Chapters (16)
Now, not quite nine months later, my mother lies lifeless in an emergency ward in San Francisco, while my father treads the marbled floors outside, a dark silhouette pacing the stark hall. Bill never expected to be here, having had little contact with Seema over the term of the pregnancy, and none yet with me.
He can’t help but wonder: Did he in some way have a hand in delivering us to this fate, by severing all relations with Seema on their divorce and signing away his parental rights to me?
6
Two other people in the hospital also claim kinship to me.
My mother’s mother, Nafeesa, waits with Bill. She’s pressed against a far wall, tiny in that cavernous room, subdued as a shadow in diffused light. Her thoughts are focused and obstinate, continuing a precise litany of hopes and dreams for Seema and me, as if to keep from considering any future that doesn’t include us all together. For how can she even bear to speculate that she who came to assist in a birth has instead precipitated death?
Somewhere in the hospital, my mother’s sister, Tahera, is searching for us. She doesn’t yet know the extent of the crisis, but because she’s a doctor herself, her mind is already mired in the looming possibilities. How is she to face Nafeesa and Seema after the events of the day? And if something were to happen to Seema, how is she to keep her promise and assume responsibility for me, consumed by guilt and remorse at her part in the evening’s tragedy?
7
Grandmother, did you know that the immature egg of me was present in Seema’s developing ovaries when you were pregnant with her, by the time she’d grown to the size of your palm? My future was being initiated within you even as Seema’s was beginning to unfold. And just as you could never have imagined then the shape Seema’s life would take—a shape that includes the two decades you barely got to see her—you can’t begin to imagine now the shape being impressed on mine.
Grandmother, do I have you to thank—or blame?—for summoning your other daughter, Tahera, to meet us in San Francisco? For it seems now that it is Tahera who will hold and feed me, her lullabies that will rock my sleeping, her words that will guide my first steps. It is her I will come to call mother when I am able to utter the word.
I see her clearly, this substitute, running toward me through a maze of hospital corridors, her hijab fluttering, her jilbab tripping her up, her face flattened and blanched by unforgiving fluorescent light.