To the Baby Who Was Forged of Fire
In Panadura, Sri Lanka, they called it a labour room. Where I live today, the word is spelled differently, but I always make sure to add the vowel in defiance of American autocorrect, because every time I write it, it’s my silent prayer for you. The labour room was the only one in the hospital that had air conditioning, but batteries for the remote had been out of budget for years. The room remained perennially thick with maternal sweat, and there were no husbands allowed within its walls. I grew up watching television shows where flustered men let their hands be squeezed by Lamaze breathing, perspiring, and loudly screaming wives in labour. But in here, no one screamed, no one held hands. Mothers cried silently while male doctors with balding heads sliced them open with an assertive scalpel. No one yelled “Happy birthday!” or “It’s a boy!” No one said congratulations. No one asked for your name or said that you had your mother’s eyes. But maybe that was because you didn’t. I knew it when she first saw you and averted her gaze in fear. The eyes you wore were his.
The day you were born, I ate three fish hoppers for breakfast before I left my host family. The road to the clinic was crunchy with wet gravel, stained from seepage from monsoons past that left green where there once was white. I wore a blue crochet top with a yellow daal stain on it, and tight black leggings. On one shoulder I slung a bright pink bag with pop art auto rickshaws printed all over, and in it I carefully laid the deep blue moleskine in which I would write every detail of our encounter. I was sixteen and living in Sri Lanka, your country, a shape that was a teardrop of my own. I was south Indian enough that your people considered me to be one of them. I knew your tongue (or at least your mother’s) and at the end of the day, that made all the difference.
I never met your father and hope you never do either. I wouldn’t have even known about him if I hadn’t been snooping through the ward record book to find your mother’s name absent from its pages. I asked the nurse in the white pinafore and bonnet about it earnestly, wondering if she would laud my recognition of a mistake. Instead she pulled me aside by the sleeve, whispered, “rape case” into my ear, and walked away for her tea break.
In Panadura, we women wore our shirts long and loose. ‘Young girls are expected to cover their midriffs, shoulders, knees, thighs, bosoms, and bottoms,” the volunteer manual had said. Modesty was sold to us as a necessity for cultural respect, secretly a preventative measure against the unspeakable. But as I watched your mother, covered head to toe in her sari, trying to expel you who looked like him, I wondered if prevention was possible at all.
Your mother went into labour at 11:15 AM. I wrote the time down in my notebook and in ingénue script scribbled the word rape beside it. Back then I didn’t entirely know what the word meant. I knew it happened to girls who wore short clothes in the back of buses late at night. On the TV and in my home, people said rape showed those girls their place and that it was beyond a man’s control. “Daddy and I loved each other,” my mother had told me when I asked how I was born. I didn’t know rape could make a child.
By 3 PM she was moaning. In my blue moleskine I wrote down the word she moaned as her forehead crumpled into a frown and body seized with every contraction. “Amma,” she cried. She was calling for your grandmother. Who else would come? Who else could understand? The nurse entered as she pleased. I noted the times. 3:12. 3:34. 3:42. 4:15 — no pattern. The fetal heart rate monitor had to be percussionned a few times to make it come alive, like a late-90s dish television during a thunderstorm. By 6:42 the doctor arrived. He wore a silky mustard shirt that smelled like chlorine pellets mixed with cheap cologne. He didn’t speak to your mother. No one did. Pulling up a creaky rolling stool, he pried his patient’s stubbled legs apart with his bare hands, gently squeezing as he ran them up her calf. “Hold the railing,” he commanded. She did. Without taking his eyes off the insides of your mother, he held out his hand and bent his index finger to beckon me closer and laughed. “Write notes,” he said, tilting his head toward your mother. “One day you will need to do this.” At the time, I was still audacious enough to think he was talking about the surgery.
“No one said congratulations. No one asked for your name or said that you had your mother’s eyes. But maybe that was because you didn’t. I knew it when she first saw you and averted her gaze in fear. The eyes you wore were his. ”
Your birth was not an easy one. It was not that you were large or that there were any complications, but just the fact that it was your birth ruined her a little. The doctor cut your mother more than he should have, just like he did with every woman, and her scarlet dripped freely against the linoleum and ran down the room. You were made to come out just the way you were put in — by force. And when you finally did show, a bundle of hair hiding a body, you roared beyond your years and shook the room with your cries. At that moment, she knew that even if you had his eyes, your heart bore her strength. Although I was too mesmerized by you to be looking at her, in the soundtrack of that Sri Lankan night that plays repeatedly in my mind, I hear how with your first tears, her last ones ceased.
The day I am writing this letter is your fourth birthday. I am twenty years old now, and when they ask me why I want to be a doctor, I tell them your story. I tell them how I stood over the incubator for five hours after you were born, refusing to sit, refusing to eat, refusing to go home. When your mother regained strength, they brought you to her breast and I hovered by you like a protector. Touching her lips to your forehead she breathed out your name for the first time. “Eḥku,” she whispered and looked up at me. I smiled back at her, knowing what her Tamil words meant. My own mother had said them to me once. Forged of a fire. Unbreakable and reliable. Strength of all strengths.
She named you after steel.
She named you after herself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Divya Manikandan is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying Health and English. She hopes to go to medical school one day and keep writing about the world around her. Her work has been published in The Lookout Journal, Earth Island Journal, The Scarlet Leaf Review, and many more.
Header photo by Hans Eiskonen.