“Positive. Maanav, it’s positive.”
I was in shock. My hands were trembling as I held the test out to show him. Maanav began freaking out and started crying. He was deathly scared of letting his father down. The panic didn’t help either of us.
We called the nurse to the room and told her that it seemed I wasn’t ill after all and quite likely, by the look of the test, pregnant. She was so gentle and understanding of our situation. She stopped all the medication and told us they’d do a blood test to be entirely sure. She said home pregnancy tests could throw up a false positive. Drawing the blood, she sent it off. Now all we had to do was wait, and when family came to visit, act as if nothing had changed. When the doctor came to see me on his rounds that evening, he confirmed that the blood test showed I was indeed pregnant.
It made sense now, I’d had no sickness on the flight to India, but I’d felt tired and nauseous on the way back. What I thought was just travel sickness was clearly something else, or should I say, someONE else.
I felt dizzy all over again, and my heart was racing. I told the doctor how afraid I was because of our conservative culture. It would be a scandal. Pregnancy out of wedlock just didn’t happen. I hadn’t heard of anyone in the Indian community, especially not in our family, who’d had a baby like this, and now here I was, an unmarried, pregnant teen.
The doctor told me I had the option of having a surgical abortion at the hospital, and no one would need to know. It was legal and routine, and would be done at no cost to me under the National Health Service (the NHS). No record of it would show on my health insurance claim. I could tell the family that I needed to stay in for a day or so more until I finished my course of antibiotics, and then I could go home. I had the night to decide whether I wanted the procedure there. Or, he said, I could take my time to think about it and visit a family planning clinic within the next few weeks.
I decided I couldn’t make a decision like that straight away, and I wouldn’t do anything either way without talking to Maanav about it first. I telephoned him from the hospital and told him it was 100% confirmed, we were indeed pregnant. The following day, we had an ultrasound scan to ascertain how far along we were in the pregnancy and to check that everything was okay. Before they discharged me, they gave me a photo. And there it was, my teeny tiny jelly bean (that’s exactly what it looked like) growing inside me, barely a couple of weeks in the making, but clear as day.
As I lay in bed at home that first night after being discharged from the hospital, I placed my hand on my tummy and felt the connection.
On the doctor’s advice, I started taking prenatal vitamins and natural remedies for the ‘morning’ sickness, which, for me, was more like ‘morning, noon and night sickness’. I could barely eat anything more than completely bland instant noodles in soup. Because I’d been so underweight and lacked a nutritional diet living in Molly Way, my body took the physical impact of the pregnancy really badly. After some days, the vitamins started kicking in, and I felt a little better; although I was still vomiting regularly, I hid it from my parents. When I was looking healthier, they assumed I’d recovered from the ‘mysterious illness’ I’d picked up in India.
For days, Maanav and I went around in circles, stressed and distressed, discussing what to do. He wasn’t keen on telling anyone, especially not his family. He didn’t step up and tell me not to worry, that he’d take care of the baby and me. Instead, he got me an appointment at the family planning clinic near his office in central London. Family planning clinics provide a safe and confidential service where anyone can get an abortion. They also provide free contraception, testing for STDs and pregnancy, and counselling. I spoke to a counsellor alone there and told them about my conservative Indian culture, the reputation of Maanav’s family, the history of violence with my father and how I was worried about his reaction. The counsellor concluded that my only apparent option was to have an abortion.
(Originally published on os.me on May 14, 2021)