But where was the head, the back, the neck, the legs, the hands?
I could feel nothing, no movement either, howsoever small, and Head Nurse had wrapped Ithim so well to guard him from the cold that I was scared it would smother him, not let him breathe.
‘Here, let me open this a bit,’ she said, as if reading my fears and, without moving from where she stood, as if for the first time she was afraid of coming anywhere near the baby, she reached forward and opened one end of the towel, like peeling a petal from a flower.
And that was my first glimpse of Ithim, my son.
‘You can take him home now,’ said Head Nurse, ‘ask the guard downstairs, he will call for a taxi. Keep the windows rolled up, it will shut out the cold and it will be safer.’
‘Safer, what do you mean?’ I asked.
‘What, haven’t you heard? The city is on fire, has been all night,’ she said.
‘Fire?’
‘All across the city, that’s what I heard.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘I don’t know the details, all I know is that just an hour or so ago, when you were in the Burns Ward, fifteen bodies came here. They are all in the Morgue, all are badly burnt. There are men, women and children. Someone said there are many other bodies too, taken to other hospitals.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘I don’t know, but be careful. You have a baby.’
That was the first time it registered. Ward Guard had told me about a fire, about Head Nurse going to check on her house, but this was the first time, the very first time I heard the whole city was on fire.
WHEN a city is on fire, they say, everyone says when a city is on fire, there should be sights and sounds and smells. There should be flames all around, yellow and blue. There should be smoke, grey and black, against the sky, the sun and the moon. There should be fire engines, red and ringing. Bystanders, witnesses, men and boys on the streets, women and girls at doors and windows, all their faces upturned, specks of light flickering in the black of their eyes. Maybe there should be, even in winter, heat and sweat as well, a line on the neck or the back, beads under chins, above lips. And to complete the picture, there should be a child being rescued, no, make that a baby, with a rattle in his hand, brought down a steel ladder, then wrapped in a clean towel to be photographed for the next day’s newspaper. Or for that night on TV. Tiny eyes closed, little head against the brave fireman’s chest. But when we stepped out that night, Ithim and I, forget the fire, it was as if the city was on ice.
So cold it was.
And in the darkness, the only fires we could see, as the taxi drove us home, the taxi that Lobby Guard had called for us – the driver, an old man with white hair and glasses, who drove slow and steady – were those by the side of the street, lit by men and women whose tarpaulin sheets or asbestos roofs could keep neither the fog nor the wind from their children fast asleep.
Only once during the journey, when Taxidriver pulled up into a petrol station to fill up, did I see any evidence of anything more disturbing: a glimpse of a group of men gathered at the pump, talking, pointing in the dark, filling plastic cans with fuel. It’s then that Head Nurse’s words came back to me: Be careful, this is a city on fire. I have heard they are killing people, men, women and children. And you have a baby, newly born.
‘You heard something about a fire?’ I asked Taxidriver.
‘What fire?’ he replied, looking straight ahead, as the vehicle hit a pothole, lurched forward, and then began to swallow the night and the road, taking me and Ithim home. The rest of the journey not once did I look out of the window – my eyes were fixed onto my child – but at the same time I was aware the space next to me on the seat was empty. Black leather, frayed, gleaming in the weak light that came from the taxi’s dashboard, from the streetlamps and from the neons of the shops that streaked by. And although the doctor had said my wife should be fine in a few days, I could then bring her home, so we, father, mother and baby, could be all together, I couldn’t help feeling an unbearable emptiness fill me up: my child was on his way, on his first night in this city, in this world, to only half of a home.
