In the Shadow of Mumtaz
Colleen Clemens
In Agra, I witnessed a shrouded woman being carried to her funeral pyre. Men carried the litter, garlands of pink flowers around their necks—the same kind of garlands schoolchildren would drape over our necks in welcome a few days later—her dead body draped in white. The college group I was chaperoning had started the New Year with a visit to the Taj Mahal, beaming white in the noonday sun, the shadows perfectly symmetrical. This woman’s shroud shone just as white in the hot Indian sun.
In India, I served as the boots on the ground: the one who fetched the doctor when students got Delhi belly, who made sure everyone was on the bus, who took kids aside and let them cry when the sight of poverty was just too much that day. In the roads of India, I saw cows, goats, an elephant, toddlers walking alone, a man with no legs dragging himself by calloused fingers and elbows across six lanes of traffic.
On the bus ride back to our hotel in Delhi from the Taj Mahal, sleep eluded me. The bus driver’s incessant honking was a jolting signal to pass, to demand room, to signal to pedestrians, to greet other drivers. After seeing both Shah Jahan’s memorial to his dead wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and the woman shrouded and perfumed off to her last rite, I saw another death: this time a man on the side of the road. A minute before he had been riding his bicycle along the dark road with throngs of others moving about in the night as dark as the ebony inlay of Mumtaz’s tomb. Now his head was smashed, chunks of his brain and skull strewn along the macadam. His mangled bike started the story along the road; the bits of brain ended it. No car had stopped.
Amidst all this death, I didn’t witness the exact moment of life, of birth, that I felt sure would happen at some point. Having read about women whose lack of access to health care forced them to give birth in the streets, I expected to see that moment of joy; if not joy at the entrance of another soul into the world, at least the joy of labor’s pain ending. In a country one-third the size of the U.S., with three times the population, I felt I had to see new life begin to counter the deaths I saw every other day in India. About to start fertility treatments when I returned to the United States, I needed a good omen, needed to see a slippery, shiny baby to satisfy my own selfish superstition; I didn’t want the deaths to follow me across the ocean and curse our attempts at starting a new life.
I never did see that life begin.
This trip would be my last for a while, a palpable fact that followed me around India for the duration of the two-week trip. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for over five years, with no result. I knew the fertility testing and treatments would monopolize my time and that I would be landlocked until they worked; there would be no more trips across the world for a while. I was still tan from India’s sun when we trudged through the January snowstorm to meet the doctor who would become part of our marriage for the next several years.
Blood tests, dye shot into my uterus, and exploratory surgeries revealed what we had already known: that our chances of conceiving on our own were almost nil. Our doctor said one percent. I wasn’t about to bet on our chances of getting pregnant. But we did, thanks to injections, and what I called the “turkey baster method.” And then we lost it. And six months later, we got pregnant on our own, had won our own type of lottery. After seeing pictures and hearing its heartbeat, we lost the baby again. The doctor on call told me I was probably just “unlucky.”
***
I am a post-colonial scholar who focuses on the issue of women’s bodies in the world. In an effort to have my research field intersect with the trip, I started the course with a discussion of Indian women serving as surrogates. Though the trip did little to force students to think about women’s health issues, we saw Indian women from one step removed. Thirty students and I crammed into a one-room AIDS clinic for male truckers who spread the disease up and down the country. Phantom women infected by the truckers filled the tiny empty spaces. We visited a former leper hospital, now an orphanage for children who had lost their parents to AIDS. Ghost mothers watched as we showed children their own images on our digital cameras. In Delhi and Hyderabad, the streets were packed with men, but the issue of women’s mobility or lack thereof would often come as a sidebar.
“Where are the women?” one of the girls asked.
I told her it was a great question, one the course would continue to address once the phantom women followed us home.
I wanted to start the course with a discussion of women’s issues and found the “outsourcing” of Indian women’s wombs a perfect starting point. With so many business majors on the trip, we talked ad naseum about industry, visiting three multinational corporations with their own zoos and golf courses. Men always gave the presentations, calling to the chai wallah for tea and embarrassing our American sensibilities. No women in charge, no women on the streets. Back in the U.S., I started the course with women to make up for all of the women missing from our trip.
