I was born into the night, and the night gave me its color. I was wrapped within a blanket of darkness and that darkness never left me. While my mother screamed in her labor, I rolled about sleepily in her amniotic sac to suck my tender thumb and gently extend my toes.
Oh yes, and there were mosquitoes that heard my mother’s scream. Millions of mosquitoes came over our hill overflowing with coconut trees. They had flown all over the land, sucking the blood of all that slept, for it was night, and Kerala nights are very sleepy.
Now and then I would kick my mother and then I would laugh. (It was hilarious at that age, playing within the womb.)
Sometimes I would shout, so loud many rats came scampering with renewed excitement to steal from my grandmother’s cupboard. And the cow with eyes that never closed? Well, it simply refused to blink, munching on to its hay, munching and munching, as my mother yelled, cursing Eva for biting that distant forbidden fruit.
At first I thought I was alone in the womb, but then I felt the breath of another child, breathing glossily on my neck. Her legs swam over her umbilical chord as she felt the walls for an opening through which to escape. It is incredible when I think of it now, that before life began she was with me, two tiny cellular structures pounding for life from the heart of one mother. Smiling, we introduced ourselves to each other, with a “Hey you.”
“Yes?”
“How are you?”
“Fine, and you?”
“I’m all right. And by the way; what’s your name?”
“Well, I don’t know. They haven’t given me one yet. And if they have, they’ve kept me quite in the dark about it.”
And then we kept silent because we did not really know what else to say to each other, and because we had no idea what we were doing there. It was a silence that lasted for a pretty long time in which we could do nothing but stare at the walls of tissue.
From inside our mother’s womb, we heard the adults talk.
We could hear everything. (M sister nods her head to tell you that what I’m saying is true.) We heard different people speak to each other in a very adult sort of way that impressed us, and sometimes made us laugh. We learned to identify people by the tone of their voices. It was from the voice of my father telling childhood jokes to cheer my mother that we first learned of humor, and we started giggling at his outspoken silly thoughts.
Well, our father really was such a comical man (which explains his claim that I was laughing when I first laid in his arms) always making everybody in the family hollering with booms of laughter, and unknown to him, he kept us laughing and weeping in that womb. At one of his jokes, we beat our hands on the floor of tissue, held our chuckling bellies, crying with laughter, shouting to our father with outstretched palms, “Father, oh Father, please stop. We don’t want to die laughing so undignified like this.”
But our mother started screaming from the pain of our silly beating of hands, forcing our father to tell even stranger jokes, making us pound our hands even wilder, bringing tears to our mother’s face, in a treacherous and mad cycle that left my mother crying and my poor father feeling helpless and bewildered.
Sometimes we grew serious when we heard the adults talked of the war with Pakistan. We shouted and we screamed. We tried to tell them that war was not the answer, that we should forgive and forget, that humanity was equal, not in poverty but in opportunity, and that we should never end up the bitter prisoners of our own history. But the adults kept talking as though we would never be born.
In those silent moments with my sister, I sat and pondered over many fleeting thoughts. What sort of world will society leave us? Will they burn it down before we have a chance to view its diverse marvels? Will they craft enemies that we must inherit? Will they set up destructive rules that we must pass on to other generations, or will we inherit a social contract that is fair and just to all?
It was while I was wondering of such things that I felt a vibration within my mother’s sac. Our sac was tearing, opening a narrow tunnel into another world so bright we were forced to shut our eyes. Within the realms of that magical creation, we suddenly understood instinctively what we must do. There was a cruel yet necessary gene in our body named Survival that was activated by this light. It was this gene that gave us our mission in life, which is to simply endure or perish.
So we clashed within that womb to be the first one out. It was never personal, simply the business of survival. We fought like young tigers. With hateful ferocity, we clashed and gnawed, clawing and biting each other’s necks, and like maniacs our eyes began to burn with the hunger to win. In our battles, we shook our mother’s womb into an ocean of rumbling red blood bubbles.
You don’t believe me, do you? You say I’m a liar? Your medical scientist claim that there is no such thing as a survival gene, that I’m making it all up, and that the unborn child has not yet developed a consciousness to even consider such things as war or survival.
Just ask my mother, and she’ll tell you herself.
(“True, true, true,” she hollers at anyone who cares to listen. “These mad children were at war. I know because I felt it in the hollow of my bones.”)
