I’m Preethi and, believe it or not, I’m over 65 years old. So quite a granny. Really. But, when I was 30 years old, I received a telephone call I so longed for in my life. It was from the GP’s surgery in Forest Hill in London where I was then living. A woman’s voice said ‘Your results have come back. You are pregnant.’ ‘Oh’ I said breathlessly. Inside, my heart was thumping with joy. ‘Oh please tell me it’s a girl!’ I was tempted to say but of course that would be stupid. Very.

Months later, I found myself waking up alone in a hospital bed, all oozy from the anaesthetic. A black nurse touched me and looked at me with prayerful eyes. ‘You’ve had a baby girl but she’s poorly. She’s been taken to another hospital’. Around me were other new mothers, each of them had a crib next to them with a little one tucked in a cellular white blanket. There was even a baby howling in the far corner. I sighed and drifted back to sleep, I’d had a caesarian and there was a fluid bag draining by my bedside. And a drip attached to my wrist. Not a pleasant site, me.

Walking heavily into an I.C.U. unit in a sterilised dark green gown was like entering a space station. Everything bleeped. A paediatrician had seen me the day before, ‘She’s likely to be handicapped’. ‘Handicapped’ that’s what he’d said. Then I saw her. My baby. Lying fast asleep in a transparent crib, her pale body covered in sensors and tubes. One sky blue tube was puffing oxygen into her tiny lungs. That very moment everything in me melted, every tortured feeling dissolved and alchemized into rapture. Joy. Unbridled joy. I had given birth! She was mine! My baby! All my own to hold. And, gosh, she was beautiful even with her eyes shut. Head of curly hair, shaved on the side to house a miniature drip. A sugar-carton-size of a chest rising and falling softly. Could I, dare I… touch her? I felt something gush in me. It was my breasts, they were leaking. How embarrassing! Honestly!!

A nurse with a gentle manner approached me. ‘Would you like to hold her, mum?’ ‘Mum’ she’d called me. I was a mum! Hah! Proudest mum in the world. And then with expert hands, this nurse detached a few sensors and lifted this bundle of my life’s hopes and dreams onto my open arms. Can you believe? In this space age room I was holding my own baby! A warm, breathing six and a half pounds of a cherubic life created through me. I bent down to kiss her forehead. Oh, it felt soft as a sponge. And warm. My life! You’re part of my life! My baby dear! A beloved one. A kiss I will cherish. For life. Till my travels to Estepona and West Hampstead, Harrogate, Alwoodley and Halton Moor cease. Till memories of my first job in Cross Green School fade. Till my body eventually disintegrates. In time this happens you know. Reduced to ashes. Just happens. Only… only the kiss lingers. In the almighty aether. The aether.