from the start. It had been his idea to pay for a honeymoon—such as it could be with their flight only twelve hours away. And Mandarmoni! A joke, a stand-in for places no decent Kolkatan ever went to. It was the kind of place her grandparents would have honeymooned, if they had ever thought of such a thing. But looking at him, with his loose shambling gait and buck-toothed grin, Joyita had been surprised to feel a twinge of affection for him, and when they had receded to the top-floor room she had been the one to advance upon him, and when he had lowered his face to hers she had kissed him tightly, one hand reaching out to pull the cheap red curtains shut behind him, and as she lay back on the worn mattress and allowed him to pant his way down her body, she allowed herself to believe that it might just be okay.

Then it was the next morning, and he was facing away from her and blubbing quietly. Joyita did nothing to comfort him. She had no time for this—she had places to be. They were silent all the way to the airport and on the flight, and then it was time to cross immigration at Heathrow. She had rehearsed this next part with Mithun over and over. She was to approach the immigration counter first and introduce him as her spouse; he was to stand behind, keep his head down and not look problematic. They had bought him a new check shirt and pants for the occasion, but halfway through the flight he had insisted on changing into the same blue gamcha he had worn the day they first met, and now it was the gamcha that the suited official behind the glass window was looking at. This was the part the agency had warned her about. No one could guarantee what happened with immigration; if they didn’t let you in, it was game over. Even now Joyita was petrified that Mithun would do something stupid, like smile too widely at the official or throw his head back and announce “God save the Queen” in that thud-thud village accent of his. She saw the official’s brow contract, felt her heart stop. But then the stamp went down—once, twice—and the passports were pushed back through the little window, and as they stepped out into the wet, gray afternoon she released the breath that she had been holding for the last two weeks. She had done it. They were in London.

~

It was easy enough to begin with. With the first tranche of the money, she had caught up on the rent for the Maida Vale flat, and slipping Mithun into her life hadn’t been hard, either. The morning after they landed, she took him around the house and building and showed him how things worked. This is where we put the trash. This is how the vacuum works. This is how you run the dryer. Foreign objects, quite literally, and yet he had learned rapidly, absorbing everything with wide-eyed keenness. Before the week was out, he had taken his first ride on the Underground; before the fortnight was out he had located a Bengali grocer that sold fish by the fillet. That night Joyita came home to smells she had long forgotten about—rice and cholar dal, mochar ghonto, murghir jhol, pabda maacher jhol—heaped liberally on the plates that he had kept ready with the green chilli, the lemon, the pinch of salt. She had tried to protest: “I have eaten already . . .” He had looked at her, uncomprehendingly, and then broken into a smile. “Good! Need more strength for the baby!” He had insisted on serving her himself, picking out the peti and the leg piece, and as she had eaten she had noted the spotless surfaces all around, the flowers relieving the cheap white of the tablecloth. There were always flowers, bought fresh each morning and arranged anywhere that would hold them, a few sprigs tucked into the lunchboxes that he now insisted on making every day for her to take to work. And perhaps this, she reflected wryly, was what having a wife must be like.

The unexpected thing was what had happened after. He had had sick headaches and indigestion ever since they landed, and when it would not ease after four weeks they had gone to the doctor. Test results in hand, the doctor had looked closely at Mithun and then at Joyita. When the words “sympathetic pregnancy” were used, Mithun exclaimed: “What?” leaping good-naturedly out of his chair. Joyita had looked confusedly at the doctor. Surely not . . . the biological impossibility of it . . . but over Mithun’s face there had spread a moon-like grin as he reached down in wonder, cradling the stomach that now seemed to grow bigger and rounder before her eyes. After that, it was as though a new tenderness had infused him. Every morning she would wake up to see him half-naked before the wardrobe mirror, checking himself for pimples, feeling his legs for varicose veins. He made a business of attending all her prenatal appointments: “My baby,” he would say, rubbing his own growing belly as he stared longingly at each ultrasound. He would hum lullabies as he prepared the morning oatmeal, shifting his weight between the swollen feet as though rocking a cradle back and forth. “Be safe, you two!” he would say as Joyita went out, winking as though in some grand joke.

