Daya

When she becomes old enough to understand I will tell her that I had imagined her birth very vividly. I would have been outside the operation theatre, and the nurse would come out holding my baby in her arms and say: “It’s a girl” (or “It’s a boy”). There would have been loud cheers and congratulations doing the rounds. Very filmy. She would agree.

No nurse came with a baby though. Can’t blame the nurse. I wasn’t at the hospital in time. The time was 1.34 AM, 13 July, Sunday. I was around 300 kilometres away on the upper berth of a train heading home. A call would have been fine, given the circumstances. That didn’t happen either. No network. An SMS is all I got. I couldn’t have imagined something as big as this getting conveyed through a less subtle medium. “Congrats. We have blessed with an angel – a girl”. So much for those mobile networks claiming to follow us wherever we go. I had nobody around to share my joy with. I thought the occasion called for a shout of joy, but I figured the other passengers wouldn’t appreciate my reaction in the middle of the night. A quiet prayer of thanks took the place of celebration. And then I tried to go back to sleep. Tried. There was after all, nothing else I could do but wait to get to the hospital. Huge anticlimax.I will tell her that when I reached the hospital next day, and I wanted to see my wife, her mother, the stern nurses wouldn’t let me. It was a caesarean and she would have to stay in the ICU for at least 24 hours they said. There went my kiss. I just saw her from a distance, and she smiled – a weak but immensely satisfied smile. And then I asked to see her, my baby. She was elsewhere on the same floor – at the NICU. A glass window acted as a transparent barrier. The curtains parted and a nurse held up a delicate little thing from behind the window. That was as close as I could get to her. Seeing the nurse holding my baby sort of reminded me of Michael Jackson once dangling his baby from a balcony. But that picture didn’t last long. What I saw before me now was my own, was me, a part of me. Small, calm, blissfully unaware she was. Part of me, yet outside of me. What I felt then is something I can’t describe best in words. Awe would come closest. I could have stood forever outside looking at her right then. But the nurse was getting rather tired of holding my little one. And she had other ones to dangle for display.

I will tell her that we decided to christen her Daya. We were swaying between Nina and Daya, my wife preferring the former and I the latter. We settled it by deciding to call her Nina at home and Daya otherwise. It was again a disyllabic name, but at least it meant something.

And I will tell her this: Over the next couple of weeks as I watched her sleep, as I saw her smile, and as she occasionally opened her little eyes to look out into this new world, not understanding anything yet, I felt a familiar tug at my heart. Of course, she would grow up, I would grow old, and lots of things would change around us. But at that time of my life, and I hope it remains that way for a long time to come – I was in love all over again.