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.

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.