Before the class began, students read an article about women in the U.S. going to India to find surrogates to carry their babies, an exemplification of the capitalism we witnessed gone awry. Cheap labor, literally, at its finest. My party line was that this practice is wrong. I wanted the students to be as devastated as I was about this abuse of women, of people taking advantage of India’s poverty. We read articles about women who lived in a home, were watched over by their womb “pimps” to make sure the surrogates didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, that the women ate well, that they were controlled. I wanted the students to say, “Sure, it seems like they are making the decision to be a surrogate, but really isn’t it their circumstances that force the women into surrogacy?”
In class we listened to a radio news show that interviewed women at a fertility clinic in Anand. Nandini Patel carried another couple’s baby because she wanted to fulfill her dream: a house for her own family. Priyanka Sharma considers doing it a second time for, very simply, the much-needed money. Finally, an American woman—Julie, no last name offered—admitted she was in Anand to save money, save the heartache of losing the child to bureaucracy, and to monitor the strict conditions under which her baby lived in its surrogate’s belly.
In India, we saw poverty that blistered our eyes: children playing in filth, emaciated men carrying bloated tourists in rickshaws, bedraggled animals limping in the streets. Once we returned to our classroom in the States, we looked at pictures of sari-ed women on cots, bunched together in rooms watching television. We bemoaned the lack of regulation, deplored that women signed off any rights to ensure the international adoptions could go smoothly. In the context of our trip, I wanted the students to question the implications of Americans and other people from wealthy nations using women’s bodies—surrogates these women would never even meet nor know the names of—to carry their babies into the world.
I trudged to class to teach that lesson in the same snow that almost kept my husband and me away from our first appointment with our fertility doctor. That January had already dumped more snow on us than I would have liked, and I was frustrated that the appointment we made months ago might be canceled because of another storm. This was before I understood the fertility world doesn’t stop for a foot of snow, nor does it stop for a single holiday or vacation. We made the hour drive to the doctor for our consultation. This would be one of the only times my husband would actually have to come along; later, I would speed to the doctor’s office with my husband’s sperm tucked into my bra, keeping it warm while he went to work.
I loved our doctor from the start. Her office was a mess. She had a cold. Her clothing was out of date. There was nothing intimidating about her. Her life looked like mine: full of chaos and one step away from out of control. The journals piled on her desk mirrored the image of my desk at home, articles piled high waiting to be read. My husband, an organized high school science teacher, wasn’t nearly as comforted, but I was thrilled not to find someone who had her life all together, but someone who might be able to understand the swirling limbo I felt.
We told her about our past experience of an ob-gyn throwing me on Clomid with no testing or advice. I now realize how unprofessional and dangerous this man was. I told her that when I was on the medicine, I couldn’t see well, that I hit the garage with my car twice, that I finally stopped taking it when it didn’t work. I wish the story of the disinterested doctor were uncommon, but this woman nodded her head, having heard such fertility nightmares before. We had tried for five years and were ready to get serious. We didn’t want to think about the cost; we just knew something had to be done. She ordered a litany of tests, my introduction into the world of blood work and ultrasounds. We learned I had an infection and my husband’s sperm aren’t good swimmers—two things that modern medicine could remedy.
Before I went to teach my India class, I would often have to stop at the doctor’s and stick out my arm. A band-aid covered the crook of my elbow hidden under my blazer. The little tug of the adhesive reminded me about my other life, one that no one knew about. But still, the image of the outsourced wombs reigned over the class, discussion often returning to them as we read Rushdie, Desai, Lahiri. Over the semester, the discussion of pregnant women became more and more painful for me as our treatments stalled. To see pictures of big-bellied women, looking ripe and healthy, made my stomach feel flatter, made me feel like a barren woman of the 1950s. We didn’t know if we were going to able to have a baby even with the help of the doctors. In class, students would brazenly rail against the practice of using women in India as surrogates. They made sweeping innocent claims that women of the U.S. were evil, colonizing imperialists exploiting India’s women. They were saying exactly what I wanted them to say, but their naïveté infuriated me. What did they know? Their days were spent sleeping, studying, and perhaps doing drugs or each other. They knew nothing about this issue I handed to them in the first place, but they were spitting back at me the righteous anger I wanted out of them: only now I hated them for it.