Sometimes on the weekends they would go out together, to places like Westminster Abbey and Piccadilly Square. Every time they did so he would video call back home to his village and show them around. He would describe London in his own way, pointing out random street corners and tourist icons with equal enthusiasm, likening the perpetual rain to the monsoon the Bengalis so gladly sought in the rice fields. Through the grainy lens, she would see the faces of myriad people in some poorly lit setup, their grins evident even through the pixelation as he waved the camera around to show what was behind him. “London Bridge!” he called, indicating something that was palpably not the London Bridge, and in cacophonic joy the voices came back as they echoed the words: “London Bridge!” She did not know which of them was bankrolling the operation, or what hard-won asset they’d had to sell to sponsor this. It did not matter, as long as the payments kept coming—and every month they did, just as promised, deposited into her account after the agency took its cut.

~

It was as they were walking down Trafalgar Square one day that she had asked him whom he would be bringing over first. She had meant nothing particular by the question, but he started guiltily and looked around, as though afraid that they would be overheard. He murmured something about it being a choice between two brothers. It all depended on whom they could afford to spare in the rice fields. He did not meet Joyita’s eye.

“They must be happy, no?” she went on. “Your family. To have a clear path to England.” And as she spoke she could almost see the words welling up in him, pushing and pushing until he could hold them back no longer, and then it was all coming out. It was not fair—this was all a mistake—this kind of deal was not what marriage was supposed to be. There was pressure upon him by the family, by god—they were hungry to come here, they could think of nothing else—he had been made to do this for them. If it was up to him, he confessed, he would have never left. Bengal was his home. He had a life there, he had meaning there.

“I had a girl . . . ” he went on, then stopped short as though he had revealed too much. Then he seemed to come to a resolution. Pulling out his phone, he flicked to a screen and swivelled it around toward Joyita. “This is Munia.” Munia looked exactly as Joyita had expected her to—oiled hair pleated down to her breasts, foundation two shades too light for her skin. Mithun next to her in a shiny shirt, hair slick with gel, his body no doubt reeking with the same Axe Deodorant he had on now. Both had on the fixed smiles of people who were all too conscious of being photographed. “We loved each other,” he confessed, “but it was not to be.” Her family had owed money to a local gangster, and the gangster had demanded Munia in lieu of the payment. They had been married for only a week.

“So you are doing this to forget her,” she said. At that Mithun jumped, his eyes rolling around to meet hers in a panic. He began stammering—Joyita was not to misunderstand, he had nothing but regard for her, etc. But Joyita continued without pause. “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand. Some things just have to happen, yes? And look at it this way. You get a work permit. That’s yours no matter who you share it with.”

Perhaps it was better if the other party in situations like these had a girl to think about, as the woman at work had explained to Joyita. That way it was easier to keep the matter to just business. Joyita and Mithun had not been intimate since that night in Mandarmoni, Mithun now respectfully turning away every time she came to bed. She did not miss the feeling, but there were times the empty space between them loomed large. It was nothing, she reminded herself every time she unwrapped one of his lunches—it was the means to an end. As she passed the factory manager’s office on her way out to lunch, she saw his back through the frosted glass, the tweed coat pressed against the swivel chair. She saw another figure come toward him through the haze—a woman. The manager rose up to meet her. Joyita made herself look away.

One day she came home to find Mithun weeping. “I broke it, I broke it.” And then she saw the shards of a cup from the Crown Derby tea set—her pride and joy, the first thing she had bought herself after moving into the flat. Why the hell did you have to touch those? she wanted to say. “It’s okay,” she found herself saying instead. He remained there on the carpet like some little helpless gerbil, tears blubbing over the pimply craters of his cheeks. And now she found herself wondering what he planned to do with himself. Did he have any actual goals for the work permit he was getting? Months later his English had remained the thud-thud kind, the uttering of ph for f, of bh for v. He still wore the gamchas he kept starched and folded in the old tin trunk; when he looked at the Beatles posters on the wall, he would invariably sing the "Yellow Submarine" song. Putting a hand on his shoulder, she suggested that he might like to start doing something else with his time, preparing himself for a job. “Your work permit will come through soon, you know, and it will help if you have a resume ready. Maybe pick up some skills.” He had looked at her earnestly, as though she had spoken some half-foreign language. Two days later she had come back to find him assembling a cradle, putting the finishing touches to suncatchers that he had positioned to catch the afternoon light. He looked up at Joyita and smiled, the diffused warmth smoothening the pockets of his skin and making him appear chiselled, almost perfect. She imagined briefly letting him stay on with her, having him cook and clean and tend to the baby when it came. The image was less unpleasant than she had expected. Angrily, she pushed it away.

