We’re each seeing a slightly different rainbow, he says. A rainbow, like beauty, is in the beholder’s eye.

15

At some point, when the hydrogen in its core is exhausted, the sun’s nuclear reactions will cease. The sun will have expanded to more than a hundred times its current size by then, engulfing the earth and its moon. Perhaps that is the description of the dawn of Qiyamah, the day of resurrection.

But this is billions of years in the future, and the inventories of my own futures interest me more.

In the normal course of events, this is what should happen after my lungs expand for their first taste of air: My vocal cords will quicken for their first cry. My lips will seek a nipple for my first suckle of mother’s milk. In a few hours, my bowels will move. In a few days, my stomach will increase from the size of a marble to the size of my fist.

I’ll learn to recognize voices, faces, smells, in a couple of months. My eyesight will become capable of distinguishing primary colors, then the full rainbow spectrum, over a period of five months. I’ll sit up, then crawl, then take my first step, then walk, then run, over a period of two years. I’ll gurgle, then babble, then speak, first in words, then in sentences that will grow more confident, more complex, over a period of six years.

My first set of teeth will erupt, then fall away one by one, to be replaced by a permanent set, by the time I’m twelve. Sometime around then my testes will increase in size, my scrotum will descend, the shaft of my penis will grow longer, thicker, and pubic hair will begin to sprout. My testicles will produce the first of the millions of sperm they’ll churn out over my lifetime. I’ll experience my first ejaculations. My vocal cords will shorten, and my voice will drop an octave lower, to my adult voice. I’ll be sixteen when these changes are complete. I’ll have grown from my current height of twenty inches to my adult height by the time I’m twenty-one.

Meanwhile, the hundred billion neurons in my brain—formed during my first six months inside my mother’s womb—will form hundreds of trillions of connections with each other, rapidly at first, as my newborn brain responds to every attention and stimulation, then slower and slower, as newer experiences serve mainly to reinforce some connections, weeding out others.

I’m a blank slate at birth, with an infinity of futures available to me. With each neural connection that is made, that my brain fails to make, that is pruned, the futures are whittled down, until if I were alive long enough, there’s only one life I could possibly live.

Call it fate, call it destiny. Call it qismat, call it the will of Allah. Call it following the laws of nature, call it acting in accordance with our natures. Say it’s been decided by evolution; say it’s in our genes, in the secretions from our glands, in the pathways in our brains. Say we’re the products of our environments, our upbringings, our histories.