During moments of an overwhelming sense of loneliness that piles up feelings of despair and loss of faith in life, one feels like like lying down on one’s mother’s lap. If somebody stroked the hair, one could even lure the elusive sleep. On those occasions when I’m struggling between the sleep that evades me and the sorrow that comes over me, I perceive the night as my mother’s womb. I bundle up all my feelings of helplessness and self-pity and deposit them into the womb of the night and sleep soundly. When I wake up smelling the cool, fresh dewdrops at the crack of dawn, I am born anew. Mother Night, who bore me through sleep, keeps the darkness to herself and kindles my inner light.
The dark vertical line running up my belly with a bump is itchy at times. I take some oil and rub it on to relieve the discomfort. It would be nice if my mother were by my side. Everyone is fast asleep except for me. I stroke my belly to comfort the baby that is bouncing inside, and the baby calms down like a kitty.
With the increasing weight gain in my belly, there has been a huge change in my body. Various parts of my body have become quite fleshy. I breathe heavily when I walk. My blood pressure has decreased recently, and I get hungry frequently. Despite everything, the nighttime has been facilitating mutual compatibility between my baby and me.
It’s been raining on and off. The relative humidity in the moist air has made it easier to fall asleep. It has been days since I gave up on the type of sleep that my eyes used to beg for more of.
My stomach is churning. These are the days when I have started experiencing the inexplicable sensations and aches during the night. Previously, if I closed my eyes at bedtime, I wouldn’t wake up until dawn. On and off, I would only be startled awake from deep sleep by sudden frightening sounds, but I had never found myself interacting with the darkness of the night on account of not being able to sleep. Falling asleep as soon as I go to bed! Even thinking about it gives me immense pleasure. It would create an illusion, as though the night had enchanted me with its snake charmer’s pipe called sleep.
The question of whether there could be someone who isn’t hypnotized by sleep had never arisen for me before. It occurs to me frequently now. The ear would sense each and every sound such as the sound of coughing from somewhere, the sound of the night watchman’s baton, the clicking sound made by the lizard on the wall, and so on. An elaborate scene would then start to emerge and expand right before my eyes, and by the time I got back to reality, several hours would have passed.
Not considering the night as beautiful, many people install colorful electric lights all around and enjoy them. They think that the rows and rows of lights hanging from above highlight the significance of certain special occasions in the family. It seems to me that the hanging lights are dangling precariously for something else.
Is it out of fear for their lives that people have become so unaccustomed to appreciating the beauty of dense darkness? Maybe. The fear of the night must have been prevalent even in the days when man was on the run, clinging on to dear life. The light that sparked from the friction of stones rubbing against one another was an amazing discovery. Light is so useful for man to redeem himself from fear. Those who are fascinated by light harbor an ongoing propensity to destroy darkness. Over the years, many festivals with a focus on light have also been created.
I’ve heard of people who eat dinner early and go to bed before darkness sets in to avoid cruelty to life, fearing that fireflies and similar insects may die if they light a lamp. The same light that calls for celebration in one place elicits fear for lives other than one’s own elsewhere.
Back in the days when I happened to reside at a place adjacent to bodies of water at a very young age, I would forgo sleep upon hearing the croaks of frogs and the sounds made by unidentifiable beetles during the night. There were occasions when I had stayed awake all night long, trying so hard, like a notorious smuggler, to seize and secure the silence of the night, but ended up losing my battle.
The nights that remind me of my helplessness and the treachery inflicted on me take me to the very edge of hatred. That is the ultimate edge of the pathetic state of feeling hatred for oneself. Those are the nights when one struggles in vain to extricate oneself from such burdensome thoughts, losing the inner battle to one’s own self. I should forget about those nights. If everything I think about is soothing to my mind, I’ll fall asleep. There is movement inside my belly again. “Okay, keep bouncing like this with no control. I just don’t know what to do with you.” Unable to bear the weight, the veins in my legs swell and stretch.
