D Day

My little miracle just an hour old

In September 1988 I returned with my parents to Saraya where I restlessly and impatiently wiled away the months in anticipation of D-Day, which was the fifteenth of December. I could manage to speak to Sandip in Jamnagar only once in a while, since getting a phone call through was always a complicated procedure in those days. 

My sister Juliet had came down from Lucknow to be there when baby came, but fell seriously ill so was of no help. At the same time my father was going through one of his bad spells and I overheard him ordering his assistant in a weak voice to keep him going  till his grandchild was born. I went into labour in the wee hours of the fourteenth and left with mother for the railway hospital, which was an hour's drive away and supposed to be one of the more civilised facilities in Gorakhpur.

Labour - nothing that one reads or hears prepares you for the hours of body wrenching agony that have to be endured. I have an unusually high threshold of pain but despite that found myself groaning aloud every so often. I lost complete track of time with baby in no hurry to make an appearance and at one point desperately announced that I had had enough and wanted a Cesarean. The doctor looked very startled and remarked that I was not even screaming so why couldn't I bear the torture a few hours more?

What really infuriated me was one of the nurses who insisted on continuously stroking my leg and humming "Sungmarmar ka badan". I growled at her through gritted teeth that if she commented once more on my marble like body I would get up and personally hit her over the head with a bedpan!

At exactly seven forty five in the evening my baby finally decided it was time to enter the world. " Its a girl" the doctor announced and I felt such a surge of joy and relief that I promptly burst into tears. The same thigh stroking nurse sympathetically clucked and said "Koi baat nahin, agli baar ladka hoga". I did not have the energy to tell her that I had longed for a daughter more than anything in the world and was just feeling completely overwhelmed.

The doctor then asked if I would like to hold my little one before she was sent off to be tidied up and I was handed over this fragile, naked, ugly, beautiful,  helpless little body who in an instant filled the deepest core of every fibre of my being with awe and adoration. Then she was bundled up and taken out to be introduced to her grandmother who off course also wept with delighted emotion and was immediately surrounded by a bevy of sympathetic nurses reassuring her it would definitely be a grandson next time around.