Aren’t our lives circumscribed, in any case, by powers over which we have little control?

16

Seema, I held our son in my arms. They had swaddled him in a blanket, to keep him warm, so only his face was visible—your face: heart shaped, an obstinate set to his lips, his eyes tightly shut. But his hair was all mine. I wanted to hold him without the blanket but didn’t know how to remove it. I was afraid I would drop him if I tried to unwrap him with one hand.

I asked a nurse to help. She looked at me oddly at first, as if she didn’t understand, but then she took him to the table and undid carefully the bundle of him. When she handed him back to me, holding him in one hand, with his body resting against her forearm and his neck supported by her palm—oh how tiny he was, how beautiful, blue-black all over, with just a hint of pink on his lips—I couldn’t figure out how to take him from her, how to hold him, with his arms and legs dangling and in the way.

How easy she made it look. Like this, she said, hold your arms like this. She made me raise and hold one arm bent, with my other hand below it, palm facing upward. To support the body, she said.

17

Grandmother, waiting outside you’re unaware of what’s transpiring in this operating room, even though the force of your mind is bent here.

Here’s how your elder daughter, Seema, dies: After plucking me out of my mother’s womb and handing me over to a nurse without even a glance, the doctor turns his attention back to my mother’s body on the table, attempting to stanch the flow of blood that is quickly draining her of life. But how to force the blood to remain in a body that seems intent on expelling it? He’s only human: he continues to try even after your daughter’s heart ceases pumping.

As for me: What real chance did I have? My body has always known what awaits it: acids have been building up in my bloodstream, and my brain has for some time been slowly strangled of oxygen. Detached from my body, my mind has all along been hovering—fluttering, skittering, skipping—suspended like a trill clinging to the air, straining to keep afloat, to keep away the final dying cadence.

But what a glorious song, Grandmother! Death sings in ways Birth cannot. It takes a lifetime to perfect that purity of tone, the vibrato of lament.

It has taken me all of three minutes.

Don’t pity me, Grandmother: I may not have experienced anything real but the inside of my mother’s womb, but I still have the song Death sings through me.

In that respect, I’m perhaps no less fortunate than others with more life: for aren’t so many of their songs merely wishful or fanciful, lined with desire and regret and envy, about what might have been but never was—or merely bitter and dissatisfied, lined with anger and remorse and guilt, of what was but never should have been?