He inhaled and exhaled dramatically: ‘Aaah.’ They looked at each other across the smoky room. She smiled. He smiled. That night, while the net sieved a puddle outside the window, while drugged mosquitoes drifted around as slow and as light as the ash in the air, Isa was kind to her husband with her hands and mouth. And when she fell asleep afterwards, before him this time, her lips were curved in triumph.
The next morning, Balaji woke to the sound of rain strumming the window and his wife retching in the en suite.
‘Okay-okay in there, Bella?’ He tried the door but it was locked.
Silence. A croak, another gush.
‘Now you get sick?’ he said, his chuckle trickling to naught.
* * *
Isabella’s first pregnancy was difficult. She vomited every day until the second trimester. She craved fruits that weren’t in season. Her skin was a soupy mess, pimples bubbling up on her chin and brow. At night, the baby often concentrated its weight into a blunt ache on her side. Balaji, having now been promoted to Daddiji, was allowed nowhere below her waist, for which they both suffered. The months passed by in hypochondriacal waves as she conjured two-headed, hare-lipped, fingerless nightmares to scare herself with – to say nothing of hairy ones. What if Sibilla’s condition reappeared, one of those genetic ghosts that skips a generation only to haunt the grandchildren? Isa lavished cajolings upon her belly, willing the baby to be normal. The baby responded in the usual way, resolutely rotating, kicking stoically at its flexible walls.
Daddiji sat beside Isa in bed, listening to her worrying and feeling with his hand the steady beat of the foot inside her. What a struggle! he thought. The Battle of Schrödinger’s Hairball. The strength of the kicks secretly pleased him, though. He felt like a father, full of inexpressible bloodly solidarity. A boy, an ally! Finally, someone to adjust the gender balance in this house.
He felt terribly guilty when Isa gave birth to a girl. They had not learned the sex of the baby when they went for their scans at UTH – he had just assumed. All those months of misaddress, like mispronouncing a friend’s name! Daddiji overcompensated for his error by loving little Naila a little too much. He gave her secret treats and protected her from her mother, who was often harsh with Naila as she grew into a toddler, grabbing the girl at random to peer at her pores. But while Naila’s hair was lovely and thick and black, and grew faster than normal, it was largely confined to her scalp.
Once, when she was four years old, Naila fell asleep with bubblegum still in her mouth. She woke with it tangled in her hair and ran straight to her father, knowing his punishment would be less severe. Used to shaving hair down to the skin for tonsure, Daddiji had left the child near bald when he cut the bubblegum out. As it grew back into a pageboy, Daddiji finally got a chance to see what Naila might have looked like if she had been a boy. But even then, he realised, it was impossible that she could be anyone other than herself. She was Naila! How unwise, he thought, to love someone in advance of knowing them.
* * *
It was inevitable that Naila would become a weapon in the next front of the war between her parents: the Battle of the Unborn.
‘Kwacha?!’ Daddiji would call to his daughter every morning at breakfast. Dawn has come?!
‘Ngweeee…’ she would respond, drawing it out like a true patriot. Light falls over the plains…
Daddiji would wink. Isa would roll her eyes. This rally call from Independence days was old and musty, as out of date as UNIP itself, which, after nearly thirty years, had been ousted by the Movement for Multi-party Democracy in ’91. Four-year-old Naila just liked the sound of kwacha! and ngweee: the bassdrum prompt, the droning reply.
For Daddiji, it was all about the money – kwacha in particular, ngwee having long fallen out of circulation. The new president, whom Kaunda had dubbed ‘The Four-Foot Dwarf’, had rejected his precedessor’s socialist principles in favour of privatisation and the free market. Despite somersaulting inflation rates (K4,000 to the pound by 2001), wig was (still) all the rage in Lusaka. The counter at Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. was stacked high with limp towers of cash – kwacha in the thousands and millions.
Daddiji was trying to change Isa’s mind about having another baby.