Megha alighted from the bus on the packed dirt path just outside of the village of Daimsbury in the county of Surrey. Thank goodness for small favours—spring’s sunshine meant the road hadn’t turned into a mire because of the constant England rain. Everyone who valued their shoes hated taking the bus. Or they made do with Wellies. She shuddered at the thought, disliking those boots with a vengeance. Could there exist anything uglier?
Unfortunately, she didn’t drive. Didn’t even own a car, and neither did her father, with whom she lived above their family restaurant in the village. Her dad’s business partner, Ben—who also shared their home—had a beaten old VW, however, and he would ferry her around in it if she needed.
But not today. She hadn’t wanted her family to know she was going to Stellan’s place. Two and two together would show how she’d gone to the building where Magnus lived, and she wasn’t ready to face any erroneous assumption as to why she’d gone to a man’s place, never mind if it was in broad daylight in the middle of a Saturday.
Speaking of that loon … She turned and scanned the only road in and out of the place, praying she wouldn’t see a speck of red careening at an impossible speed into the town centre with a screech of braking then squealing tyres that would’ve been more at home on the set of a Fast & Furious movie. Nothing on the horizon; what a relief. But then again, a Ferrari, and especially one driven by Magnus, would’ve reached here well before her chugging bus made it back.
A sigh flowed out of her. Was there no escaping that man? Just for one day, please?
Everything he’d said rolled and rolled inside her mind. She wasn’t ready for this. Her radar had fixed its needle on ‘surviving’ ever since the news had hit, not bothering to notice anything else. She planned to move it to ‘thrive’ in the near future, but anything else? Nope. No can do.
So where did that leave her? He’d planted a niggling thought inside her brain; that’s what he’d done. And now, she couldn’t shake that little ringing bearing a striking resemblance to his boy-band-sounding yet deep voice telling her to ponder her options before it got too late.
With a shake of her head, she started towards town. The soft spring breeze came at her redolent with the scent of newly bloomed flowers. Everywhere she looked, green and splashes of colour were replacing the darkness and drab browns of winter. A time for rebirth, for new beginnings. Didn’t it feel like this for her, too? True, she’d just been told she would’ve probably died from atrocious complications and suffering had the cancer not been caught when it had and her surgery done before the malignant cells spread. It felt like a new lease on life. With a price still to pay—the treatments were coming, waiting for her behind the closed door she refused to open until the very last second.
Still, confronted with her own mortality, with the prospect that she could possibly not have seen this day, or the first daffodils pushing out of the barren winter earth this year, things sorta fell into place of their own accord. For instance, the wind smelled sweeter. The colours looked brighter, contrasts sharper. She noticed little details now, like how beautiful the pattern of dew on the fresh-burgeoned leaves could be in the early mornings. She’d never run the rat race, but lately, she stopped even more to smell the roses, literally and figuratively.
Her steps had taken her close to the centre of town, and she paused at the corner of Mrs. Murphy’s cottage upon catching sight of someone on the curb.
Liam Morelli was helping his very pregnant wife Honor into his car. Patient, caring, even to the point of being gently rebuked by Honor who laughed and proclaimed she wasn’t an invalid and simply with child. Liam grumbled something in reply, his brow creased, but with a soft, besotted smile on his face. A young girl then bounded out of the ice cream parlour behind them and skipped to the car. Andie, Liam’s teenage daughter from his first marriage.
The child that could’ve been hers today. Megha’s heart clenched. For a while, she’d dated Liam. But she’d been twenty-three at the time, getting into her first real relationship—she didn’t count the flings, not that there’d been many, before that. Liam had been twenty-six, Andie eight already. A sunny and lively kid who held no grudges, didn’t seem to have a wicked bone in her thin body, but impressionable nevertheless. The girl had known Megha and her dad had been fast friends, then had come the day when Liam had thought it time to tell Andie the truth. At which point, Megha had baulked, realising the full extent of this decision. She wasn’t ready to become a stepmother, let alone an instant parent. Heck, she hadn’t even been sure Liam was the one for her. So she’d broken it off with him. No hard feelings between them, as he’d understood; the welfare of his daughter came before anything else.
As she watched them today get into their car and crawl away at a snail’s pace—Liam being overly cautious again, and once more chastised by the two females—she swallowed the lump in her throat.
Movement from the corner of her eye registered, and she turned her head just enough to notice Mrs. Murphy peering out from behind the voile curtains of her first floor window. Ack. How much had the busybody seen? Nothing escaped the old hag’s notice; the reason why the gossip mill in Daimsbury always worked with one titbit or the other being fed by this witch here.
