Valentine’s Day as new parents: Love in the time of diapers

We are in the park. It is a golden afternoon in Delhi, the sky so blue and the sunlight so dappled that the subject seems apt.

We have been together a long time, Mr Jha and I, and Valentine’s Day has never occasioned a budget in the past. I dimly remember a first V-day celebration. This would be circa 2003, and the expense was certainly minor: a small gift (given ironically of course) and a halved mutton patty each, in the era when Flury’s still had white walls and no franchises. (The patty was Rs 14 and the gift, two soft-toy pigs that kissed to Chinese music, in the range of Rs 100.) The celebration was entirely surreptitious. If our college friends at Presidency found out we had participated in such a bourgeois affair, we would hear no end of it. Valentine’s Day was meant to be mocked: This was our youth.

Later, as right-wing attacks against celebrating couples in cities grew rampant, many of these former mockers of our generation decided to embrace V-day as protest, and interesting things such as the Pink Chaddi campaign were launched. But by then we were married, struggling in the struggling-writers’ world, far too grown up for such fripperies. Valentine’s Days came and went without comment. Soon, it became a day when girlfriends got together for lunch.

2024: The present. The park, a profusion of flowers, the very mild scent of spring in the air, everything conspiring to erase — temporarily — all the worries of our time that we carry around in our hearts. “I would like a Valentine’s Day present this year,” I tell Mr Jha. “Is it the expensive stroller?” “No,” I say witheringly. Then: “It is the expensive high chair.”

The subject of this conversation wriggles in my arms. She would like a better view of the parakeets who are, along with pigeons and squirrels, pecking at grain, while a cold breeze, still carrying the breath of winter, gently shakes the branches above — and, therefore, the shadows below. We are her slaves, and so, careful to not disturb the birds, we inch closer. Masha laughs.

We look at each other, Mr Jha and I, and shake our heads ruefully. A quarter of an hour ago, we’d had to flee from the children’s shop where said stroller and high chair were arrayed in impressive rows of strollers and high chairs. Masha had considered being strapped into a stroller a mighty insult. She was screaming bloody murder. Now, she softly calls the birds to her. “Come, come, come,” her hands gesture.

We who live in the world of adults, of razors and knives, apocalypse and war, are only just learning to savour these quiet afternoons of parakeets and babblers.

After a difficult pregnancy (during which my daily Valentine was my beloved doctor, Ruma), when Masha was born many weeks before her due date, Mr Jha and I felt our love for each other leave our individual frames, where they had lived — not always painlessly — and become a conjoined pulsating ball that hovered just outside the NICU of Gangaram Hospital, where she spent a month in a little tray. Our bodies would return home every night while the ball waited with her. Some days, when the going was good, it glowed in the dark; other days, it was a grey cloud that stalked the doctors and pestered the nurses: “Is she going to be okay?”

This new and frantic love of ours was so wrought with superstition that everything seemed like audacious arrogance on our part, breathing, walking, telling the world about her, even giving her a name. Very often, we didn’t know what to do with it, where to place it — this impossible love which apparently our parents had wordlessly carried for us all these years without our knowing — in our house with its hundreds of dusty books and our ever-present uncertainty about the future.

In the face of this new and frantic love, so demanding that everything else receded in its wake, did the conjoined ball, now home and hovering above her, morph into an old and sure thing? Can romantic love ever be old, ever be sure? Who can tell.

Valentine’s Day 2024. Halfway through this essay I am writing, we have a big fight, Mr Jha and I. All our worries about money and unmet deadlines, all our anguish about our formerly bohemian lives and our wasted years, all the interrupted nights of little sleep and my constant worry about her weight: They collide and implode. We shout at each other. I am full of recriminations.

Then, chastened, we bring our new and frantic love back upon her throne, our former marital bed. She glowers, scolds us, and then — her eyes widening in unbelievable innocence — she vomits. As I hold what was her lunch in my upturned palms and her father hunts for towels, as our guilt unfolds and panics, I look up at the ceiling and find the ball of our love hovering up there, directly above the kid, radiant with a kind of half-light.

Roy is a Delhi-based author. Her most recent book is Cat People, an edited anthology