~

There was a complication in her bloodwork—she would have to rest at home for a week. Mithun had been scrupulous about tucking her into bed and making sure she had enough pillows. But he must have forgotten to top up the water jug at her bedside table, and when she woke up a few hours later there was only half a glass left to pour. She called to him to bring more water. There was no answer.

It was the first time Mithun had not heeded when she called. She kept doing it, uttering the name and hearing the empty flat throw the echo of it back to her. Several minutes later—though it felt like several hours—he finally came in, scrambling, spewing apologies. He had had a phone call to take—his mother had not been well—he had stepped outside the building; he was so sorry.

He bustled about the room, refilling her water, straightening and re-straightening the covers, bringing her extra pillows. But she had caught a glimpse of his phone screen as he clutched it in his right pocket and had seen the name at the top of the call log. The call had not been from his mother. It had been from Munia.

Over the next few weeks, it was clear that things had changed. He was giving her the same scrupulous service as always, but it was executed meaninglessly now, as though at a hotel. And it should not have affected her. Why should it affect her? It was none of her business. And yet she felt herself grow itchy, querulous. By now his belly had grown to the size of a cantaloupe, the wrinkled leg of his boxers visible through the gamcha that no longer held it all in. The flowers had stopped coming; when he sang now, it was under his breath, and always the kind of Bengali love song she remembered from long ago: “On the tides of love let us dance.” She thought of Munia in her painted face and cheap silk dress, of Mithun’s face in the photo next to her. She was filled with a sudden anger. Tides of love, indeed!

And then one evening she caught him trying to put things into the tin trunk and slamming it shut when she approached. He looked away. Munia was unhappy, he admitted—her husband was beating her, not letting her out of the house, monitoring everything she did. She’d had to sneak out to her sister’s house to even make the calls to Mithun.

“I was thinking,” and his face was a pink ball of shame, “that I could fly over and try to get her out of there. Be with her a while.”

Something inside Joyita seemed to topple. “You can’t leave the country now. Your work permit isn’t here yet. Customs could put it against your record.”

“I . . .” He bowed his head. And she knew what he wanted to say, that the work permit hadn’t mattered anyway, not to him. No—no. She couldn’t let it happen. She pushed past him, grabbed the bag where both their passports were and held it wildly, childishly out of his reach, not caring as one pendulous breast spilled out of the front of her nightgown.

“If you want it,” she breathed, “you’ll have to get it off my body!”

He took a step, not toward her but away, as though recoiling from her presence. Something old and exhausted crept into his face. Slowly he retreated from the room, and she heard the jingle of the keys and the sound of shoes as he put them on, one by one. The door closed.

~

When the factory manager had first placed his hand on the small of her back, she had seen it as a story reaching its climax, the fulfilment of something she had deserved all along. “You are intelligent,” he had said to her the very first night. “You are meant for better things.” And she was—she was! It was not her fault that there had been that little skirmish at college (it hadn’t really been plagiarism, not in any real sense, and really, didn’t everyone rip off from everyone else?) and that she’d had to join the factory to keep her visa valid. She had been desperate, yes, and he had had to do a little extra paperwork to make sure that she was eligible for residency in two years instead of four, but such things happened, he assured her—she should not let it stop her! And had she not worked hard? Hadn’t she made her way up to the top floor? All that had followed—the flat in Maida Vale that he paid the rent on, the nights out and the lovemaking—was that not her rightful tribute? When they were together he would talk to her as though she were his equal, Eton-and-Oxford bred and three generations of landed gentry, a jewel of high society.

