Free A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel by Amulya Malladi Page A

massages—what a life!

    Due to the cramped housing situation, Asha and Pratap had not spent much time together. Not that they were allowed to do anything even if they could be together. Doctor Swati had asked them to not have sex three months before and during Asha’s entire pregnancy.
    Pratap had seemed embarrassed to hear a woman discuss such intimate things, but Asha had been relieved. She didn’t like doing it when she was pregnant. In fact, she didn’t like doing it at all, but then again, not many women she knew liked it. Kaveri was different. She said she had fun, which sounded like complete nonsense to Asha.
    Asha wanted to talk to Pratap alone about the money and had planned for them to go and see the latest Chiranjeevi movie, Shankar Dada Zindabad , which was a remake of a hit Hindi movie. Asha had preferred the Hindi version to the Telugu one. She had seen it the year before with Kaveri and the children. Mohini had fallen asleep in the middle, but Manoj had enjoyed it very much, as had Kaveri’s boys. Kaveri had just given birth to the white baby at the time, and she and Raman had just bought their new flat. Strange to think that it was just a year ago that Asha had judged Kaveri for getting pregnant with a white baby, and now here she was, also having to submit to her circumstance.
    “What a bundle, complete bakwaas movie,” Pratap said on their way back home. “Chiru is getting too old, and the story was a total waste.”
    “Well, he’s what, sixty years old?” Asha said.
    “And he’s still playing a thirty-year-old hero,” Pratap said. “I think there comes a point when you have to move on and do father roles like Nageswara Rao did.”
    “Ah, look . . . ,” Asha began, and then faltered a little before she spoke in a small voice, her words rushed because of her fear. She had never questioned Pratap before. How would he respond? “Are you going to spend all the money on a flat?”
    Asha had been just eighteen when she married Pratap, who was two years older. She had been so afraid when she’d met him that first time, during the bride-seeing ceremony, when he and his parents had come to her father’s house. They had not talked at all before they had been married. All she had said to him was namaskaram , and he had nodded.
    Now she had two children with him. She’d slept with him. She’d had sex with him. And yet, Asha was still afraid of Pratap. It wasn’t fear fear—he had never hit her—it was just not being completely comfortable. It was the small things and the big things. Like when she was having her monthly, she would be too shy to tell him why she couldn’t have sex with him; she would let him know with sign language, with a look in her eye and a shake of her head because she couldn’t say it aloud.
    She wasn’t like Kaveri, who yelled and screamed at Raman, even in front of their children. Kaveri did it with such ease, like it was nothing. She didn’t seem to think it was strange that she called her husband by his name—“Raman, you whore’s son . . . ,” she’d begin. Asha always called Pratap “ yenvandi ,” the universal “dear husband.”
    So it took an immense amount of courage for Asha to ask Pratap if he was going to use the baby money to buy an apartment. She expected him to get angry about her interfering in money matters, but he surprised her; he didn’t seem to mind at all.
    “I don’t know. That’s what Raman wants us to do. But I don’t know what’s right for us. We have Manoj,” he said.
    Asha wanted to dance in relief. “And his education is so important.”
    “Yes,” Pratap said. “We need to send him to a better place. There is a good boarding school in Hyderabad. He could go there.”
    A boarding school?
    “But that would mean we won’t see him every day,” Pratap continued. “I don’t know if that will work. Maybe we can find a nice one in Srirampuram. Chinna, this guy I work with, was talking about the one his boss’s son goes