Padma was always smaller than I remembered, and more ordinary. Standing in her doorway in a faded house dress, her hair a thick oiled braid, wrists stacked with the green glass bangles worn by married Marathi women, her smallness struck me when I left Mumbai and when I saw her again. Back in Brooklyn, I worried how to portray her work, and whether to write about her at all.
From 2005 to 2015, India was a global surrogacy hub, drawing infertile and gay couples from countries where surrogacy was illegal or expensive. At Indian fertility clinics, by contrast, local women bore children at bargain rates. The $4,000-$6,000 that surrogate mothers earned was said to be a life-changing sum of money — enough to buy a house or educate a child — but this claim, like much else about the business, has been contested.
In both local and global media, surrogate mothers were framed as either winners of a relative fortune or victims coerced into “renting” their wombs. In October 2015, the Indian government, arguing the practice exploited poor women, banned foreign surrogacy clients altogether.
During the decade of India’s surrogacy boom, there were hundreds of reported stories about the phenomenon, but the surrogate mothers themselves were elusive — strangely absent or cast as supporting players in a Western couple’s fertility saga.
In 2012, for instance, NBC followed a Wyoming couple as they retrieve their baby from a famous surrogacy clinic in Gujarat. There, they meet with Usha, the surrogate mother who almost died delivering the baby at 27 weeks, making the couple “only more grateful to Usha’s sacrifice.” Usha is never quoted. She is the verbal equivalent of a popular stock photograph that showed three pregnant bellies swelling out from saris, heads cropped out of frame. Who were these faceless women? How did they see themselves?
II flew to Mumbai in August 2009 with a research grant to try to answer some of these questions. I had never been to India, but I was fresh out of graduate school for creative nonfiction, a discipline that encourages writers to embrace the unknown. The idea is that you lurk like an anthropologist, taking copious notes toward a nonfiction book as rich and empathetic as a novel. This kind of complex portrayal could, I felt, give surrogate mothers a voice. I never guessed that the story would take me six years or, as I came to think of it, the remainder of my youth.
In Mumbai, I pulled my luggage from the airport into a dark, smoky night. In the taxi, the open windows let in tropical air dense with exhaust, incense, and shit. We drove past rickshaws, past narrow men clustered around kiosks lit by single lightbulbs, squatting on their haunches. Women in saris sat with their feet in the gutter. At the hotel, I recorded feeling resourceful for ordering a bottle of water from room service. Such was my disorientation in this city of moldering buildings, eye-stinging pollution, mosquitos, heat, and constant horns, where barefoot children begged at choked intersections, laying their palms on the closed windows of BMWs.
In retrospect, it’s lucky that it took me five months to meet Padma. I needed to acclimate, and learn enough Hindi to be polite.
I met Padma through her sister-in-law, a former surrogate mother I met in a Mumbai clinic in January 2010. At that point, I had interviewed several surrogate mothers, but always in the presence of a lawyer; their doctors had grown distrustful of the media after being burned by an Australian exposé. This dynamic did not make for frank conversation, so I was grateful when Padma’s sister-in-law allowed me to meet her at home.
When I first appeared at her doorway, Padma was cautious. For one, white women were an oddity in Ulhasnagar, an industrial city north of Mumbai where many surrogate mothers lived. For another, I’d arrived with her sister-in-law, who she considered disreputable. Still, Padma invited me and my translator — a friendly, pushy local journalist — to sit on the family’s bed in their single room. Her teenage daughter Anu, slender in jeans, set down a plate of Ritz crackers.
The journalist explained our purpose in Marathi, and we agreed to change the women’s names for privacy. Gamely, Padma told us about the surrogacy she’d done for a couple in Bihar. Or rather, Padma spoke for several minutes, and at some point, the journalist turned to me and said, “Padma says, ‘When I did it, I got only 1.25 lakh [rupees], which is not enough.’”
Padma, meanwhile, watched me intensely, unsmilingly — which made me think she was serious and spoke in pronouncements. In fact, I later learned that she had a bawdy sense of humor, a sharp and sudden laugh.
On our next visit, we found Padma in her dim kitchen, frying pooris. She’d invited a surrogate mother and another agent to lunch, after which Anu unveiled an eggless chocolate cake to celebrate my visit. She fed me a slice by hand, smearing frosting on my nose, as is Indian custom.
In my notes, I documented my odd role as both reporter and white spectacle, affectionately displayed to relatives and neighbors. I wanted to grasp these women’s intimate thoughts, but I did not yet grasp how to use their toilet.
I needed to learn how to work with a translator and how to report this story. In those early months, I was troubled by the way the journalist glowed in the women’s attentions — the way she joked around with them and didn’t always translate the jokes. Months later, when I had interviews transcribed, I saw she’d asked guiding questions and left things out. The quotes were correct, but I worried that I was missing the subtleties — missing what the women had to say when unasked.
Worse, we were both so present in the room — nothing like the “fly on the wall” writers I’d studied in graduate school, like Tracy Kidder or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. The journalist swatted at Padma’s son when he didn’t do his homework. I practiced English with Anu. Padma constantly urged me to get married and demanded that I call her when I reached my apartment in Bandra.