“Man has turned into a machine these days and has started to live unmindful of days and nights. We are becoming victims of an extremism that disregards climate change. The human life chain and genetics are facing tragic adversities. Meanwhile, you are going to be born, and will grow up in the midst of all of these and blend in . . . ” I was telling my rejoicing child. We have learned to enter the battle array, but we get tired and give up before we find a way out of it.
Outspreading the loneliness that allows one to ruminate on one’s mind, body, and experiences, the darkness of the night was informing me of myself. Suddenly, it felt as though the floodgates had broken and a huge river was forming. Though I found the feeling of sticky wetness between my legs disgusting, I consoled myself thinking that there wasn’t much I could do about it anyway. Biting my lips hard and grasping anything within reach with all my strength to control my moans of pain, I was transferring the increasing pain to the minds of the spectators.
Once I had poured some hot water across my waist and drank a homemade medicinal concoction to soothe the pain, I felt a little better. The vehicle to take me to the hospital arrived directly after the phone call. The hospital facilities were fairly comfortable. It was approaching twelve o’clock at night when the pain started coming intermittently, but it was hard to tell whether it was real labor pain or false alarm. The doctor who examined me left the room saying that the pain had to increase a little bit more.
I thought of passing the time listening to the experiences of my Paatti, my grandmother, who was then by my side. She had wrinkles all over her body. All those wrinkles appeared to me as drawstring pouches that were safeguarding her lifelong experiences. I was amazed at how enthused Paatti became, even at that midnight hour, when I asked her to describe her childbirth experiences. She began by saying that childbirth used to be managed at home with the help of a midwife.
“Paatti, what did you do when your youngest son was born?” My question instantly shrank the narrative of her overall general experience to a specific one, and she started describing the night she had gone into labor. On that particular night, Paatti had been winnowing the chaff from the pounded rice paddy for the following day’s meal preparation, after having worked hard all day long—toiling in the kitchen, tending the cows and calves in the cowshed, and attending to her three mothers-in-law. The night, however, had put everyone else to sleep. Paatti narrated in detail her experience during that night when she was struggling with the onset of labour pains and had stayed awake the entire night, reluctant to disturb others, yet not knowing what to do other than think about her previous deliveries and alternate between walking and sitting to alleviate the increasing pain. She stopped her narration when my own labor pains kicked in and resumed where she had left off when they subsided.
“In the daytime, the women in the household would respond to calls promptly and would come to one’s aid in no time,” Paatti recounted. “In the middle of the night, which mother-in-law would I wake up? If I woke one up, another one of the others would get angry. It would have also been embarrassing to raise my voice and call out loudly. Should I have woken my husband, who was sleeping on the thinnai, the raised platform in the front veranda, I would have had to listen to the reproaches of my three mothers-in-law. One of them would comment, ‘If she knows how to wake him up, doesn’t she know how to wake us up, too?’ Another one would remark, ‘Don’t cry wolf.’ Yet another one would sleep soundly even if I were to scream her ear off.” Just about the time Paatti had finished telling me how she had suffered through that night in pain and how she was yearning for the day to dawn and for the people in the household to be up and about, my labor pains started to intensify.
They had already told me that it would be a normal delivery. The nurse came in and said that she needed to give me an enema. By then, it was two hours past midnight. I thought to myself that it would be nice if the baby was born right away while I was in pain. As time dragged on, the pain that had to be endured exhausted me.
Crying during delivery alienates the body, and the scream that emanates from the delivery room signifies the separation of the body from oneself. Therefore, I resolved not to cry and controlled myself.
“This is my body, and the body that has the power to perform incredible wonders beyond magic is flooded today and is flowing in fluid form,” I said to myself. Interrupting the doctor’s voice, which was coaxing me, “More . . . a little bit more . . . more,” the high-pitched sound of the newborn’s scream emerged, and they lifted the baby up to show me. I looked at the baby with warmth and deep concern . . . Even in that darkness of the night, the light of the dawn slowly permeated the room along with the smell of blood.