Megha quickened her step and almost hopped all the way to Ben&Jari’s, the restaurant she had called home for over two decades. She’d been six when they had come to live here—she, her father, and Ben. They’d been in West Ham previously, in the heart of London, where she’d been the only dark-skinned kid who wasn’t Black or mixed race. The Paki, of course. Her father and Ben had heard about the teasing, the relentless bullying, and they hadn’t appeared to think twice before packing up and moving here. Strangely, to a place where they’d been the only ethnic family around, in an almost all-white English village.
But the locals had welcomed them, the kids here making her one of theirs immediately, the townsfolk becoming regulars of her father’s Indian and Lebanese restaurant, which was the only other place in town selling food. Some had even said pub grub had gotten boring, so they’d been all for the curries and the shawarma.
The aromas from those same foods greeted her well before she reached the door of the place. A pungent whiff of fenugreek—what, to her, made Indian food smell like, well, Indian food—together with the heady cloves and earthy nutmeg spices Ben used for his signature chicken mix. All of this carried on the heavy but comforting reek of chippy grease used to fry the chips for, of course, the most English of all takeaways: fish & chips. This was what home smelled like. Just the scent alone proved enough to soothe her ragged soul and calm her rapidly beating heart.
She went in from the back door, setting the alarm back on once inside. At this time of the afternoon, the place was closed, lunch run over, and would open again for the dinner rush in a few hours. A peek in the kitchen showed her a mass of crow-black hair with absolutely no shine on top of that atrocious black fleece jumper.
Megha rolled her eyes. Didn’t that girl own any other clothes? Before the overly chatty and troublemaking Missy Taylor, the hired help, could spot her and try to engage her in yet another conversation she had no wish to take part in, she rushed to the stairs and took them two by two. Something about that young woman rubbed her the wrong way. Missy told ‘her’ story to all and sundry, but Megha kept picking up a sort of ‘rehearsed’ vibe to it, making the whole take not ring true. The girl was hiding something, but what? Megha wouldn’t stick around to pry it out of her, and even more so now. She had other fish to fry.
Once in the hallway of the first floor, she paused. A strong urge caught her to rush to the left, where a door concealed the stairs leading up to the loft, which she had made into her flat. To be honest, she didn’t want to face anyone right then. After the near-miss with Missy below, all her energy seemed to have drained out of her. She should hightail it up …
But she also couldn’t do that, a part of her yearning to go to the door on the right, where she never needed to knock before entering, the only place where she always found solace.
Her heart made the decision. In its battered state, what with having just seen Liam and his cute family and then everything Magnus had dumped on her in Kensington, she simply couldn’t fight. So she trudged there, pushed the wood panel open, and skittered in to drop her fabric tote on the overstuffed sofa facing the wide, industrial-type window panes that let in the brilliant sunshine.
Ben Hamidi looked up from where he stood behind the kitchen counter stirring a thick beige paste inside the gigantic food processor he insisted they also own in their home. A ray of sunlight glimmered off the shiny bald pate of his head, and the sight of his hooded eyes that always seemed sleepy caused her to smile. She was about to be used as a guinea pig again.
With an exaggerated sigh, she went to the counter and settled on a stool. Leaning forward on her forearms, she opened her mouth so he could pop in a spoonful of whatever he’d just concocted.
Her eyes started watering before she’d even swallowed, and she coughed once the lump had cleared her throat. “What the hell, Ben?”
He grinned at her. “African bird’s eye chilli.”
“In your hummus? You gotta be kidding! That doesn’t belong in there.”
Even her Indian taste buds that had no problem eating the fieriest curry couldn’t deal with that, especially in such doses.
Her father came out of his bedroom and laughed. “I told you it packed too much of a punch.”
She smiled at her dad as he came over and dropped a quick kiss to her temple. The scent of his aftershave hit her nostrils, and she breathed in deep, comforted by this light and fresh smell that had always meant comfort for her at any age.
He smiled and winked at Ben, before taking a seat across from her at the island. Ben grumbled something and took the food processor bowl down to the restaurant’s kitchen. Good, he could use Missy as a guinea pig now and burn all her taste buds, and in the process, why not her vocal chords, too, so the girl would finally shut up.
Everyone in town believed these two were a gay couple. She’d asked, once, and they’d said no. They also each had their own bedrooms, and Ben was rumoured to have a lady friend in London he visited time and again. They were best friends. Not that it would’ve bothered her if they’d been gay. To each their own, she believed.
“You okay, beti?” Jari Saran asked.
That’s how he’d always called her. A cute little endearment meaning ‘daughter’ in the Indian Hindi tongue. Never mind that he also addressed every other young girl in Daimsbury by that title. No, she’d been the original ‘beti’; no one would usurp that spot from her.
And just like that, that word also sapped through all her resolve. She hadn’t told her father why she’d gone into London today. He’d never been the one to pry, choosing instead to trust her to make the right decision in every instance once he, with Ben’s help, had shown her right from wrong and how she should morally and ethically behave in society.