I am Old Bird, I was very old, about sixty, seventy years old, I can never get these numbers right, I was born in this city, I worked as a sweeper in Holy Angel, part time, I had three children, one son and two daughters, both daughters are married and live in Surat where their husbands work in diamond shops as polishers and cutters, one of them has two children, the other has one, all of them are safe, nothing happened in Surat and it was only last month that I met my grandchildren – one of them is doing very well in school, he comes first or second in his class – who had come to visit me in this city where I lived with my son, his wife, and their daughter who is five years old and is to start school next month, my son had gone to work in the morning, he has a cycle-repair shop, the mob came in the afternoon and surrounded our neighbourhood in such a way that no one could escape without being seen, I heard them, I saw them, too, I told my granddaughter to run to Mr Shah’s house where I worked as a maidservant, they are nice people, they always treated me with respect although Mrs Shah told me I should not enter their kitchen because of my religion, she told me I should sweep the floors of all the three rooms, I should clean the bathroom and go home, never enter the kitchen for which she had another maid but the daughter of the house was very kind to me and many days, behind her mother’s back, she would give me some of the food that had been cooked in one of their dishes and tell me to take it home, I would wash that dish with extra soap, bring it back, covered with my sari so that her mother didn’t notice but the daughter is brave, she once even let me enter the kitchen, open the fridge, get her a glass of water and that’s why I told my granddaughter go to her, I told her, she will take care of you, and once the child had left, my daughter-in-law and I covered our faces with our saris, we poured water over our bodies but the fire was too strong and now that I am gone my only hope is that my son is safe, that my granddaughter still has her father, I hope they, too, move to Surat, I hope my son marries again, my daughter-in-law should not have died, she was very young, I am very old, I am almost blind, my time was up and that’s why I don’t fee sad that I was killed, the tragedy is that my daughter-in-law was killed, too, when she had just started her life as a mother, when she was waiting to see her daughter go to school.
4. Ithim At Home, Call At Night
BUT look at the bright side, Ithim and I were home. Now I didn’t have to wait outside a glass door for Head Nurse to graciously condescend to brush the curtains aside so I could see my child, I didn’t have to tail her like a dog does his master, I didn’t have to run down the stairs like a man crazed, begging, imploring, pleading Her Excellency to show me my baby. Now I could look at him, undisturbed. And it was then, when we walked into the house, when I switched on the lights, that I noticed there was no escaping his eyes, there was no looking away.
Because these were the only part of my Ithim that moved, that betrayed life, newly born, when I placed him on the bed – still wrapped in Head Nurse’s hospital towel – I was convinced that Ithim was only his eyes, that the eyes were only Ithim. And that the entire rest of him was a blur, a mere distraction, an unnecessary appendage that I could, at least for the time being, ignore. That my baby, severely deformed, began and ended with his two perfect eyes and their two sets of eyebrows and eyelashes. And that these performed, and would continue to perform, all the functions that were meant for his head, his neck, his hands, his arms, his legs, his feet, his stomach, his everything. Of course, this was nonsense.
But, at first glance, this seemed to be the path of least resistance that my mind took, telling myself that if I could tend to these eyes, if I did all I could to prevent even the slightest harm coming their way, I wouldn’t need to worry about anything else. Ithim would be fine. For a while, even Ithim fooled me into believing this by his blink, his beautiful baby blink.
Sorry, I should take the last sentence b
ack.
Why blame the child? That’s unfair, if not cruel.
Because what could this baby, just a few hours old, without his mother, a baby that should have been kept in the warmth of the hospital nursery, under an infrared lamp, an attendant by his side full time, a baby who should have been taken out every hour, on the hour, to be placed on his mother’s breasts so his heart could feel hers beat, who should have been feeding on his mother’s milk, resting his tiny hands on her breasts, his soft head against her chin, but was, instead, now lying all by himself in a room with his clueless, bumbling father – what could this baby do?
What could this baby do other than look?
Other than just open and close his eyes, raise and lower his eyelashes? Which he began to do the moment I peeled the towel’s edge from his eyes and switched off the harsh white tubelight in the room to cut out its glare.
Outside, the sky was beginning to stain the colour of ink, the purple blue that forms when night begins to grow old, a colour that softens the edges of this hard city, washes the washed-out yellows and the whites and the greys of the houses.