I started living two lives: the PhD candidate teaching courses on feminism and post-colonial literature and the woman desperately trying to get pregnant. Those in the former world knew nothing about the latter. Perhaps someone at the university would see me tear off the band-aid and toss it in the Writing Center trash, but otherwise, no one needed to know about this other life that didn’t fit with the image of a feminist scholar. So when after a year of treatments we got pregnant and lost the baby weeks later, no one knew. I graduated, gave a commencement address, won an award, and felt happy and relieved from the grief for a solid week.
Then we miraculously got pregnant on our own. Over the previous year people kept saying, all you need to do is relax and the baby will come. There is nothing so heartbreaking to say to a woman undergoing fertility treatments (one would never say to a diabetic, if you just relax the insulin will manage itself). We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary at the clinic where we saw the first pictures of our baby and heard its heartbeat. We told some friends. We felt like we were dancing inside a miracle, that our luck had turned. And then we went to the doctor—a substitute while our regular doctor went to the Jersey shore, a man we had never met—and when I opened my legs and waited to hear the sound of the heartbeat again, the room was silent. After I realized the baby was dead, he told me I was unlucky, said I should start thinking about IVF, a world I didn’t want to enter and had said I would avoid.
Years ago, I was appalled by a woman on a daytime talk show; she had gone through eight rounds of IVF. She told the audience that she would not stop until she had her “own baby.” Oh, honey, I thought, give it up. The writing is on the wall, and this is just pathetic. I didn’t want to be that woman, catapulted onto a path of treatment with no end. There I lay, my feet still in the stirrups, the doctor inviting me down that endless path of IVF, genetic testing, and surrogates. I couldn’t help but feel like the wind of death had followed me across the ocean, just as I had feared.
After graduation, I became an expendable adjunct. I yearned for a baby and a full-time position. I had neither. If I wanted a baby, I needed to consider costlier options that would bring others into an equation that should have only been me plus my husband. Here was an academy that taught me why women in India working as surrogates was wrong; I had built my career’s foundation on this idea of fighting oppression of women throughout the world. I had set students up to argue exactly this point. But the other self, the one that wanted a baby even more now that I had felt one inside of me, thought that maybe I would need to go to India to find a surrogate. I realized that the academy taught me great theory, but that in practice it was doing nothing to support it, nothing to support me. I earned little money and was offered no health insurance. The thought of finding cheaper labor, a cheaper womb, was tempting to that second part of me, the one that sat in a house with no baby upstairs.
***
I tell everyone that our fertility story will have a happy ending, even though we don’t know its narrative arc. Someday there will be a baby in our house, but she will never be carried by a surrogate whom I feel is being oppressed. Though I know that my choice is the “right” decision, on bad days I feel angry that my beliefs supersede my and my partner’s desires. On good days I know I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.
But sometimes, I wonder if being able to look at myself in the mirror is worth the sacrifice of never being able to look into the eyes of my child.
In Agra, I witnessed a shrouded woman being carried to her funeral pyre. Men carried the litter, garlands of pink flowers around their necks—the same kind of garlands schoolchildren would drape over our necks in welcome a few days later—her dead body draped in white. The college group I was chaperoning had started the New Year with a visit to the Taj Mahal, beaming white in the noonday sun, the shadows perfectly symmetrical. This woman’s shroud shone just as white in the hot Indian sun.
