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Many years later, standing beside his wife in the sterile, antiseptic air of Bellevue hospital’s maternity ward, surrounded by the rhythmic beeping of machines and the soft murmurs of medical staff, he felt his mind drift. Two images, vivid and unbidden, rose to the surface. The first: Arvind Swamy, the ever-handsome star of Tamil cinema, pacing anxiously in a hospital scene from the movie Bombay, with the song Poovukenna Pootu playing in the background. An absurd memory to emerge at a moment like this, but memories have a way of slipping through the cracks of reality when least expected.
And the second: his mother’s voice, vivid as a monsoon wind, telling the story of his own birth—India under Emergency, the country in labor, and he, born on the cusp of freedom, on what could be seen as India’s second, metaphorical Independence Day, in the Egmore Government Hospital. Perhaps all births, he thought, are as much about the political as they are the personal.
It was March 19, 1977. A Saturday. The city of Madras still yawned in the early hours, the sun not yet risen high enough to burn off the morning mist. His mother, like most Tamilians of that time, was listening to All India Radio on 4920 kHz, as though the world itself could be explained in radio waves, static, and the disembodied voices of broadcasters. It was 6:30 a.m. when her contractions began, sharp as broken glass. She winced but carried on listening to the news like a soldier awaiting orders. The baby had been restless for days, a rebel in the womb, kicking at the walls of her body as if impatient to be free. She had already taken leave from her office, knowing her body was no longer her own.
It was an auspicious day—new moon. In her heart, she hoped the child would come on a waxing moon, for all things born during the waxing of the moon were bound to flourish, to rise, to grow into the light. But fate, that mischievous architect of lives, had other plans.
At 7:45 a.m., the radio transitioned smoothly from Malarum Samudayam to Nagarvalam, as though even the airwaves were indifferent to her pain. The contractions now came in violent waves, each one more insistent than the last. She called out to her father, who had just stepped out of the bath, steam still clinging to his skin like the remnants of a dream, smelling faintly of soap and sandalwood. Her mother stirred a pot of sambar in the kitchen, the scent of tamarind and turmeric perfuming the air. Her brother, still bleary-eyed from the night shift, slept in the next room.
They left for Egmore in a rented Ambassador car, navigating the uneven streets of Madras, the city rising slowly with the sun. As they drove, she chanted softly, under her breath—Jaba Kusuma Sankasham Kashyapeyam Mahadyutim, invoking cosmic forces of protection and patience. She prayed not for a painless birth, but for a delay—a few more hours, perhaps a day, so her child might be born under a better moon. The road to Egmore was lined with familiar sights— rickshaw-men, vegetable vendors setting up shop, the temple priests brushing the steps of the shrines. But when they arrived at the hospital, the child refused to make an appearance.
“It’s not today,” the nurse smiled, almost conspiratorially. “You can go home. But come back if the baby kicks five times in a minute, or if it feels like your water broke.” A small victory for the spring moon.
Thirty-two years later, and eight thousand miles away, in Seattle, another March morning dawned. Another Saturday. Another waxing spring moon. The air here was crisp, unnaturally so, as if the Pacific Northwest had washed it clean. And just like his mother, his wife’s contractions began with a ferocity that demanded attention. It was almost poetic, this symmetry of pain and anticipation.
“Is the car ready?” Binu asked, her breath short and sharp.
He lounged on the couch, coffee in hand, watching Gangs of New York on HBO as if it were a regular Saturday morning. He had been to the hospital twice already, each time returning with a mix of frustration and relief, the baby refusing to conform to schedules.
“Why is he taking so long?” he muttered, half to himself, half to the gods of childbirth. “It’s like he’s negotiating.”
His wife, in the midst of another contraction, glared at him through a veil of discomfort. “Your son is going to be just like you—stubborn, lazy, and late.”
He sipped his coffee—a sacred ritual, the final remnant of normalcy. “They said to wait until the contractions are five minutes apart and last a minute each. It’s been an hour, no need to rush.” But the clock was ticking, each second punctuated by the rhythm of his wife’s breathing.
With a resigned sigh, he grabbed his laptop, threw on a pair of shorts, and they made their way out the door. He parked the car outside, ensuring she was comfortably settled in the passenger seat. The streets of Seattle, quieter than Madras but no less familiar, felt oddly intimate in the early morning light, as though time itself had folded in on them.
