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?

I share this song with you, Grandmother, so it might bring you some comfort. I have mere moments to live. You will soon learn of our fates—my mother’s and mine—without needing to hear the words spoken by the doctor, for the expression on my not-to-be father’s face will convey everything you need to know.

Grandmother, somewhere in this building your other daughter, Tahera, my other not-to-be mother, is searching for us. She is lost: the maze of corridors that separate us—identical and blandly monotonous—have confused her. She asks for directions but is too impatient, too agitated, to heed them. Now, in the desperate hope that she’ll somehow be led to us, she’s hurrying through corridors picked at random, clutching to herself her jilbab, which trails her raggedly—the sleeve and skirt were caught in the car door as she made haste to exit the cab, the fabric ripping when she yanked to extricate them.