In India, I served as the boots on the ground: the one who fetched the doctor when students got Delhi belly, who made sure everyone was on the bus, who took kids aside and let them cry when the sight of poverty was just too much that day. In the roads of India, I saw cows, goats, an elephant, toddlers walking alone, a man with no legs dragging himself by calloused fingers and elbows across six lanes of traffic.
On the bus ride back to our hotel in Delhi from the Taj Mahal, sleep eluded me. The bus driver’s incessant honking was a jolting signal to pass, to demand room, to signal to pedestrians, to greet other drivers. After seeing both Shah Jahan’s memorial to his dead wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and the woman shrouded and perfumed off to her last rite, I saw another death: this time a man on the side of the road. A minute before he had been riding his bicycle along the dark road with throngs of others moving about in the night as dark as the ebony inlay of Mumtaz’s tomb. Now his head was smashed, chunks of his brain and skull strewn along the macadam. His mangled bike started the story along the road; the bits of brain ended it. No car had stopped.
Amidst all this death, I didn’t witness the exact moment of life, of birth, that I felt sure would happen at some point. Having read about women whose lack of access to health care forced them to give birth in the streets, I expected to see that moment of joy; if not joy at the entrance of another soul into the world, at least the joy of labor’s pain ending. In a country one-third the size of the U.S., with three times the population, I felt I had to see new life begin to counter the deaths I saw every other day in India. About to start fertility treatments when I returned to the United States, I needed a good omen, needed to see a slippery, shiny baby to satisfy my own selfish superstition; I didn’t want the deaths to follow me across the ocean and curse our attempts at starting a new life.
I never did see that life begin.
This trip would be my last for a while, a palpable fact that followed me around India for the duration of the two-week trip. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for over five years, with no result. I knew the fertility testing and treatments would monopolize my time and that I would be landlocked until they worked; there would be no more trips across the world for a while. I was still tan from India’s sun when we trudged through the January snowstorm to meet the doctor who would become part of our marriage for the next several years.
Blood tests, dye shot into my uterus, and exploratory surgeries revealed what we had already known: that our chances of conceiving on our own were almost nil. Our doctor said one percent. I wasn’t about to bet on our chances of getting pregnant. But we did, thanks to injections, and what I called the “turkey baster method.” And then we lost it. And six months later, we got pregnant on our own, had won our own type of lottery. After seeing pictures and hearing its heartbeat, we lost the baby again. The doctor on call told me I was probably just “unlucky.”
***
I am a post-colonial scholar who focuses on the issue of women’s bodies in the world. In an effort to have my research field intersect with the trip, I started the course with a discussion of Indian women serving as surrogates. Though the trip did little to force students to think about women’s health issues, we saw Indian women from one step removed. Thirty students and I crammed into a one-room AIDS clinic for male truckers who spread the disease up and down the country. Phantom women infected by the truckers filled the tiny empty spaces. We visited a former leper hospital, now an orphanage for children who had lost their parents to AIDS. Ghost mothers watched as we showed children their own images on our digital cameras. In Delhi and Hyderabad, the streets were packed with men, but the issue of women’s mobility or lack thereof would often come as a sidebar.
“Where are the women?” one of the girls asked.
I told her it was a great question, one the course would continue to address once the phantom women followed us home.
I wanted to start the course with a discussion of women’s issues and found the “outsourcing” of Indian women’s wombs a perfect starting point. With so many business majors on the trip, we talked ad naseum about industry, visiting three multinational corporations with their own zoos and golf courses. Men always gave the presentations, calling to the chai wallah for tea and embarrassing our American sensibilities. No women in charge, no women on the streets. Back in the U.S., I started the course with women to make up for all of the women missing from our trip.
Before the class began, students read an article about women in the U.S. going to India to find surrogates to carry their babies, an exemplification of the capitalism we witnessed gone awry. Cheap labor, literally, at its finest. My party line was that this practice is wrong. I wanted the students to be as devastated as I was about this abuse of women, of people taking advantage of India’s poverty. We read articles about women who lived in a home, were watched over by their womb “pimps” to make sure the surrogates didn’t drink alcohol or take drugs, that the women ate well, that they were controlled. I wanted the students to say, “Sure, it seems like they are making the decision to be a surrogate, but really isn’t it their circumstances that force the women into surrogacy?”
