We are born into the dirt of the earth as an act of respect. After all, it is the earth that sustains us. As far as I know I also dropped into one of those pits from my mother’s womb, and a pit is where I’ll be put again when my heart beats no more. There are some families, especially the ones where the wife comes from some other village or town, who prefer to go to a hospital for the birth. We do not judge or stop them, it’s everyone’s own prerogative to decide where and how to give birth, if at all. They feel safer at a hospital, although many of them bear their second or third child in a hole dug for them by their husbands.

I don’t have children, and at my age that situation is unlikely to change. I don’t know what I would have decided, pit or hospital, if I had to face the choice. But as I sit by the window, watching the fields at night – they’re darker than black, as if they’ve merged with the sky above, their depths hiding more secrets than all the seas – I’m thinking it’s a blessing to be born in a pit. It’s the most natural way. You rise from the ground and then fall back into it when the time comes.