“And you understand, sex is not just a pleasure,” he had said to Joyita once as they lay in bed. “It is a necessary act. A practical need, a mutual give and take. The world might call it by many names, but fundamentally that is what it means. You understand,” he had added, taking her hand and pressing it to his heart, “you see that the physical is an objective way of being.” Joyita had not known whether she did see it that way. All she had known was that she could not let him see otherwise.

And then had come the missed period and her desperate visit to his office. And that was when the truth that should have been clear to her from the start had become evident. Joyita must understand, he had said, that there were certain scaffoldings one could not topple, however much one might want to. His wife was a prominent figure in London society with connections in high politics, and it was impossible, he said—nay, imprudent, to even entertain the idea of leaving her. And while sex might be a necessary act, love was much less so. No, he said, she must understand that she was on her own from now. Joyita, sitting opposite the table with the pregnancy test still warm between them, had tried to meet his eye, but he would not. It was as though he had become a solid block of wood, all traces of what had drawn her to him now extinguished. And then it hit her that he must have done this before, that other factory girls must have heard and felt the same things. Only she had believed them. Stupid—stupid! And how transparent she must have been, how evidently in love with the man, to where the other girls must have noticed, must have laughed at her stupidity. There was the older woman at the next machine; she had been the first to notice Joyita’s condition and pull her aside. She, too, had been in the same boat, she confided. There had been no child, luckily, but that had not made it any easier. “You are not alone,” she said. “More than one of us has fallen for him."

Joyita slumped miserably into a chair. Hearing it did not make it any better.

“You cannot,” she gestured toward Joyita’s belly, “get it taken care of?”

Joyita shook her head. She could not do that—not to his child.

“I understand,” said the older woman. “But you will need money to take care of yourself. And he, I presume, has cut you off now that you are an inconvenience.”

Luckily, she went on, there was a way.

~

It was not illegal, at least not in the sense that one might picture. This agency operated in the background, had networks all over Asia and Africa, had brought countless people over to the UK and set them up for perfectly legal and blameless lives. Third-world families were ready to pay massive amounts for the sake of foreign permits—this agency just provided the system for it. Essentially, the aspiring resident signed up for a marriage to a legal UK resident, for which the agency would handle all the paperwork, the marriage certificate, the permit application, even the passport if there wasn’t one. The aspiring resident’s family paid the UK resident for their trouble, and all the couple had to do was stay married until the permit came through.

“You have your residency permit,” said the older woman, “and the money comes directly into your account. You don’t pay any of the fees—it’s all them. There’s a cash payment upfront before you sign the marriage license, too. I’d say there are worse ways to make a living.”

And so she had been put in touch with Mithun’s family. A line of Bengali farmers, looking for a better life, willing to pay the price whatever it took. She would have to fly over to his home country for the marriage, which in a way did not matter—once it had been her own home country, too. She had only met Mithun, the rest of the family staying in the background, not bothering themselves with the traditional fuss one would make of a bride. Joyita was a means to their end—just like Mithun was to hers, she reminded herself. And yet she thought of the simple devotion in his eyes and of the way he had pulled back from her. Did he hate her? She did not want to think about it.

~

When Mithun came back home, he held tickets to a movie. “I . . . I thought you might like to go out for a bit.” In the darkness of the theatre Mithun was mindful not to touch her, his elbows scrupulously inward as he held onto the seat handles. The plot was terrible, the jokes ribald. By the time it was over, her head was spinning.

When they returned he looked at her and asked, “Are you happy?” He did not have it in him to be sarcastic, but Joyita used that as her excuse to rail at him. It was against nature in a man, what he was doing. They lived together side by side, and he was about to abandon her when she needed him. He listened without responding, his eyes on the floor.

“If this is about Munia—” she continued.

But at that, he pushed her away with wild-eyed rage. “Don’t talk to me about Munia!” She looked at him, and saw his expression slip from anger into abject horror. He came toward her like a shrunken creature—how could he, he was a monster, he knew not what came over him.