In class we listened to a radio news show that interviewed women at a fertility clinic in Anand. Nandini Patel carried another couple’s baby because she wanted to fulfill her dream: a house for her own family. Priyanka Sharma considers doing it a second time for, very simply, the much-needed money. Finally, an American woman—Julie, no last name offered—admitted she was in Anand to save money, save the heartache of losing the child to bureaucracy, and to monitor the strict conditions under which her baby lived in its surrogate’s belly.
In India, we saw poverty that blistered our eyes: children playing in filth, emaciated men carrying bloated tourists in rickshaws, bedraggled animals limping in the streets. Once we returned to our classroom in the States, we looked at pictures of sari-ed women on cots, bunched together in rooms watching television. We bemoaned the lack of regulation, deplored that women signed off any rights to ensure the international adoptions could go smoothly. In the context of our trip, I wanted the students to question the implications of Americans and other people from wealthy nations using women’s bodies—surrogates these women would never even meet nor know the names of—to carry their babies into the world.
I trudged to class to teach that lesson in the same snow that almost kept my husband and me away from our first appointment with our fertility doctor. That January had already dumped more snow on us than I would have liked, and I was frustrated that the appointment we made months ago might be canceled because of another storm. This was before I understood the fertility world doesn’t stop for a foot of snow, nor does it stop for a single holiday or vacation. We made the hour drive to the doctor for our consultation. This would be one of the only times my husband would actually have to come along; later, I would speed to the doctor’s office with my husband’s sperm tucked into my bra, keeping it warm while he went to work.
I loved our doctor from the start. Her office was a mess. She had a cold. Her clothing was out of date. There was nothing intimidating about her. Her life looked like mine: full of chaos and one step away from out of control. The journals piled on her desk mirrored the image of my desk at home, articles piled high waiting to be read. My husband, an organized high school science teacher, wasn’t nearly as comforted, but I was thrilled not to find someone who had her life all together, but someone who might be able to understand the swirling limbo I felt.
We told her about our past experience of an ob-gyn throwing me on Clomid with no testing or advice. I now realize how unprofessional and dangerous this man was. I told her that when I was on the medicine, I couldn’t see well, that I hit the garage with my car twice, that I finally stopped taking it when it didn’t work. I wish the story of the disinterested doctor were uncommon, but this woman nodded her head, having heard such fertility nightmares before. We had tried for five years and were ready to get serious. We didn’t want to think about the cost; we just knew something had to be done. She ordered a litany of tests, my introduction into the world of blood work and ultrasounds. We learned I had an infection and my husband’s sperm aren’t good swimmers—two things that modern medicine could remedy.
Before I went to teach my India class, I would often have to stop at the doctor’s and stick out my arm. A band-aid covered the crook of my elbow hidden under my blazer. The little tug of the adhesive reminded me about my other life, one that no one knew about. But still, the image of the outsourced wombs reigned over the class, discussion often returning to them as we read Rushdie, Desai, Lahiri. Over the semester, the discussion of pregnant women became more and more painful for me as our treatments stalled. To see pictures of big-bellied women, looking ripe and healthy, made my stomach feel flatter, made me feel like a barren woman of the 1950s. We didn’t know if we were going to able to have a baby even with the help of the doctors. In class, students would brazenly rail against the practice of using women in India as surrogates. They made sweeping innocent claims that women of the U.S. were evil, colonizing imperialists exploiting India’s women. They were saying exactly what I wanted them to say, but their naïveté infuriated me. What did they know? Their days were spent sleeping, studying, and perhaps doing drugs or each other. They knew nothing about this issue I handed to them in the first place, but they were spitting back at me the righteous anger I wanted out of them: only now I hated them for it.
