She turns when she hears the door to the fire escape open. She tenses as Bill joins her at the railing. They stand side by side, only their little fingers touching, staring at whatever part of the city the winds choose to reveal. Now the faint necklace of the Bay Bridge, now the lights of cars dipping and rising on Market Street.

“It’s a very lovely view,” Bill says.

It’s the view that sold them on this house, despite its location in the fog belt. “I’ll miss it,” she says.

“I’ll have to look for another place too.”

“Do you have to?” A sense of loss sweeps over her now, as she imagines their home stripped bare. She has moved a lot in her forty years. From Chennai to Oxford, to New York, to San Francisco, to Boston, then back to San Francisco. And within these cities so many dwellings she so briefly called home, only to pack everything up in neat little boxes and move again. She’s become an expert at that.

“It’s too big for a single person,” Bill begins, but stops when he notices her crying. Now the city is doubly blurred. He holds her as she sobs on his shoulder. He massages her fingers.

“You’re cold,” he says. “Let’s go back in.”

Is it love, or is it the chill embers of love flaring one last time before dying out? Is it just bodies seeking warmth and shelter, turning to what’s nearest? They’re back in the bedroom, in bed, the comforter pulled over them. They’re clinging to each other, their faces proximate, their lips touching. Their whispered words are swallowed by their mouths.

4

By chance—or is it fate?—my mother ovulated the night before. An ovarian follicle ruptured, releasing an egg, which nestled at the end of her fallopian tube. Ordinarily, her hormone-releasing intrauterine device would have prevented the sperm my father ejaculates into her from reaching the egg. But Seema had the IUD removed the very first week into their two-month separation, so she could imagine herself once again as the woman she was before she met him.

Of the more than a hundred million sperm that start their way, a tiny fraction reach the egg. It requires the collective efforts of hundreds of sperm to dissolve a path through the cloud of cells that surround the egg, so that one sperm can fuse with it. How they whip their tails and swing their heads in frenzy, activated by the chemicals the egg secretes!

Finally, one sperm succeeds, transferring its unique genetic cargo from my father, which combines with my mother’s DNA and determines me.

What a miracle of conception, even if unintended and unwanted.

5