Memories of a time-sibling

A good blogger (like any artist) tries to capture life truthfully. In this effort, the bloggers honest memory usually serves as a poor servant:

"Memories are milestones
But the magic of life is made
In the mundane moments
'Tween the markers in our mind."

So when Notunma asked me to write about the time leading up to Noyonika being born exactly a year ago (wow, is it 1 year already?!), I was in a fix. It was too hard a task for me to perform.

I could write about my most vivid memory - sometime in Dec '06, when we did the ultrasound and my heart stuck in my throat when I saw the picture of that little baby curled up and sucking her thumb (just the way she does even today).

I could write about K leaving the US for India on Feb 17th last year, and my restlessness and melancholy afterward, till my getting to Guwahati on Apr 7th and being ridiculed for being "beefy" - I had taken to weights to beat blues; I guess I had been a bit too restless!

I could write about the morning of the 8th, when we ate poori & chhole at K's aunt's house, and K telling me that her stomach was hurting, she'd eaten too much.

I could write about the tension of having to switch Doctor's on the morning of the 8th and the 4 hours that crawled by till we heard a wail from inside the O.T.

I could write about my looking around, dull-headed and dim-witted, when the nurse stepped out with a bundle in her arms and said "Father kaun hai?" (& of dearest Shahana, being right there next to me to push me forward!)

However, none of these events seen individually communicate how I (or K) felt before Noyonika was born. Nor do they, when strung together like beads, capture accurately time leading up to Noyonika's birth.

The reason that it's so hard writing about the time leading up to Noyonika's birth is that while I may document each event as honestly as I can, my memories of before Noyonika are a falsehood - they are the memories that belong to a different person, who just happens to have the same writing style as me.

"Time-siblings
Created at birth
Of another."

There are a few events in ones life that are truly life-changing, that add a new dimension to life that you couldn't have understood before the event and can't explain with words after.

Now, whenever K runs up the stairs at 90 miles an hour at an imagined sound from a fast-asleep Noyonika, I grin to myself - this isn't the woman I married, but no worries, life's good.