The sadness she felt was the sadness of losing the potential of a deeper sense of closeness that she might have had with Omkar. She was just like those young mothers who lacked a sense of love and belonging. A baby felt like a knot that would have been tied between herself and Omkar, fortifying the security of their union. Maybe the guarantee that she would be cherished by him a little longer. Aria was irritated at her own unshakable insecurity when it came to connection. But then again, how could she not be anxious? She wasn’t a girl who was worried about a loss she had never tasted. Loss had been the rule of her life instead of the exception.
There were no children on the beach that day, so instead of watching them, Aria imagined them playing there. She tried to study the bubble of belonging that seemed to exist around a man, a woman and their child. It caused a potent ache to paint itself against the trammel of her chest.
“Hey, what are you looking at?” Omkar said, walking up behind her and kissing her on the cheek from behind. Aria was staring off into the recesses of the ocean, trying to see with her mind what her eyes could not.
“Nothing,” she said, smiling at him as he sat down beside her.
“Why did you come here? Did you miss me?” he jested, mindful of the fact that she had chosen to sit exactly where they had sat during the picnic he had arranged for her on their first date there.
“I don’t know. I just wanted to see the ocean again,” she said.
Omkar could feel the murkiness of her mood, and put his arm around her shoulder, burying his face in the hair that cascaded past the side of her neck. Aria broke the silence by asking, “How would you feel if I got pregnant? I mean, what would you want to do or whatever?”
He sat back in disbelief, his breathing shallow. “Do you think you’re pregnant?” he asked. The entire trajectory of his life hung in the balance of her answer.
“No. I know I’m not pregnant. I just started thinking, since we haven’t exactly been careful about it, you know … What would you think about it if it happened?”
Omkar leaned back on his arms. “What would you want to do about it?” he asked, not wanting to answer first in case his answer was the opposite of hers.
“No, you don’t get to put it back on me. Can you just try to answer?” she asked.
Omkar thought about the fact that he was already struggling to juggle the pressures of school and work and having enough time left over for Aria. He thought about the wrath of his parents, were he to make a “mistake” like that. But even though there were undeniable consequences and even though the timing would not be his first choice, Omkar could not find an inch of himself that felt like those negative factors would outweigh the blessing he would perceive it to be if it actually did happen.
To his surprise, when he considered the question, he realized that it would feel like a consummation of the love that he felt for her. He pulled her to lay her head against his chest. Aria could hear the sound of his heart beating. “Shona, I don’t want to ask you to do anything that you don’t want to do. But how could it not make me happy? A child is a divine spark. It is sacred. If God wanted us to be a soul’s entry into this world, how could I not be happy? I wouldn’t care if it were a girl or a boy. I would want you to have the baby. I could not see it as a mistake because I love you and I know that God likes to use love to create new life.”
Even knowing his heart as well as she did, Omkar’s answer astounded her. She was spinning as a result of it. Omkar coaxed her from her silence. “What would you want to do?”
“I’m not saying that I want it to happen right now or anything, but I wouldn’t want to get an abortion,” she said, looking down at her feet in the sand.
A smile spread across Omkar’s face. He leaned down and kissed the crown of her head. In the wake of the conversation, they watched the ocean with their minds far away from it. Aria let his surety carry her trust, and with the weight of her trust in his arms, Omkar started to think. By American standards, they were young … too young, perhaps, to consider marriage. But when compared to the prospect of bringing life into the world with her, which was a commitment that even divorce could not undo, marriage no longer seemed far away. It made no sense to Omkar why, if he could consent to having a child with her, he hadn’t proposed to her already. The conversation had been a wake-up call to whatever part of himself had not been diligent about taking precautions when they had made love. A wake-up call to the part of himself that knew how much he loved her and how committed to her he really was.
That night, Omkar sat with Aria until she fell asleep. Sensing that his opportunity was upon him, when he walked upstairs, instead of going to his room, he walked straight into his parents’ bedroom. Jarminder was already asleep. With the side table lamp still on, Neeraj was flipping through the pages of a book on acupressure and locating the corresponding pressure points on himself.
Knowing his
