A SELF DISCOVERY NOVEL
Lost & Found.
Chapter 6: Jordan Unwanted.
“I kinda felt like the first slice of bread in the bag. Everyone touched me, but no one wanted me.”― Kelly Moran, Winter’s Path
Mira walked out of the hospital alone after giving birth to a healthy boy born at 11.55 pm on the 1st of August 1971.
Mira had not told anyone about her pregnancy. A single 19-year-old girl in 1970’s Delhi had no chance of bringing up a child on her own. Society had no compassion for children like that. Nor did they have any sympathy for the mother. Mira also knew that if she kept the child, she would have to give up the life that she had planned ahead of her. At 19, life holds an ocean of potential and hope that might not be easy to realize but impossible to sacrifice.
The day Mira found out she was pregnant with Brian’s child, she faked a medical reason in the family, took a sabbatical from her course for six months, and moved to live with her grandmother, Leela, in the hillside town of Coonoor in Tamil Nadu.
Mira had spent many months with her Granny Leela at their ancestral home in Coonoor while growing up. Any chance Mira had to get away from her village life with her parents and Mira would be in Conoor. Mira felt more attached to her grandma than to her parents. Mira’s father used to work in a coal mine and had to retire early after a mining accident where he lost his eyesight. Mira’s mother was a school teacher who wanted Mira to marry the local church pastor’s son, stay in the village, and help look after her ailing father.
But Leela was Mira’s role model. Leela had been a well-known classical singer in the local radio station, who also sang often for the Tamil movie industry. Mira’s dream was to model her life like her granny and become an actress and also be able to sing, dance, and maybe one day write her screenplay for her movies. Leela saw Mira had a talent for acting and music and inspired her to apply to the National School of Drama even though her mother was vehemently against it.
When Mira arrived three months pregnant in Coonoor, Leela asked Mira to consider aborting the fetus and offered to pay for it to be done safely in a private clinic. But for Mira, this life budding inside her was a confluence of two paradoxical emotions. Pain and Hope. She felt the pain of lost love for Brian and hope for how incredible giving birth could feel. After a few sleepless nights, Mira told Leela that she was going to have the child.
Mira wanted the love child, conceived with Brain, to have a chance to experience the world and find freedom as she wished for herself.
During the months of her pregnancy, Mira spent most of her time in her room that still had her early crayon paintings on the wall, her old dollhouse, and her small collection of butterflies found while roaming the tea estates in the area.
Mira loved western and Indian classical music. In the last few weeks of pregnancy, her favorite pastime was drinking coconut water and listening to her granny’s classical music record collection, and humming along to some of her famous composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Indian classical singers Kishori Amonkar Begum Akhtar and M. S. Subbulakshmi.
On the 31st of August, Mira arrived at the gynecology ward of the local hospital at 8 pm. Mira had what the doctors called precipitous labor. She went into labor and gave birth in less than three hours. The doctors complimented her on such a smooth procedure, seemingly only two percent of women have such swift labor. Instead of feeling good about this, Mira felt a bit sad. For her, it was as if her son was in a hurry to get out of an unwelcome womb.
Mira had agreed to have no contact with her child after its birth to ensure a swift international or domestic adoption process by the local church charity in Coonoor. All she had was a few hours with her son for him to remember his mother through his just born senses.
The nurses brought Jordan to her nicely wrapped up in a soft cotton blanket. He was silent and seemed to be fascinated with the world all around him. He was awake, and the moment he saw Mira, he fixed his gaze on her without blinking his enormous hazel brown eyes. Mira started to cry as she hugged him tightly against her bare breasts. After a few minutes, she moved his mouth to her nipples, and he immediately began to suckle her breasts. Mira was relieved and delighted, and she wept with joy as she fed him his first meal with her first colostrum after giving birth.
Her breast milk was the first and last present she wanted to give her son.
She wanted this fluid to be his armor against all doubt and despair. She wanted it to be a potion of hope and confidence to succeed against all his enemies. She wanted this colostrum to give him the power to find joy and happiness despite all sorrow.
After a few minutes, he stopped suckling and looked up at her with a satisfied look as if to say, “Thanks, mum, I needed that.” Mira lifted him for one last time and put him on her lap, and gave him a big smile. She wished him all her luck as she kissed him on his lips, then on his cheeks and his eyes, and finally on his forehead to bless him the fortitude to become noble and yet stay humble.
She put her hands on her heart and then put it on his head and said, “From today, my heart belongs to you. I hope you forgive me for letting you go. I love you, my son, and I hope you will want to meet me again in this life. ”
And all this while Little Jordan could not take his eyes off Mira as he stared at her, almost trying to imprint every inch of her face, voice, smell, and touch into his soft, tender brain.