5

In one unlit corner of the waiting room, a mother, wife, again-to-be grandmother stands with her back against the wall. She feels safer in the relative shadows, away from the light, as if by doing so she can escape the malevolent attentions of the universe. Every time someone—a doctor, a nurse, an orderly—enters, she shrinks a little as if to render herself invisible, preferring ignorance to bad news about her daughter and the baby.

But as the minutes pass uninterrupted, a slow anger builds: Will no one—no doctor, no soothsayer, no god?—reveal to her the outcome of this waiting and free her from this particular hell? She’s been patient long enough. The time allotted to her is even now running out.

Until then she’d accepted her impending death with resigned equanimity, much as she’d accepted everything that happened as simply how the world worked. But now she wants more than just the knowledge of the well-being of her daughter and her baby:

She wants to hold and coddle her grandchild, to be there when he takes his first steps, when he utters his first words. She wants to teach him Urdu, to sing him Urdu lullabies and ghazals. She wants to see her daughter settle down with her partner; she wants to cook for them the most delicious meals they’ve ever eaten.

She wants the world—for herself, for her two daughters, for all her grandchildren—more fiercely now that she’s confronted with a world slipping away from her.

A figure approaches, haloed under the light, unearthly, otherworldly. He’s a doctor, a healer—like her husband, her daughters’ father, but not him—and as he draws nearer:

Oh, what comfort does he bring?

6

Inside an operating room, a not-to-be mother is laid out on a table under the cool annular brilliance of surgical lighting, her domed belly exposed.

She’s unaware, of course, of where she is. Her heart continues to pump what feeble blood it can. Her lungs continue to inhale and exhale a straitened air. She’s hooked up to machines that monitor her body for signs of life, to tubes that dribble into her the blood and fluids her body has lost and the anesthesia that will deaden her to any pain her mind can still acknowledge.

Around her assemble doctors and nurses, their hair covered, faces masked, bodies gowned, hands gloved. Scalpels and scissors, forceps and suction tips—these are the tools at hand for these robed figures: inadequate, but the best they have. A scalpel slits through the skin and fat covering her belly and slips into her womb.

Blood seeps out of her like a spring. Gloved hands probe the interior of her split womb, seeking to lift out her blood-smeared baby. The umbilical cord connecting her to the child is snipped. Her body struggles to hold on to the wispy flame of life still flickering through it. Others bear the child away.