TW: Abortion
“Surrogate” depicts detachment, autonomy, guilt/relief through our main character Sarama and her situation with her husband, Soumen.
Sarama, a school teacher living in a joint family marriage taking care of her husband, Soumen’s father, and his two younger siblings. Sarama’s dream is to have a child – of her own to take care of.
Being a school teacher was similar to rubbing salt on a wound. Sarama sees her students being picked up by laughing and gossiping mothers and envies them. She wants to be in their position and hates them for it. Her desire to birth children almost becomes torturous – she gets unexplainably painful headaches that doctors said would only go away with pregnancy.
However, Soumen has no such desires and keeps making excuses to push off.
Soumen’s excuses come in the form of service: take care of the father, raise the younger siblings, get the younger siblings married and settled. In order for this to happen, both Sarama and Soumen need to continue to work. With work and Soumen’s excuses, fifteen years pass by. The father passes away, both siblings graduate, get married and Sarama is still childless.
Suddenly, Soumen starts to change; he starts buying Sarama gifts when he never had before. He starts to bring in porn magazines and expresses his desires for kinks. He is finally showing desire to have children after fifteen years. Needless to say, Sarama was not used to this side of Soumen yet she detached herself for the sake of her potential unborn baby. Instead of a sense of relief, Sarama is disgusted. She’s battling with the reasoning of her own desires to bear children versus the unexpected changes in her husband.
On her way home from the doctors, finally hearing the news Sarama’s been waiting for, she runs into her brother-in-law. He informs Sarama about the shenanigans of his older brother; how Soumen has been meeting this ‘bad’ woman from the neighborhood and Sarama needs to stop it. The world comes crashing down on Sarama and yet, the clouds lift over her head. She is finally able to put two and two together of the strangeness of her husband’s recent behavior. Gift giving, porno magazines and kinky desires are all Soumen’s confession and guilt.
At that moment, Sarama makes her decision; she aborts her fetus. To her, the fetus was the result of Soumen and his desire for the other woman. While Soumen was impregnating Samara, he was fantasizing about his mistress thus making her a surrogate of Soumen and his mistress’ child.
Nabaneeta Sen takes an interesting approach to surrogacy. Surrogacy is usually when a woman gives birth to an external couple’s child/ren. In this case, Sarama symbolically becomes the surrogate of Soumen and his mistress. Even though it was technically her child, she would not see it as such. Sarama thinks that she has no right/ownership of the fetus.
This story has been in my mind for weeks now because at first, I was struggling to understand Sarama’s perspective when it came to her pregnancy. Sarama’s action of abortion was puzzling yet intriguing. Why did she see her own fetus as her husband’s and his mistress? Why do Soumen and his mistress take precedence over the fetus growing in Sarama’s body? As the mother and future birth giver of the fetus, Sarama has more right over the fetus than both the mistress and Soumen. I recognized that I think mothers’ have more love, responsibility and ultimately, more say towards her child than the father or anyone else and Islamically, that is true in some sense. I never thought the other way was reasonable. However, after reading this, my perspective was broadened and I appreciate Sen’s outlook in “Surrogate”.
Reference
Dasgupta, Sanjukta. Her Stories: 20th Century Bengali Women Writers. Srishti, 2003.
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