Our Daughter Cost Three Rounds and Every Rupee We Had

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of IVF is sometimes the spreadsheet. I kept one on my husband's old laptop — consultation fees, the injections that cost more than our monthly groceries, the scans, the anaesthesia, the freezing charges that nobody mentions until the bill arrives. By the end of our first round I knew the price of hope down to the last rupee.

We had savings. After the first round, we had less. After the second, we had none. I remember sitting at our dining table with my mother-in-law's gold bangles in front of us, the ones she had given me at our wedding, and my husband saying very quietly, "If we sell these, we try once more." I cried — not because of the bangles, but because he was willing.

There is a particular shame that gets attached to money in our families. People will ask how the treatment is going, but never how you are paying for it. Relatives assume. Neighbours calculate. I learned to stop explaining myself. We borrowed from my brother, took a small loan, and told the truth to the people who mattered. The pretending was more exhausting than the borrowing.

The third round was our last — we had decided that, money or not, our hearts could not survive a fourth. I did the injections without flinching by then. I knew the clinic's chai lady by name. When the doctor called with the result, I was standing in the kitchen, and I sat down on the floor before she even finished the sentence.

Our daughter is two now. She has my husband's stubborn chin and a laugh that fills the whole flat. The loan is mostly repaid. The bangles, in the end, we kept — my mother-in-law refused to let us sell them once she understood, and pressed them back into my hands when our girl was born.

If you are counting rupees tonight and feeling small about it, I want you to know there is no shame in it. We spent everything we had. We would do it again tomorrow. Money comes back, slowly. What we got could never have been bought at any price.