This growing two-way intimacy was a part of gaining trust. But I suspected it would complicate the story.
Over time, Padma introduced us to a circle of surrogate mothers and egg donors over large lunches. She served as the agent for many of them, taking them to medical appointments and injecting them with hormones. We changed the subject when neighbors dropped by, as the work was taboo. (Married surrogate mothers often disguised the pregnancy as their own and claimed the baby was stillborn.) I learned that the pregnancies were medically risky, with a high incidence of twins, and that the women did not earn a “life-changing” sum of money. The foreign couples met the surrogate mothers briefly in hospital rooms or courthouses. This separation, sometimes imposed by the clinics, meant that the foreign couples did not know the details of the women’s financial deal — or much about them at all.
II flew home to Brooklyn nine months later, where I realized I didn’t have what I needed to write the book I’d imagined. My scenes were mostly of women sitting around gossiping, slapping their thighs in amusement, drinking chai. In my notes, the women seemed crudely drawn, lacking interiority. Though I had spent hours with these women and certainly saw them as complex, I didn’t have the material I needed to portray them as rich characters on the page. Part of the trouble was the awkwardness of translation, which did not reveal their thoughts in detail. So I went back to Mumbai again, and then again.
In January 2012, I went to a party at Blue Frog, a nightclub in Mumbai. I was introduced to Katherine Boo, who’d written a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction account of a Mumbai slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Boo spoke neither Hindi nor Marathi, but her book was novelistic and gorgeous. When I told Boo I was frustrated by my interviews’ limitations, she advised me to spend more time with my subjects — to record their interviews and then review them repeatedly, listening for nuance and voice.
Beyond this painstaking method, Boo’s book had demanded vast resources and institutional support. She reviewed more than 3,000 public records and interviewed 168 people for the book’s pivotal event. She or her translator spent consecutive days and months in the slum. That sort of research was not possible for me, as I was funding the project on my lecturer’s salary. Still, I wanted to approach Boo’s craft.
In her book, I marked sentences like, “Rising to shake out a cramp in his calf, Abdul was surprised to find the sky as brown as flywings, the sun signaling through the haze of pollution the arrival of afternoon.” How did she get that thought? I wondered. In her author’s note, Boo wrote, “I came to my understanding of their thoughts by pressing them in repeated (they would say endless) conversations and fact-checking interviews.”
I imagined applying this process to Padma, pointing at the open sewer that threaded through Ulhasnagar and asking her, “What color is the river? Does it remind you of a local animal?” Or I could fact-check her thoughts in triplicate interviews. She’d think I’d gone insane. Perhaps it was my lack of skill.
II felt incapable of writing the book I’d intended. In the end, Chiara Goia, an Italian photographer who I had been working with, brought me back to India yet again. Padma greeted me with warmth and agreed to repetitive interviews. Interestingly, when I asked Padma how she’d first become an agent, her story had changed from what she first told me. This time, she told me that she taught herself the business after her agent abandoned her. Four years prior, I remember she’d greeted the woman as a friend.
On that trip, we worked with a new translator, a coolly brilliant sociologist whose manner was very different from the journalist. The sociologist and Chiara tried to remain more detached from the family than I had been. They saw Padma as a strong, manipulative local power broker. Padma had encouraged one of her surrogacy patients, a slender widow named Sonali, to take on an unmanageable house loan. The sociologist speculated Padma was getting a cut. As an agent, Padma made ten times Sonali’s salary, and had by that time bought a two-room house. The sociologist also showed me an Anu very different from the sweet, serious college girl I thought I knew; in her eyes, she was a young woman with crude speech who belittled her mother’s patients and called Sonali “a dumb doll.”
Truth had always been slippery in Ulhasnagar. There were rumors of surrogate mothers flying abroad, or who had sold their own babies, or blackmailed foreign clients for more money before signing paperwork to surrender the baby. Denied documents by their doctors, the women had little proof of the stories they told. But slipperiest truth of all was suddenly Padma. Who was Padma, really? Padma was tough — a woman who lifted her family into the middle class — a businesswomen who came to hold the fortunes of women in her hands in the form of passport photos Photoshopped to be paler, so they looked like more desirable egg donors.
On the one hand, Padma was giving dozens of women the chance to earn a better income than they could sewing in Ulhasnagar’s garment factories. But Padma may have been exploiting these women to rise.
Last year, I finally sold the surrogacy story. I no longer knew how to write Padma, who I cared for and worried over, who remains a mystery. By the strange laws of nonfiction, I could have minimized her or cut her out. I could have written solely about any one of several dozen other women, like Sonali, who had simpler, more pathos-laden narratives. The story would have been technically true and in some ways, more emotionally satisfying — a clear, strong shot of injustice. But if I left out Padma, I would have told what Chimamanda Adichie in her TED talk warns is “the single story,” perpetuating a vision of poorer Indian women as abject, passive, and as victims.
Padma was changeable, contrary and no easy heroine. To write her, I had to concede that I could not capture her thoughts or give her voice, but I could report what she said. Maybe this is what it means to finally see a person as complex: to realize you have known just an edge of her, and can only capture a gesture.
This article was originally published in BRIGHT Magazine on July 21, 2016.