The labor stretched on, hour after hour, a painful, rhythmic dance between his wife and the contractions that gripped her. By 6 p.m., the anesthesiologist arrived, a quiet presence, administering the epidural with the practiced precision of someone who had done this a thousand times before. But as time crept forward, the relief it offered began to wear thin. He watched, helpless, as her body fought to bring their son into the world. Eighteen hours. Eighteen long, torturous hours where each contraction felt like an eternity. And yet, despite the agony, there was an odd comfort in the routine—the steady beep of machines, the nurses moving with silent efficiency. His fingers twitched, sensing the familiar weight of his Nikon hanging from his shoulder, the flip camcorder poised on the table beside him. He stayed by her side, not just as a witness but as the one who would frame this moment, capture it—not only for memory, but for posterity. The quiet hum of the hospital grounded them both, holding them in this moment, in this place.
In 1977, two days after the first attempt, well into the waxing spring moon, his mother’s labor stretched long and unforgiving. The general elections had just ended, and the vote counting had begun. India, restless, awaited its democratic voice. The oppressive heat of Madras clung to the city like a dense fog, thick and stifling. His grandfather paced the hospital corridor, nervously fingering the buttons of his shirt, as though the act of waiting demanded some strange mechanical ritual. Inside, her body was consumed by the waves of contractions, each one more brutal than the last, as the baby stubbornly resisted the world that demanded its arrival. Hours blended into one another, the quiet of morning drowned in the cacophony of hospital life—doctors’ hurried steps, the faint cries of newborns, and the sluggish hum of ceiling fans slicing through the heavy air. And still, the baby did not come.
It was late in the afternoon, as the sun began its slow, golden descent over the Bay of Bengal, casting long shadows through the corridors of the hospital, when the baby finally emerged. Silent and still. No wail, no cry—just the deafening absence of sound that hung heavy in the air.
The doctor frowned, his hands pausing for a moment, before the nurses moved quickly, too quickly, whisking the baby away to an incubator, that sterile glass box suspended between life and uncertainty. His mother tried to speak—boy or girl?—but the question lodged in her throat, unable to cross the space between them. The doctor reassured her with a brief nod, but the silence clung to the room like a second skin. Outside the hospital walls, Madras buzzed with the electrifying news that the Emergency had ended, that India was, once again, free.
His Chithappa was elated—not just by the birth of the baby, but by the serendipity of its timing. Two births, he mused—one of a boy and one of a nation, both emerging from the shadows of uncertainty. Chacchu manni, as expected, arrived promptly, the family’s ever-reliable matriarch, her madisar as perfectly pleated as always, her presence a signal that things would be alright. She was the first to lift the baby after his first cry, her hands cradling him with the authority of tradition, the small weight of him held steady against the larger tides of history swirling outside.
In 2009, there was no moment of hesitation, no breathless silence. When Achu was finally born, after those eighteen long hours, he entered the world with a cry so fierce and clear that it cut through the exhaustion that had settled into every corner of the room. The baby was healthy, his small body wriggling as the nurses gently cleaned him. The relief that swept over him and his wife was palpable, a wave of emotion that made the months of anticipation and the hours of pain seem almost trivial in comparison.
They had known it was a boy long before he was born. The ultrasound had confirmed it, but even so, seeing him in the flesh—tiny, fragile, yet so very real—was an entirely different experience. His wife cradled Achu in her arms, already whispering something lovingly to him in Malayalam, her face flushed with exertion but her eyes soft with the kind of love only mothers seem to carry. She spoke to him as though she had known him for years, continuing a conversation they had started long before he entered the world, perhaps from the very moment he stirred within her womb. He watched, struck by the intimacy of their bond, as if she had been waiting to resume this dialogue since their first shared heartbeat.
And so, two babies, born decades apart, connected by the thread of blood and time, entered worlds that were at once entirely different and strangely similar. One, born in the tumult of a country shedding the last traces of political suppression, emerging into a nation on the brink of newfound freedom. The other, born in a country just beginning to recover from a deep economic recession, in the early days of a new presidency that had promised hope and change.
He stood by his wife, looking down at his son, feeling the weight of these two moments converge, not quite understanding the gravity of what tied them together, but knowing—deep in his bones—that these moments were more than just events. They were pieces of a larger story, a story he would never fully understand but one he would attempt to tell, piece by piece, slice by slice.
He was, after all, the unreliable narrator of his own life. These were his memories, but memories are slippery things, molded by time, reshaped by the stories we tell ourselves. And this was his story—a mix of truth and fiction, with the edges blurring like ink bleeding through paper. It wasn’t just his life he was recounting, but the life of cities too. Madras in the 1980s and 90s, where he had grown up, a city full of contradictions and endless possibilities. And Seattle in 2000s, with its quiet streets, its rain-soaked mornings, its promise of a new beginning.
In the end, it was always the moments—fleeting, fragile. Each one, a whisper of time, binding past to present, love to loss, joy to sorrow. And though they faded with every breath, it was their very impermanence that made them endure—the delicate essence of all that is, and all that will ever be.
(to be continued…)
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