Baby talk in family plots

Shah Rukh Khan may or may not have had a third child, he and his wife may or may not have conducted a gender test to check its sex, they may or may not have had the baby through surrogacy - but the subject is taboo in our family conversations because of a certain in-law who must never be named. Anonymous and his wife have not been able to arrive at the dubious distinction of parenthood, but they will not consider surrogacy for reasons unclear to my wife, who is a great keeper of its faith and would, no doubt, have leased her womb for the cause, had such miracles at her age been possible.

All this secrecy has confused me so much, I no longer know who's had babies, and who hasn't. When I commiserated with an in-law on the woes of nocturnal parenting, I was met by frigid silence. Fortunately, my wife giggled instead of admonitioning me, which meant I had unknowingly trumped some trigger of family politics. "Darling," said my wife, "it's all about inheritance" - apparently, those with babies getting to keep land and legacy, while those without, agreeing to enforced godparenthood to keep their earnings within the clan instead of bestowing them on a charity for cats and dogs.

There's a dynastic divide about the next generation in the family, like a net drawn between heir raising incumbents, lobbing adoptees and surrogates against those to the manor naturally born, the rhetoric getting shriller with each exchange. Can you be too old to be parents? How about going straight to being grandparents then? "Grandparents to your own child, don't be silly," my wife snapped when I suggested it as a tiebreaker. I'm still hoping something will come of it, though nappy-changing in the middle of the night when you ought to be having hip and knee replacements isn't my current idea of fun.

Birthright, unfortunately, isn't the sum and balance of savings bank accounts and Kalpana Mausi's fake heirlooms. There's the matter of family traits and habits - what if the surrogate baby picks up Shorty Mama's unfortunate kleptomania and pretty nearly everyone else's dipsomania? Wasn't there a history of cheating in the bloodline, did Tina Jiji's habit of two-faced hypocrisy qualify as a bipolar flirtation? Is the genetic predilection likely to swing towards poor materialism or poorer mathematics?

The sword of surrogacy continues to hang over transnational calls, the subject being considered too delicate to be addressed in emails. Conference calls on who might or might not be biased continue late into the night with delightful laundering of family excesses. "Really," I tell my wife, "I didn't know you had such interesting relatives," which apparently is the wrong thing to say, though I mean it as a compliment. Alas, like everything else, decisions are delayed, so I'm still unsure whether a surrogate or substitute or some other form of baby is or isn't adding to the family strength any time soon, or even who the potential parents might, or might not, be. But I admit to a moment of panic when my wife suggested to her relative that should he and his wife order a baby and then change their minds, my wife and I could step in as alternate parents. Someone ought tell her that it's on account of the same relative and my wife's genetic predisposition that our children still require math tuitions to balance their credit cards - nothing you'd want to risk a third time round when the result is a given.