To be honest, she didn’t want to hide anything from him, even what Magnus had pushed before her eyes today.
Then she thought of Liam and Andie. If she’d married him—they had been that solid; she knew they’d have made it down the aisle if she’d agreed to move past the hurdle of telling Andie about their relationship—Jari would’ve had a de facto granddaughter, and Megha would surely have gotten pregnant sometime, gifting him with yet another grandkid.
A pregnancy which might have saved her life today?
Unbidden, the insidious thought inserted itself in her mind.
“Maybe if you’d used those breasts for what they were intended for, for feeding your babe, then you wouldn’t be in this condition today. Oh, Lord, you losing all your femininity because you modern girls just have to live your lives, don’t you? Settling down is not good enough for you, is it?”
That rant had come from her aunt, her father’s cousin Asha, one of those hard core, typically Indian and nosy aunties who lived only to arrange marriages for any young people in the family once the girl reached eighteen and the boy turned twenty-three. Megha had brushed off her arranged proposals more than a few times, and Auntie Asha had never gotten past that.
Those words had rattled her, though, even to the point where she’d asked her care nurse, a lovely middle-aged woman named Siobhan, if that could be true. Siobhan hadn’t been appalled; to the contrary, she’d laughed right into Megha’s face, telling her that sort of reasoning was absurd. In that case, why didn’t every childless woman get breast cancer?
“Beti? Megha?” Jari asked.
She snapped out of the bleak spell and gave him a watery smile. No escaping it—she needed to talk to someone about all this. A person who would understand, who’d be on her side no matter what, not pressuring her to do anything unless it was two-hundred percent her decision.
She reached out and clasped his strong hand, and he wrapped his other palm over the back of her fingers. Such warmth, such comfort. As long as she had him, she could and would triumph from all this.
But she had to bite the bullet now.
“Daddy, you … you never wanted grandkids?”
He chuckled. “Is that your way of saying I’m old?”
She laughed, too. “No, of course not.”
He grew sober, because it wasn’t like her to acquiesce and even apologize in such a discussion. The usual she would’ve ribbed him senseless by this point already.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, pressing her hand between his.
She took a deep breath. “I … I went into London to meet with Magnus.”
His eyebrows raised. “You mean to say …?”
She blinked. “What? No! Not at all! We’re not together!”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t have been an issue if you were, though I would advise you to be careful around the likes of him. That boy doesn’t seem to know his own mind yet.”
True, that. Evidence in the fact he changed girlfriends almost every week. He’d keep the tabloids in material just from that alone, and if one added Serial Bride Marenka Maurel to the mix, those rags would never run out of fodder between the two of them.
But she shook herself. She had to do this.
“He wanted to talk to me about something.”
“Which was?”
On a sigh, she told him everything. The fertility clinic, Nammy’s trust, how he wanted her to be the first patient and then the face of this endeavour.
“You’re not ready for that, are you?” he asked once she’d finished.
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m not ready for any of this crap, but do I have a choice?”
He clenched her hand tighter. Her dad knew she wouldn’t tolerate a hug right then. The gesture might come from a good intention on his part, but if he, or anyone else, started to coddle her, she’d lose it. For good.
“But have you thought about it at all?” he continued.
“I don’t know, Dad. From what I’ve understood, because I have no hormonal link in the tumour, I should be back to ‘normal’ within a few years of my treatments. It’s usually a year after chemo, but since I am younger, they want to blast me with the most intensive cocktail they can just so we have all the bases covered.”
“And there’s no accounting what that could do to your fertility.”
Another sigh. “Exactly.”
“What would this procedure be like?”
“As far as I know, just the same as when a woman goes for IVF, minus the re-implanting embryo part. It’s a course of hormone injection over ten days to get more eggs to mature in one swoop, then they go in through a small surgical procedure to extract them and then freeze them.”
“And where would that hurt?” he asked.
Where would it hurt, indeed? True, she already felt like a psycho bitch on PMS days; hormones for follicle stimulation would keep her high on oestrogen and the like for days. Hello, Hell!
But the result … She’d never considered having kids, not having thought she was mature enough or at ‘that’ stage in life where she could contemplate motherhood without running away screaming. Then the cancer had come, and everything changed. She might not even be able to have kids should she want them later on.
And that’s where it hinged, innit? The possibility to have a family later on. She definitely planned to live, to put that ignominious disease behind her once and for all after she’d cleared her treatments. And life had already shown her that its beauty lay in the small things. In the flowers, the pretty streaks of colour in the sky at dawn or twilight. In making her father smile. In indulging whatever culinary fancy Ben had wrapped himself in. In a cup of coffee with loads of cream and sugar, the heavy mug warming your cold hands the very first thing in the morning.
