Bandit Book Review: A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi
In trendy Silicon Valley, Priya has everything she needs—a loving husband, a career, and a home—but the one thing she wants most is the child she’s unable to have. In a Southern Indian village, Asha doesn’t have much—raising two children in a tiny hut, she and her husband can barely keep a tin roof over their heads—but she wants a better education for her gifted son. Pressured by her family, Asha reluctantly checks into the Happy Mothers House: a baby farm where she can rent her only asset—her womb—to a childless couple overseas. To the dismay of friends and family, Priya places her faith in a woman she’s never met to make her dreams of motherhood come true.
Together, the two women discover the best and the worst that India’s rising surrogacy industry has to offer, bridging continents and cultures to bring a new life into the world—and renewed hope to each other. --A House for Happy Mothers (AmazonPub, June 2016)
I was a bit amused when my spring issues of The Virginia Quarterly Review arrived, for gracing its cover was "The Surrogacy Cycle". It was indeed interesting timing, as I was in the process of reading for review Amulya Malladi's A House for Happy Mothers, which coincidentally, is about Indian surrogacy - a business which holds the promise of being a "win-win" for both parties involved - the surrogate and the parents-to-be. But is it truly a win-win for those involved? Or is it a crude exploitation of those who are desperately attempting to flee poverty by western affluence?
A House for Happy Mothers succeeds in putting faces and lives behind the stories of surrogacy that many of us read about from the news. In Malladi's deft hands, we catch a glimpse of the personalities that could be involved in this exchange - the impoverished women who see a way out of poverty and the usually well-off westerners who are able to purchase their off-spring, often at bargain basement prices. We meet Priya and her husband Madhu - a successful couple who has everything except a child. We bear witness to their hesitancies, eagerness and the shame even, that could be involved in such intimate transactions.
We are allowed into Asha's life - the surrogate- and through her meet the promise that renting one's womb out has for her and her family along with the many other women who at some point in their lives, end up in a home to deliver someone else's baby, most often more than once (the VQR article points out how common it is for women to repeat surrogacy as the money from the first one is never nearly enough to be that ticket out of poverty).
Malladi gives us inside passes into these women's lives. Through these characters, we understand the grey areas involved, the mishaps and the successes. I personally appreciated experiencing Asha (the surrogate) and Pratap's (her husband) relationship - seeing how this non-western construct was able to bend but not break under the extremes that such a transaction demands not just from the women, but for those who surround her in her life. It was refreshing to see a male Indian character not fall into the stereotypes that the world has about him.
While the VQR article by Abby Rabinowitz demonstrates that too often the surrogates are left "little to show for their efforts," Malladi brings the reader closer to a reality that is just as guilty of exploitation as it is responsible for offering opportunity: to both those who become surrogates and those who are on the receiving end of parenthood. A House for Happy Mothers is a "best case scenario" story, as much as the situation could allow -and Malladi's use of chatroom dialogue truly captures the anxiety new motherhood inevitably bestows upon the women who find themselves powerless as they are usually very long distances away from the women who are carrying what is most definitely their most precious gift. I especially appreciated how the narrative shifted between the two families, giving us insight into Asha's experiences - her misgivings, hope and the conversations she has with other surrogate mothers is at best, revealing.
This is not a book that makes an argument as much as it gently takes your hand to walk in the shoes of two women who have chosen an option that is available to them. It is an engrossing, quick read and a refreshing look into what is in this case, a slice of American life, and how our privilege can seem superhero-like in the eyes of the global poor. A House for Happy Mothers is more than a book about surrogacy. It's about womanhood and what that can look like from two very extreme ends of the spectrum.