Letting my eyes adjust to the darkness in the room, this night light slipped in through the window and bathed Ithim so that when I held him, my palm cupped beneath the place where his neck should have been, and removed the towel, for one moment what should have been grotesque appeared only a little out of the ordinary. And even before I could start listing what was missing in my child, the night rushed in to cover his empty spaces with shadows, half-light and half-dark.
So what did I see?
There is no one answer, there cannot be one answer. I have already described him, at the beginning, cold and clinical, and yet that doesn’t even begin to do justice to the original. For the Really New, the genuine original, defies all description because there is nothing in the old to compare it to. But then, because the number of words at our command is always limited, predetermined, we have no choice but to fall back on the old, on what has already been imagined, what has already been described. That’s why I am going to take the easy way out.
As if we are all in school.
Imagine you are taking an examination, sitting in a class, with a piece of paper in front on the desk, and Ithim facing the entire class on a raised platform with the blackboard as his backdrop so all of you can see him clearly.
The question in the test is: Please look at the child carefully (he will be placed on the desk for the entire duration of this examination). Please rank the following in order of likeness. Mark your rank in the box provided against each choice.
□ A small cylinder made up of flesh and skin, wrapped around bones and cartilage.
□ A vegetable, gourd or pumpkin, more long than wide, that has been placed on a fire and quickly removed, leaving its two ends charred and its tip wrinkled.
□ An oversized insect, its six legs and its two antennae torn out, leaving just the abdomen intact.
□ A bird, its feathers plucked, its legs and its wings cut, skinned, its head distended.
□ A piece of plastic tubing, sawed off, and then covered with a material, stretched tight, resembling skin.
□ A caterpillar, without any serrations in its body, seen through a giant microscope, its tentacles clipped, its legs missing.
□ A Thermos flask, the colour of skin, the kind they advertise for picnics, which keeps the water warm or cold depending on what you want.
□ A child’s toy, made of rubber, a broken toy, perhaps a train or a cargo truck to be dragged along with a piece of string, bits and pieces of it fallen off, lost while the child was at play.
□ A bit of all of the above.
Without even taking this test, without even seeing any of your answers, I can speculate: most of you would have ticked the last box.
What should I have done? I, who had no luxury of taking tests or marking the order of likeness? I, the father, who had just brought his son home and now was looking at him, what about me? What should I have done? Should I have recoiled in horror? In fear or anger? Disgust, maybe even hate?
In fact, when I first looked at Ithim, I felt nothing.
Perhaps, the strangeness of what lay on my bed, this object, this creature, this toy, this flask, this rubber tubing, this bird plucked, this insect, this vegetable, this cylinder, this all of the above, was so overwhelming – along with the exhaustion of that evening and the night at the hospital, the shapeless blur of people and events – like a fuse that temporarily switches off some connections to save the entire house when there is a surge of electricity, something inside me had done the same. Shut me down.
So that the mere realization that I was back home, with my baby, had filled me with a flooding sense of achievement that had drowned all dread or foreboding that lay, I was sure, just below the surface.
I decided to touch him.
I sat down, on the bed, leaned close, brought one hand over his face. I stretched my fingers out, moved my palm four or five inches above his eyes. My hand must have blocked the ceiling fan and the plaster from his view but I could see no change in his eyes, he kept staring, blinking once or twice, as if nothing had happened. As if my hand hadn’t even been there.
I touched him between the eyelashes with my little finger; even that had no effect, none at all. I touched him on the double-pierced, tiny mound that was his nose, I touched him on his knife-cut lips, on the thin funnel-flap of skin that was his left ear. I ran my little finger along the length of his body and all the while, kept looking at his eyes, for the faintest flicker of movement, for some change that could tell me that he was reacting, that the blinking wasn’t only an involuntary impulse.
