I wonder if I wasn’t supposed to ask that—the nurse is staring at me in complete shock. Suddenly she darts to the door, pokes her head out and checks left and right. She comes back to where I’m lying and stands very close to the bed. All this is very strange behaviour.

‘Do you know where you are?’ the nurse asks me softly. She is making me nervous.

‘In a clinic—a maternity home?’ I say.

‘This is Dr Mridul Kumar Gandhi’s clinic, M.K. Gandhi?’ the nurse says and stresses on ‘M.K. Gandhi’.

I don’t know what she’s trying to say. ‘Dr Gandhi’ rings a bell but for the life of me I can’t place the name. I shrug.

‘Dr Gandhi is famous in New Delhi for his maternity clinic. But he is also known for providing certain other services not available in Delhi. People pay big ‘donations’ for those services,’ the nurse says in a whisper.

Dr Gandhi. Dr Gandhi—where have I heard the name, I’ve heard it pretty recently …

The nurse rolls her eyes and leans even closer, ‘Dr Gandhi is the one to go to—’

‘—when you want to find out the gender of your child,’ I say, the information clicking into place in my brain.

I remember the night I went to the jagran with Dragon; Mrs Mishra’s family doctor was an M.K. Gandhi … the same one.

I look at the nurse, still somewhat confused—you can’t tell the gender before eighteen to twenty weeks of pregnancy.

‘How does it matter? It’s too early for me to know my baby’s gender so …?’

The nurse bites her lower lip—she seems to be deciding or thinking—she suddenly grabs the sheet of paper she kept on the tray just minutes before.

‘Do you know what this is?’ she asks me, waving the paper at me.

I shake my head.

‘Then read it and don’t sign it without reading it,’ she says and hands me the paper.

There are only a few lines on the paper and I read them quickly. I read the form four times to be certain—and each time, the content remains the same.

The first line reads: Consent Form for the Medical Termination of Pregnancy.

I feel it surging inside me, growing with every passing second, urging me to let it out, demanding gratification. I had first felt it stir when Comma had told me of Ragini’s betrayal. I had felt it again—much stronger—when Sid told me he had resumed his affair with Lalita. And now that I know what Sid is trying to do—I feel it consuming me.

I trusted these people. I close my eyes and see their faces—fingers pointing at me, laughing at me, mocking me.