Yet, I’m now expected to welcome a world I know little about, wrenched from my mother’s embrace.

A mother who is already dead. Her heart no longer pumps what little blood remains in her body, lying splayed on the operating table. Beside her, a doctor is furiously trying to revive her, his hands massaging her heart via the six-inch incision in her abdomen through which I was lifted out just a minute ago.

The doctor compresses her heart’s chambers to coax them into action again, all the while issuing commands that others rush to carry out. They’re working hard, these men and women, as if they believe—and fear—they still hold my mother’s life in their hands.

As for my attendants, they’re anxiously awaiting a sign from me. Particularly, a lusty cry that will indicate my lungs have inflated and that I’ve accepted my admittance into this world.

2

Is this to be the extent of my experience of my mother—these few moments in the operating room when I still feel linked to her, the umbilical cord only just severed, the oxygen that flowed through her body still flowing through me? Taking a breath and crossing the threshold of this world will sever my remaining connection to her and consign her to the shadowy regions of my subconscious.

I would like to think I have more choice: I could hold my breath and be granted a longer respite. A few moments more, to grieve what I’ve lost, to appraise what I’m about to enter. For what world handicaps a child at the same time it receives him?

My mother’s name is Seema. Which means face, something of her I will never see, or frontier, something I must leave behind.

How twisted it is: to be able to properly mourn her, I must not cry, for with the very breath I take to cry, I will leave her behind.

All that I will carry of her is what she has left imprinted deep within me.

And the name she’s given me: Ishraaq.

Sunrise. Radiance.

3

What cosmic irony that I, who am birthed at my mother’s darkest hour, am to be named for the day’s rosiest light.

Wasn’t the warning evident in the hour of my conception, during an obscured dawn?

The night before, my yet-to-be mother Seema returns to a home that’s barely visible in the fog. It’s early February in San Francisco. The fog has already rolled in, and it now shrouds Twin Peaks, so there is no house to see, only its faint outline.

The living room is dark; the kitchen and dining room beyond are an orange glow. A bottle of red wine stands open on the dining table next to two empty glasses. My yet-to-be father Bill is not downstairs—the air is too still, the light too steady.