Amal

It all began the way we thought it would: contractions, discharge, indescribable pain. But the pain does not stop.

And it never will.

I always wonder whether there was anything we could’ve done differently. We planned our lives around this singular event. We sold our convertible for a family car. We moved to the quiet suburbs to be closer to family. As we limped back home two nights later, we were enveloped by a strange sense of grief. Our home greeted us with memories of the future, a pitch black silence.

Nine weeks earlier, the doctor smiled as he faced us.

“She’ll be home in time for Christmas”.

Hearing these words, I feel a profound sense of joy and responsibility. Joy at the thought of my firstborn coming into my life on Christmas Day. Responsibility at the idea of having a child. At that moment, I realised I had no idea on how to become a father.

I mask my anxiety as best as I could, but on the drive back home, Asha notices. What does one who grew up without a father know about fatherhood, I argue. More than one who grew up with one, she responds. I clench her hand. She squeezes it, firmly.

Nine weeks later, I squeeze hers, weakly. I let go. My hands shake, watching her writhe and scream in the maternity ward. And even in this moment, all I can think of is how life is such a fragile, wonderful little thing, how we can never have enough of it. I watch the midwife wheel her into the emergency unit, as I collapse to the ground.

I always wondered whether there was anything we could’ve done differently. We looked around for names like we were searching for our first home in a foreign land; something solid and functional, somewhere safe. Easy enough to pronounce, to remember. One evening, we watched Shawshank Redemption, chairs reclined, hearts heavy, when we knew.

“Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing never dies.”

That was the moment we knew we would name our daughter Amal. Hope.

We would later find out that it also meant expectation. I had expected a normal delivery. A first Christmas. First word. Would it be papa? First steps. First birthday.

I held high expectations of myself as a father. Emotional availability, physical presence. Over nine months, I learned to leave the office on time. In every fight with Asha, I practiced mindfulness. I learned to feel grateful for my habit of waking up in the middle of the night.

On the day she was born, we rushed to the hospital. It had all begun the way we thought it would: contractions, discharge, blood. We had ticked all the boxes. Except, we found out, there was no heartbeat.

I often read and reread the statistics. 1 in 160 pregnancies is a stillbirth. At 38 weeks, the odds are 1 in 10,000. The danger of statistics is that they quantify grief. That’s bad enough, but how do you quantify grief over something that never happened?

I turn on the lights in our home when I realise that the lights have gone out of our life. Amal, our hope, extinguished. Her presence floats around like a ghost, without an anchor, neither here, nor there, yet everywhere. All that remained of her were clothes she never got a chance to wear, memories we never made, and the one glimpse I had of her before I handed her over. She seemed at peace, eyes firmly shut, body frozen cold. Meeting her was the grandest, most terrible moment of my life; love and loss, joy and sorrow, all dissolving into one profound, primal feeling.

Grief has a strange way of putting things into context. Like a gambler who borrows money to make a bet, you are no longer risk-averse, because you know you have already lost everything. You understand why some people never seem to smile. You figure out why perfectly normal people can do extremely terrible things.

Rage wakes you up every morning, reminding you there is little to live for. Pain becomes a disability, an extra limb you cannot amputate. A poisoned chalice, killing newborn moments before they take a breath.

You see reminders from nine-thousand nine hundred ninety nine timelines that are not this one. The pram in her room, the crib that was never christened. You lose friends because they never know what to say. You feel guilt because they tell you it isn’t your fault. But when the odds are 1 in 10,000, you often wonder whether you’ve done something. Whether you’ve done enough. Grief destroys your sense of probability.

The following week, our doctor tells us that we may never conceive again. The complications from the stillbirth took its toll on Asha’s body, damaging her uterine lining, with the possibility of infertility in the future. He tells us that we have options, but more than anything, he’s sorry. We are too.

But he tells us there’s a chance. We thank him, but we say, hope is a terrible thing, the worst of things, and often the first to die.

Two years later, we walk the white sands of Tromsø, hoping to watch the Northern Lights dance across the sky. Our host had been remarkably glum, letting us know the skies had been cloudy for over three weeks, and would remain so over the coming days. We camped there, nevertheless, braving the freezing cold, hoping for a glimpse. On our last day, I decided to go again. I did not have many expectations. Just a bit of hope.

The snow fell gently at first, before falling in heaps. It wasn’t long before it turned into a blizzard. Asha and I sat in our room, the mood somber. We had come all the way to northern Norway, trying to outrun something we could never outrun. So we decided to take a walk instead. Our host protests, but we laugh it off. We were no strangers to freezing weather.

Neither of us said it out loud, but we thought of the acres of wasted time and land that lay stretched out ahead of us, the icy kisses that fell from above, with ever decreasing ferocity, the lengthening shadows that followed every step, soon enveloping us in its darkness. And then, just like that, the snow stopped, the clouds cleared. We looked up ahead of us, and there it was, a tinge of green. Aquamarine. Velvet. Blue. An invisible hand stroking its fingers across the vast canvas of the heavens, launching forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself. The sky was drawn in the colors of our hearts.

We embrace each other, and sob. At last, there is hope. Amal.

We return to our cottage. Our host is surprised to see us, and he tells us it is the first time he’s seen us smile. We tell him why we don’t smile anymore.

We go up to our room, and I look into Asha’s eyes, feeling something larger, grander than my grief. I did not know this was possible, to ever feel that way again. We make love for the first time in twenty four months, and I fall asleep to her hands wrapped around my heart.

I wake up in the middle of the night. I kiss her on the forehead and make my way out of the cottage to go on a long walk. I have little recollection of how long I must’ve walked, but I instinctively stop when I reach a lake at the valley of two mountains.

I sit on the snow and think of how I ran away as quickly as I could, how it was all in vain. At this moment of my deepest grief, I decide to surrender to the wildfire of the past, to become the ashes of a dream that I tried hard to forget.

I burned, I burned, and I burned, and I must have burned for very long, because when I finally came about, what I saw was neither dark or day, but a color I had never seen before.

It emanated from a giant ball painted in a dark crimson shade, that I noticed, grew smaller and smaller as it rose, the color of the sky turning pale, pale, and paler; until the ball burst, scattering everywhere, turning everything blue.

Let there be light.

Our son, Arun, was born nine months later, on the 21st of December. He was born in the depths of the most terrible winter we would ever endure. His name, means “dawn”.