A House for Happy Mothers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

a mind. It was as if she didn’t exist.
    “It will be nice to live here, in a city, instead of our village,” Pratap continued. He had envied his brother’s fortunes, Asha knew, and now felt eager to have the same advantages for both himself and his family.
    Before Asha could answer, a nurse dressed in a white dress and a white bonnet called for them. “Pratap and Asha Vardhan?”
    Asha stood up and checked her sari, making sure everything was draped just the way it should be. Pratap had already started to walk toward the doctor’s office. She watched his back for a moment and then straightened her own and walked behind him.

CHAPTER THREE
    Priya had found out about surrogacy through Poonam, whom she had met at a South Indian cooking class. Priya had always prided herself on her cooking, but then she met Madhu’s mother, Prasanna, who was like a South Indian Jamie Oliver. And Madhu loved his mother’s cooking.
    It wasn’t really a competition, she knew—after all, could Prasanna whip up a coq au vin or bake a chocolate soufflé that melted in your mouth? But still, Priya couldn’t help but want Madhu to drool over her sambhar and coconut chutney just as he did over his mother’s.
    It was a sponsored link on her Facebook page that led Priya to a cooking class at Restaurant Sakshi, owned by Mrs. Sachidanadan or, as she went by, Mrs. S, convenient for the non-Indians who found her last name to be a tongue twister.
    And Mrs. S definitely delivered. She transformed Priya from an amateur South Indian cook to a decent one, and Priya knew that with four more months of classes to go, her chances of acing the dosa , the holy grail of South Indian cooking, were good.
    Poonam took the classes mainly to get away from home.
    “I have two kids and they’re home all the time. My husband travels nearly five days a week. By Friday night every week, I’m ready to slit a wrist. But with this class, every other Saturday at least, I feel like a normal person, not a mommy or a wife or a crazy lady who’s running around her life like a chicken without a head,” Poonam told Priya at their first class.
    Poonam wasn’t the type of woman Priya usually got along with. She was a stay-at-home mom who let her husband run her life. She got permission to go to a cooking class, the mall, the grocery store . . . everything. She would go to the salon and lie about how much it cost, as if her husband couldn’t just check the bank statement. She was the kind of woman who bought something new and, if her husband noticed, said, “This old thing?”
    But Poonam understood the tragedy of Priya’s life. She herself had gone through five miscarriages and three failed IVF treatments before hiring a surrogate through Happy Mothers. Now she had two children who were driving her out of her mind.
    Priya even invited Poonam and her husband, Ranbir, over for lunch one Saturday to help convince Madhu about using a surrogate.
    Of course, Priya had not counted on Poonam’s two kids being an unholy nightmare. Natasha was three and Tara was fourteen months old, and both were walking advertisements for contraception.
    That lunch had been a turning point for Madhu.
    “ Arrey yaar! You can adopt, but God knows what you bring into the house,” Ranbir began as they sat on the patio with drinks and snacks.
    “I think adoption is a good thing,” Madhu said as patiently as he could.
    “Good for people like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, but for people like us it’s a nuisance,” Ranbir continued. “It takes years. It costs so much money. And you don’t know what blood you bring home.”
    “You bring home a kid,” Madhu said, putting down his beer carefully on the wooden garden table. Priya knew his impulse was to throw that beer in Ranbir’s face.
    Poonam was holding Tara in one arm and put a hand on Ranbir’s shoulder. “Come on, Ranbir, we might have adopted if we couldn’t have had these two with a surrogate.”
    Ranbir shrugged. “I don’t