I started living two lives: the PhD candidate teaching courses on feminism and post-colonial literature and the woman desperately trying to get pregnant. Those in the former world knew nothing about the latter. Perhaps someone at the university would see me tear off the band-aid and toss it in the Writing Center trash, but otherwise, no one needed to know about this other life that didn’t fit with the image of a feminist scholar. So when after a year of treatments we got pregnant and lost the baby weeks later, no one knew. I graduated, gave a commencement address, won an award, and felt happy and relieved from the grief for a solid week.
Then we miraculously got pregnant on our own. Over the previous year people kept saying, all you need to do is relax and the baby will come. There is nothing so heartbreaking to say to a woman undergoing fertility treatments (one would never say to a diabetic, if you just relax the insulin will manage itself). We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary at the clinic where we saw the first pictures of our baby and heard its heartbeat. We told some friends. We felt like we were dancing inside a miracle, that our luck had turned. And then we went to the doctor—a substitute while our regular doctor went to the Jersey shore, a man we had never met—and when I opened my legs and waited to hear the sound of the heartbeat again, the room was silent. After I realized the baby was dead, he told me I was unlucky, said I should start thinking about IVF, a world I didn’t want to enter and had said I would avoid.
Years ago, I was appalled by a woman on a daytime talk show; she had gone through eight rounds of IVF. She told the audience that she would not stop until she had her “own baby.” Oh, honey, I thought, give it up. The writing is on the wall, and this is just pathetic. I didn’t want to be that woman, catapulted onto a path of treatment with no end. There I lay, my feet still in the stirrups, the doctor inviting me down that endless path of IVF, genetic testing, and surrogates. I couldn’t help but feel like the wind of death had followed me across the ocean, just as I had feared.
After graduation, I became an expendable adjunct. I yearned for a baby and a full-time position. I had neither. If I wanted a baby, I needed to consider costlier options that would bring others into an equation that should have only been me plus my husband. Here was an academy that taught me why women in India working as surrogates was wrong; I had built my career’s foundation on this idea of fighting oppression of women throughout the world. I had set students up to argue exactly this point. But the other self, the one that wanted a baby even more now that I had felt one inside of me, thought that maybe I would need to go to India to find a surrogate. I realized that the academy taught me great theory, but that in practice it was doing nothing to support it, nothing to support me. I earned little money and was offered no health insurance. The thought of finding cheaper labor, a cheaper womb, was tempting to that second part of me, the one that sat in a house with no baby upstairs.
***
I tell everyone that our fertility story will have a happy ending, even though we don’t know its narrative arc. Someday there will be a baby in our house, but she will never be carried by a surrogate whom I feel is being oppressed. Though I know that my choice is the “right” decision, on bad days I feel angry that my beliefs supersede my and my partner’s desires. On good days I know I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror.
But sometimes, I wonder if being able to look at myself in the mirror is worth the sacrifice of never being able to look into the eyes of my child.
Working notes
This piece was originally composed for a collection about the idea of globalizing motherhood that never made it to publication. I am happy that something forced me to write this essay that was sitting inside of me, and I am glad—though nervous—that it has found a home for publication. I worry that we as scholars sometimes do not admit that our theoretical backgrounds and ideologies force us to consider questions about personal desire and the implications of our actions. I know this piece is less painful to see published because we did welcome our daughter into the world a year ago, though the pain of losing pregnancies and now knowing the joy that was delayed for a decade make reading the essay difficult, like reopening a wound that was mostly healed when our daughter was born.
About the author
Colleen Lutz Clemens, assistant professor of Non-Western Literatures at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, earned her Ph.D. in Post-Colonial Literature at Lehigh University. Her research focuses on issues of veiling in literature, and she studies the intersection of women’s issues in art and politics. Her academic work has been published in Feminist Formations. She is the editor of several books of non-fiction including Philadelphia Reflections: Stories from the Delaware to the Schuylkill and has published short essays in various collections including Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. She lives in Bucks County with her partner, two dogs, and daughter. She can be reached at clemens@kutztown.edu or via her blog kupoco.wordpress.com.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.