So my friends let us resume then.
This survival gene, granted by God, directed me to survive, to think for myself, even in the darkness and magic of the womb. And for many years I would attempt to deny this in order to calm my conscious, to keep myself human, and to allow myself the power of moral authority. But when I tried to reach for life, my sister pulled me by my leg and dragged me back inside like a barbarian for she had in her blood the remnants of a Stone Age Queen. Then my sister reached out to the precipice of new beginnings, smiled triumphantly back at me with her black diamond eyes, and leapt into the whirlpool of life, swam and floated through a blue midnight tunnel that was full of stars and meteors, the moon and memories, the Mohini Attam dancer who dances in a temple, who seduces men with the flash of her eyes, and that strange ether the ancient alchemists claimed could allow my sister to float on a red carpet over the golden deserts of magic like an Arabian princess, and into the world of realism, and my sister came out as a baby in shining golden tears because she was so overjoyed to see the colorful beauty of this other universe. There were smiles on the faces of the midwives as they took my shrill crying sister up into the air. My grandmother smiled; her chubby cheeks a sign of pride.
"Karthav, Bhagvanai," she called to God with outstretched palms, and then she looked at my grandfather Eapen, who refused to die even as everyone around him started dying.
“Oho, listen Manusha,” my grandmother told her ailing husband. “It’s a girl.”
Poor Eapen, scratching mosquito bites, simply stared at Aradhana and asked, “Is the baby huge?”
“Why no, a tiny one,” old Aradhana said.
“Such a strange thing,” Eapen mused out loud. “The way she was, it seemed the baby would be very large.”
To which my grandmother Aradhana became slightly confused at this tiny irrationality, because Eapen was right. It seemed the baby would be very large. Aradhana noticed the midwife (the one with pretty eyes) place a steel cone on my mother’s belly. The midwife put her ear to one end of the cone and looked worried.
“I hear another heartbeat,” she said, her pretty eyes flickering in astonishment. They all gasped and fretted and stammered with the same fears that I feared. I could not hold my fear back for much longer, and I yelled and kicked my mother. I swam rotating and rotating in that enclosed amniotic fluid filled sac searching for a way out of solitude while blue bubbles floated about me.
I was so frightened and vulnerable. My legs were wobbling and my heart was racing. I was so scared I felt like pissing. I felt an exploding pressure between my legs, and I cringed my legs together like a wet towel and my face turned blue. The ocean arrived to suck me away into its whirlpool of light and liberation; that blue midnight tunnel through which I saw the twinkling stars and a blue burning comet, the hate of men and the revolutions of history. One world as it truly was; an oval marble of blue and white clouds floating speedily into a black ocean of infinite space that according to one school of astronomical thought, expanded and contracted, expanded and contracted, in continuous cycles, like the rhythmic heartbeat of that pretty Mohini Attam dancer, dancing in her whitest sari, with the melody of her ankle bells silently tinkling as she takes a step forward in the red temple where she serves as the most beautiful dancer in all of Kerala, to welcome me into the world, with clasped hands in Namaste, as I reached a dusty room of wooden beds and cheap red saris, where pretty midwives took hold of me, raised me to the still air, and completed this magical song with a resolute announcement;
“Look here edi, it’s a boy.”
While she was saying this, my sense of disorientation was disturbed, and I felt that sensation between my newborn legs and I liberated the overfilled pressure of liquid from my bladder. (Oh how embarrassing what your fear can make you do. But really now, how long can you keep it all in?) So I sprayed right into her face and she gave out a “What? Who? Huh?”
(She doesn’t think I’m very cute anymore. She hands me to my grandmother.)
Well, I really wanted to be with my grandmother anyway, that ancient woman whom I knew only from the voice speaking from the other side of my mother’s womb. She took hold of me from those silly midwives, and her silver wet hair fell on me. She carried me close to her bosom, and I wanted to sleep there forever. When morning came, she handed me to my father.
Our house was quiet. Our song was over, and the midwives have scattered to other homes where the other mothers of Kerala will need their expertise. As for my grandmother, she walked outside the house with a tired sigh on her face, and with her broom made of dried coconut leaves, she swept away the saffron flowers that accumulated about our pebble porch throughout the previous night.
