‘But—’

‘No buts.’

‘But what the hell, Mom. It’s my body. No one gets to tell me what to eat or what to wear or . . . or whatever.’

Nina Rai looked at her daughter. ‘Is that what you think? That your body is your own?’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Oh, honey. You’re getting so full and curvy that I forget sometimes how young you are. You’re going to be a mom. For the next few years at least, your body will not be your own. You’ll give birth in a room full of people. You’ll eat, sleep, wake up, bathe whenever you find the time to, not when you want to. Arms to carry the baby, legs to walk the baby, breasts to feed the baby, head to constantly worry about the baby. Even your heart you gave away the day you decided to become a mom.’

Gehna didn’t know how to respond to all this grim talk about hearts and breasts. She picked up the plate of French fries in silence and retreated to her room.

Instinctively, and also because any woman who had given birth twice was probably an expert, Gehna knew that her mother was right. It had already begun. Whereas previously she had been a girl with ideas, opinions, likes, dislikes, facets, a personality, now she was identified exclusively as being PREGNANT. As she began to show more and more, it wasn’t going to be possible to hide it from the extended family, so Nina Rai had cautiously told a few of her closest cousins. When they met Gehna, it seemed to her that her aunts had stared at her torso. They no longer cared what she was studying, what her plans were for the future; they wanted to know when the baby was due, whether it had kicked yet, what its name was going to be. At the ob-gyn’s, she was treated like cattle, poked and prodded to ensure that she yielded a healthy calf. Varun, on the rare occasion that he took the trouble to notice his kid sister, was all about the fat jokes—Gehna was always getting as big as a boat, a whale, or a house, depending on how friendly he was feeling towards her.

It was too much. Sometimes, like now, the feeling that she was losing who she was was so overwhelming that it freaked her out. She felt like doing something crazy, something to remind herself that this was still her life and not a scene from, like, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Gehna picked up her phone to call the Yam so they could go somewhere and get tanked on vodka. Then she remembered that the Yam had betrayed her by going off to London for an internship. Like a rat deserting a sinking ship, thought Gehna bitterly. She called Eram instead.

‘I’m coming to Goa with you,’ she said.

‘Seriously?’

‘Yep. I gotta keep an eye on my investment. When do we leave?’