She tried to speak—he pulled her toward him, their bellies bumping. “Please forgive me—please!” And now he was plucking at her clothes, and she was undoing the knot of his gamcha. Their bodies moved clumsily, their mutual roundness a constant obstacle to manoeuvre. She tensed up; he was unable to finish. They fell back panting.

Two weeks later, she felt the first of the contractions.

~

She inched over to the designated ladies seats on the metro and breathed as hard as she could. ”Need to go . . . hospital,” she gasped as she entered the flat.

Mithun looked at her, his own belly taut and balloon-like. She managed to lie back on the sofa and put her feet up.

“Call the ambulance,” she said. He looked at her without moving.

“Did you hear me? Call the ambulance! 999!”

Still he looked at her, considering her as though she were something he had found growing in the woods. She felt a part of her seize up, then release painfully.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you wouldn’t keep the baby?”

For a moment she could not believe what she was hearing.

“You never told me that you wouldn’t be keeping the baby,” he went on. “I thought the baby would be yours.”

“How did you know?”

“Someone called and said that they were from an adoption agency. They said you signed up with them three weeks ago.”

There was a silence.

“It’s not that easy,” she tried to explain, “I’m not in a position to raise a child right now. The father,”—she swallowed—“I would be doing it alone. I cannot do that.”

“But you are the mother.”

“That is not the point.”

“If you are the mother, do you not want the baby?”

And the pain in his eyes almost sickened her into listening further, until she remembered her own physical pain.

“What does it matter?” she said, forcing herself to sit up. “What do you care what I do with my life? You and I, we’re here for one reason. We get married, you stay until you get your work permit, I get my payment. Before and after, what we do, our own business. And why do you care anyway? Aren’t you in love with Munia?”

“Munia.” He closed his eyes. “My Munia.”

“Yes. Your Munia. And you can go get her here if you want to. Once you have the permit, once you’ve brought her away, you can marry her and bring her over. As soon as you finish your part of the deal.”

“Deal, deal, deal.” And now he was the one raising his voice. “That’s all people like you can think of. You think other people exist just to do your bidding? That we just turn ourselves into whatever you want us to be because you say so? You and Munia, you’re just the same. You think it was just that her parents made her marry that man? She wanted to. She wanted what he could give her—money, prospects, material things. Things I couldn’t give her. And where did that lead her? Into the arms of a gangster. She could have run away with me before the wedding, but she chose to stay. And she will stay. It doesn’t matter if he beats her. She won’t leave him. Even if I go back, I know she won’t leave him.”

“Then why bother trying?”

“Because I love her.”

“Love.” Joyita laughed despite herself. “What has love ever given anyone but trouble?”

“That baby deserves love.”

“What is the baby to you?”

“Everything,” he announced, tapping each syllable out on his own belly, which she could now see was starting to collapse in on itself, a pumpkin from which the flesh had been scooped out. “I have carried it with you. I have felt it grow. You may think you owe it nothing, but I do.” He exhaled. “I do.”

By now the pain was almost numbing. She slumped into the sofa and looked up at him.

“What do you want from me?”

~

And in the end, this was the easiest of all. She had birthed the baby—a boy—and three days later Mithun had taken the baby and announced that he was going for a walk and had never come back again. A few days later, Joyita was on a call with his family for the first time, frantic at having heard nothing from him. The agency disavowed all responsibility. They had issued the work permit—it had arrived at the Maida Vale flat the week after Mithun left, stamped and bound with his name on it—and since the permit had already been granted, the deal was considered complete, and the family would have to pay the final installment of the money.

She would hear from Mithun now and then in the years to follow, through pictures and WhatsApp voice notes enunciated in the same halting English. There was joy in everything Mithun described about the baby—the way he smiled, the way he played with toy soldiers, the way he slept on his side with his cheek on his palm. As she built a new life for herself, she would imagine a version of events where the three of them walked through London, feeding the pigeons at Trafalgar Square. Already the boy was starting to walk and talk like Mithun. Children grew to be like the people who loved them. But as she pictured them, she couldn’t help but imagine—hope—that there was something of her in the boy too, just a little—in the way his eyes lit up as he tossed a seed upward and watched it arc through the air, momentarily sending the pigeons into flight before they came swooping back down to take what had always belonged to them.