A different kind of fever

Can childbirth turn the habits of an inveterate reader upside down? Publisher CHIKI SARKAR recounts how motherhood made her a seeker of romance novels.

- Chiki Sarkar

I have been more hormones than human last year. first there was the HCG in my urine test in April: confirmation that I was pregnant. Then the estrogen and progesterone went on overdrive. Suddenly I was nauseous after my meals and began to pant as I walked up to my second-floor flat. After that I lost track of the vast, invisible army that took over my body, changing my skin and hair, rounding my stomach, softening my movements.

But it wasn’t just my body that was transforming itself, making my little boy Ashok inside me. Hovering over all of these little soldiers was an invisible God who had taken over my mind. I had just started my publishing company (our app launch and the news of my positive test came in the same week) but the daily stresses of my job suddenly ceased to matter. There was now a barrier between real life and the magic in my body. No bad news, no crisis, could penetrate into the dark secret stuff that was taking place within me.

It changed my reading too. One summer’s day, early into my first trimester, when I’d otherwise have read Elena Ferrante or Zadie Smith, I took myself off to The Lodhi hotel’s pool and began to read Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible under the cool fans, with a tall glass of fresh lime soda beside me.