It would also shine at her through the gurgle of a baby. The smell of baby powder and that unique scent the downy heads of babies had. A child looking up at her with wonder, in those years when every kid thought their parent a superhero.
She’d never had a mother. Hers had chosen to leave in the thick of the night with only a note stating “I can’t do this anymore” left behind. Pretty Anita Rabb who’d had pale skin and green eyes had been the queen of her Indian village. In Europe once she’d married Jari Saran, a man who looked more like a Hollywood movie star than an Indian, her name had hidden any connotation of her being from such a lowly place and instead, they’d both passed for white. Until Anita had given birth to her first child … who’d had the misfortune of being born with dusky desi skin.
For the start of Megha’s life, Anita had hardly cared for her, this twist of Fate bringing down a terrible post-partum depression on her. When Megha had been six months old, she’d left, petitioning for her divorce through the elders of her birth village. Neither Megha nor Jari had seen her ever again, though Megha had heard Anita Rabb had married a white Englishman named Winslow, and that she had later borne him three children.
Could Megha be a good mother if she ever had a child? With that kind of family history, should she even be allowed to become a parent? Not to mention the faulty gene she must carry that had caused her cancer—could she ethically bring into this world a child, maybe a daughter, who would carry this same gene and thus a Damocles’ sword on her head?
But then again, she had half of Jari in her DNA, and all of him in her upbringing, in the woman she had become today. Such a wonderful man, who’d never faltered from having to care for a tiny baby after being abandoned by the wife he’d obviously adored, deserved every brightness she could bring into his world. And that implied grandchildren. She had to do everything to make this possible … and under the current circumstances, it meant having her eggs frozen.
“Megha? Earth to Megha.”
She blinked and stared at him. “It’s not covered by the NHS, and it’s not cheap.”
He didn’t even bat an eye. “How much?”
“About three thousand pounds, at least, just for the procedure for one cycle. Could be up to another thousand and more for the fertility drugs themselves. Then there’s yearly storage fees.”
She didn’t add that that she didn’t want to use Magnus’ money for this. She didn’t want to owe him anything. Heck, if she went ahead with this, she wouldn’t even tell him.
“Money’s not an issue, beti. Whatever it takes.”
And that was true. They weren’t rich, but they were also quite comfortable. The restaurant did very well, and if things got dicey, she could always sell one of the antiques she’d so painstakingly searched for and restored up in her flat.
So, the decision was made …
***
Three weeks later, she’d finished the injections. It had been hormonal hell—she never wished to go through that again!—but thank goodness, her team of doctors had been right on board, and given how her menstrual cycle was just about to start again, they hadn’t had to wait nor had they had to accelerate the procedure in order to accommodate her treatment schedule.
In the waiting room of the fertility clinic, Megha had sat herself tall despite everything inside her wanting to make itself as small as possible to escape the stares.
There was pity—oh, look, poor single gal without a man and also with no hope of snagging one, for why else would she be coming here to have her eggs extracted and then surely fertilized with the sperm of an anonymous donor so she can prove she can have a family?
Then smugness—again, not being with a man, while most of the other women were here with their partners to undergo IVF.
Contempt, too—many must’ve thought her one of those career girls who wouldn’t contemplate what she’d been put on Earth for, aka motherhood, and needing to climb the ladder in a man’s world, often by all means necessary; she hadn’t bothered to enlighten the one cow who’d had the viper’s tongue to actually tell her that to her face.
A small dose of something like understanding had come from the lesbian couple in the room—though their struggle wasn’t at all her own. She was here to have her eggs frozen, almost like having kids but before she could proclaim she was having said kids, they were herded away to be stored in liquid nitrogen. Quite anticlimactic, to be honest, and after the roller coaster emotional ride of the high hormones, it all fell flat, bringing with it recognition that this had all been something momentous …
Once outside the clinic after they’d cleared her post-procedure, she knew she had to face it. That kind of place did the job, yes, but it wasn’t meant for cancer patients, for the kind of intrinsic support a woman facing such devastating prospects required. She’d seen it with her own two eyes, had felt it in every part of her heart and the deepest reaches of her soul, where the hurt had infiltrated, insidious enough to leave no area free of its venomous clutches.
The time had come to swallow her pride, because empathy would always win—she couldn’t, in clear conscience, let any young cancer patient go through something like what she’d been through. She’d had the backbone to weather it, but others might not. So, for her fellow cancer sisters, she had to do this.
Megha grabbed her phone and input the number. It rang twice on the other end before the recipient picked up, slightly breathless. What had he been up to at such an hour of the day to be out of breath? Had she maybe interrupted something …? A blush heated her cheeks.
Get this over with!
She took a deep breath.
“Your fertility clinic idea,” she stated. “It makes sense.”
“So it’s a go from your end?”
Another deep breath.
“It’s a go.”
And now, prayers she wouldn’t regret this …