Book Title: Goddess Complex
Author: Sanjena Sathian
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Number of Pages: 252
ISBN: 978-9365693539
Date Published: May 16, 2025
Price: INR 438
Book Excerpt
Chapter 1
Expectations
Pages 3 to 5
It began innocuously enough, with a text message from an unknown number that arrived while I was soaping my armpits in the ladies’ room of the New Haven train station.
So you and K are back in town.
I presumed that the sender had seen me lugging a forlorn expression around campus recently, where I was, in fact, back after a long spell away. Possibly we had even brushed past each other on the train platform moments earlier. I glanced over my shoulder, quickly, as if some figure might materialize from one of the Pepto Bismol–pink toilet stalls. Then I stood, very still, for perhaps half a minute. All was silent. I became suddenly aware of the foolishness of my posture, the way I was leaning toward the mirror, lit by the sickly fluorescence, my true eyes fixed on my reflected eyes, like a cat tensing up at its likeness in a windowpane. I shook off the chill that had run down my neck at the sight of the initial, K.
There had been nasty, disjointed flashes like this all year, as acquaintances whose names I could not remember, whose faces I failed to place, crossed streets or cafés to say hello and, inevitably, ask about Killian. He was, after all, still legally my husband. I usually just said, “Oh, he’s out of town,” because I could not bring myself to explain the limbo of our situation. I had ghosted him last summer, and we had not spoken in nearly a year. I was something between a wife and an ex-wife, between who I had been and who I would be next.
I pocketed my phone and returned to the task at hand: dabbing my smelly underarms with a damp paper towel. I had stopped shaving (out of laziness rather than self-empowerment) and the more forested my pits grew, the more they seemed to become their own ecological zones. On top of that, I had lost my deodorant, and I could not bathe, as I could not go home: it was commencement weekend on campus, and in order to escape the celebratory crowds of smug families and promising graduates who would emphasize, by contrast, my own pompless circumstances, I’d Airbnb’d my place to some undergrad’s parents and fled to my friend Lia’s, in Brooklyn. My stay had begun pleasantly, until, after I’d poured the four-dollar wine I’d brought as my keep, Lia coyly pushed her glass aside and announced that she was expecting.
“Expecting what?” I asked, absently, thinking of a piece of mail, or another guest.
“Expecting expecting.”
Her beam matched the sheen of her stainless-steel appliances. Lia and her husband Gor had recently bought a two-bedroom condo in a new-construction high rise in Dumbo. All the appliances seemed straight out of plastic wrap. I felt like a mannequin in a showroom. In college, Lia had passed one barefoot, braless summer volunteering on a dairy farm, sleeping on alpaca rugs, extolling Diva Cups. More recently, she and Gor, both attorneys at white-shoe law firms, had been featured in a New York magazine piece about millennials’ home-buying “journeys.” I was still unaccustomed to this new Lia, who had found serenity in her renunciation of renunciation.
My throat clogged, and instead of congratulating her on having become successfully inseminated, I said, “Who the fuck says expecting instead of pregnant?”
Her doll-like features immediately contorted into an expression of utmost sympathy. I grasped that she thought I was jealous.
It was true that my life was increasingly becoming the warped inverse of hers. I’d left Killian the month she and Gor celebrated their two-year wedding anniversary; signed a lease on a dank studio weeks before they closed on the condo. And there was something else, too: unbeknownst to Lia, I had terminated a pregnancy last August. The pregnancy had transformed what had once been my ambivalence about childbearing into a certainty. I could only think: I do not want it in me; I cannot be split.
For weeks after the procedure, I cramped and bled. The doctor said the bleeding went on too long; my womb, she deadpanned, had “relaxed too much.”
So, no, I did not envy Lia’s forthcoming rascal.
If I coveted anything about her life, it was the glow of comprehensibility that surrounded her. Once, I, too, had made sense, but of late, I was becoming less defined. I seemed to have abdicated my birthright citizenship to the nation of marriage and mortgage and motherhood, and beyond its borders lay uncharted terrain. I did mourn something after the procedure—not a specifically rendered unborn child, some slo-mo picture of a dark-haired creature soaring higher and higher on a bright red swing.
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Excerpted with permission from Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian, published by HarperCollins India.
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