As I stand outside the modest labor room, separated from my wife by a dark green screen, an aluminum door and an impregnable curtain of apprehension, I feel a numbness spreading from my chest. I know it’s a decent hospital, and medical science has come a long way. And also that the doctor is a well-known gynecologist. But when you rush back from office to find your beloved wife clutching her belly tightly, unable to walk or speak as contractions — it was to come two months later — wring her insides, your faith on everything is shaken.
There are ultra-sounds, anomaly scans, blood tests, an army of complex machines and advanced medicines. Tons of information, expert doctors, statistics and favorable probabilities. But then, there is Fate. The unexplained, the illogical. The little terrorist of uncertainty that still infiltrates your make-believe rampart and tears it apart.
So an unknown fear flies around me in circles, refusing to go away. The smell of spirit and floor cleaner is nauseating. The cold, dry air of the AC is gloomy. I look around. I am not the only one waiting. There are other labor rooms and other husbands. Mothers and sisters too, who pace up and down the corridor flanked by their handbags and medical files. Their faces tight from anxiety, their skin color-drained. There isn’t any respite from my own demons in the collective paleness of their faces.
The little alley leading up to the labor room is pregnant too. With hopes, fears and collective prayers.
Three to four hours of wait, the doctor says, post which they would intervene for a C-section. Two hundred minutes of wait when every second hammers away a part of your heart! I feel terrible for my wife who, in spite of her career and an unwillingness for another child, is now writhing in pain on a narrow bed inside.
I realize that all of us have been longing for a cry. The cry that marks an end, and a beginning too. So I wait, with a desperate craving to see my wife smiling tiredly, a little bundle by her side. We all wait. For two lives to undergo a painful separation, quite ironically, to begin a lifelong journey of togetherness.
I pray for one last time. Girl. Oh God, please give me a girl. And take care of my wife as she undergoes one of the most painful moments of her life. I feel guilty that my longing for a girl is more intense than the well-being of my wife.
As I close my eyes, I see the orange darkness behind the eyelids give way to a beautiful little girl running towards me, hands raised in an empty embrace. I see a white lacy frock, stepped from top to bottom, like a white flower in full bloom, out of which a little head has popped out. I slip my hands under her arms and lift her high. Her fingers on my face are unimaginably tender, her feet on my shirt collar a delicious shade of pink. The deep black eyes and the long curly hair makes me want to bury my face into her and never let her go. I know I have fallen in love with this girl. Will she bless me by being my daughter?
“Hey…”
The images of the girl vanish in a blinding flash and the warm noise of nervousness pours back. It’s my anxious sister-in-law. As I tell her what has transpired since morning, a nurse asks me to complete the admission formalities for the ‘patient’. Patient, my wife.
My sister-in-law waits in my place while I run downstairs to finish the admission stuff. They ask me if I have insurance. I do, but I have run out of patience for the procedure. I whip out of my credit card and slide it on the counter. I also want to kill the front-desk executive who takes his own sweet time between checking messages on his phone, small-talking with his colleagues and laughing about things that are criminally unimportant to me right now.
“Give me the bloody cabin quickly and let me go,” I want to say, “and you can laugh till your jaw falls off.”
“Someone delivered a girl, ” my sister-in-law says as I rush back upstairs. She isn’t sure whose baby it is and no one is telling her, she complains.
Not so soon, I think. Or could it be ours? May be. May be not. Probably not. I alternate between an unreasonable joy and a rational denial. A nurse rushes out from one of the delivery rooms. “Is…is it a girl for Mrs. Kar ?” I ask, almost jumping in front of her. She either doesn’t recognize the name or doesn’t pay attention.
What follows is an excruciating wait. Sometimes waiting is the most difficult thing to do in the world.
The doctor finally comes out in a dark green apron, a white mask hanging around his neck. I take two steps forward to block his way, desperate as I am to know if everything is alright. He smiles at me.
“What happened?” I ask without the customary pleasantries. I have lost the metal faculty to ask a pointed question or show any courtesy.
“Exactly what you wanted. Nothing to worry, she is fine.”
She? Which She?
“Girl, right?”
I don’t want to believe anything yet, and yet want to believe in what I have always believed in. Because real world has a nasty habit of going against the simple laws of mathematics. The more desperately you want something, the lesser is its chance of happening.
“Yes, yes. Girl!” he says.
Though I ask him other questions, a part of me has already gone berserk. It’s a girl. Thank God. It’s a girl! Images of someone running towards me with open arms come flooding back. And I fall in love with a girl, all over again.
A real girl this time, but unknown, unseen yet.
