Ordinary Lives #1

The year Noni, they called her so with love, turned four, she began to sense a strange movement deep inside her Mummy’s body, a pulsing beneath the skin. There was a change, for sure. Noni, who was so sensitive to every touch in her mummy, felt a change in texture every time she mounted  on her lap. As her mother sat motionless at their drawing room door, her vision stretched to its limit, seeking nothing, little Noni sensed this wasn't one of her moody silences. She had lost her completely.  Most of the times when Noni bumped into her lap, she would push her gently away, pleading in a lost voice, "Baby, I am tired, go and play."
Noni was suffused with a helpless jealousy against the thing that had stolen her mommy. Not even his pappa's hugs and his stories about an elephant who fell in love with a steam engine diminished her hurt.  "Come my cutie Bandaria, I'll tell you a story about the Lakshaman Jhula bridge. It is hundreds of years old. It is made of wood and rope and prayers. With faith and ambition. It hangs like a dream on the River Ganga. Noni, babu are you listening?"
She closed her ears to her father's tale and asked instead, "Pappa, why is mommy so quiet? Does she have a ghost in her? Ayyah told me ghosts occupy beautiful woman's body. Mummy is so beautiful" "Oh my child. Your mommy isn't a ghost. She loves you but you are too heavy for her. She has a baby inside her tummy now"
Noni had three months to get used to the idea of having another child in the house.