I moved the finger to where his waist was, over the strip of charred flesh that ran like a belt fused to his body, and the moment I touched him there, his eyes blinked hard, blinked again. His eyebrows moved closer to each other, as if he was furrowing his forehead, as if he was trying to understand something called pain, perhaps. I promptly pulled back my finger and his eyebrows returned to where they were before.
Life.
Yes, that was a sign of life.
A sudden wave of relief washing over me, like the warmth of a fire in winter, I lay on my side, next to Ithim on the bed, placed one hand just behind his head, my fingers resting against his scalp. And then there was the second sign, the sign I remember describing to you at the very beginning, the movement just below the surface of the skin, inside his head. Of tiny things flying and resting, a heaving and a churning, as if the bones inside had yet to form the skull and were, therefore, trying to lock themselves in to give his head a form, a solid shape. Life, once again, the second sign.
Two signs, both of pain, but I was the father, I was the beggar, I could not choose.
MY wife had downloaded pages at Mr Meeko’s cybercafe from websites on how to take care of newborns and those sheets of paper, with their urls at the bottom, the page numbers, the dates – mocking me with their sense of a more hopeful past – lay on a table in the living room, in a blue folder my wife had marked BABY HOMEWORK, and that now seemed to carry within its folds missives from some other world at some other time.
If the baby is lying on its back, you need to slide one of your hands underneath the neck, splay out the fingers so that your hand acts as a prop for the whole head. Then bring your other hand, spread its fingers like a fan and slide this one under the lower back. Then bend down, if you have a problem with your own back bend the legs at the knees, come close to the baby and lift it gently. Don’t let the baby’s arms or legs flail around and keep the head a little higher than the rest of the body. While you are holding the baby, you always have to make sure you are supporting its head. It can be in your hand, above the spread-out fingers, it can be in the crook of your arm. What is important is that the baby’s head shouldn’t be flopping around because the neck of a newborn isn’t very strong, the head is big compared to the rest of the body, you will need to help it support its large head until it can manage its
elf.
There was no head to flop around, neither were there arms nor legs to get in the way. In fact, Ithim seemed to be a quiet baby, as Doctor 2 had said, he just lay on the bed, exactly as he was when I had first put him there.
Hold the baby in your lap with one arm around him so that his neck is in the crook of your arm. Brush a finger across the baby’s cheek closest to your body and the baby should turn his face towards you and his lips should part slightly. Gently push the nipple of the bottle into the baby’s open mouth, keeping his head and upper body raised at a slight angle so that it’s easier for the baby to swallow. Tip the end of the bottle up as you are feeding so that the baby doesn’t swallow air as the formula disappears. To burp the baby, hold him with his head over your shoulder and rub his back softly until he lets out a satisfied little belch.
Ithim’s mouth was such a tiny slit that no nipple, no bottle would serve the purpose. But before I could work out how, I needed to first arrange the feed. My wife had kept all the provisions in the second room of our two-room flat, which she had half-converted into a nursery.
I should not have entered that room.
Desecrated that shrine my wife had so painstakingly built to her hopes and expectations, to our future as a family, this eight-by-ten-feet rectangle of space with four walls and one ceiling and a floor. It was the room my wife had always kept locked, telling me, whenever I asked (and even if I didn’t), that it was a surprise she had in store for me and the baby and for all of us, as a unit. But clearly, this was no time for me to dwell on abstract commitments when our child was lying on the bed in the next room and I was clueless.
The ceiling had been painted blue. My wife had pasted stars on it, tiny white specks, not stars that razzle and dazzle in cheap, shiny paper, but a soft white that glowed in the dark. In the centre of the ceiling, from the iron hook meant for the ceiling fan – the fan we had deferred buying until summer – she had installed a mobile of fishes and birds, each bird ringed by a tiny blue circle that shimmered like water, each fish with gills that looked like tiny wings. Fish that flew, birds that swam.
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