Voices of Islam (152 page)

The Birth of Aliya Maryam
119

When Hazrat Maryam came to this moment, the Temple could no longer shelter her. She had conceived a child with no father and risked the opprobrium of her people. Young, unprepared, and utterly alone, ‘‘she con- ceived him and withdrew to a distant place’’ (Qur’an 19:22). I thought of her solitude as my pains increased and beautiful companions joined me. I had let Osman sleep to gain strength for the next day, but he awoke early, sparkling with vitality and goodwill.
Ammi
arrived in the afternoon on the first flight from Chicago. She had been reading the Sura of Maryam on the plane and disembarked to blow its blessings thrice over my body as we lingered near the baggage claim in International Arrivals. Her eyes told me that she would not cease until I had safely delivered her grandchild. Later I was joined by three women whom I had thought of as wise Sherpa guides. They would lead me, share my burdens, and teach me how to breathe in the thin, high altitudes of labor.

The first was Jackie, our
doula
or birthing companion. She had met Osman and me twice during the pregnancy and had helped us refl on how we should experience this event. Mostly, I knew that I wished to be present and conscious to experience each moment of the journey and greet our child, clear-eyed and fully aware. Who would she be at the moment when she arrived? What would I become? I wanted to share a first glance unmediated by any sedative. I called Jackie on the afternoon of December 18th to say that I was still at ease, despite riding the waves of suffering and relief. An hour later, Osman phoned again, urging Jackie to come quickly. As soon as she arrived, Jackie fi the bathtub and crouched beside me all night. When the hot water ran out, Osman boiled some more, running back and forth like a midwife’s apprentice in some earlier century. I must have fallen asleep before sunrise, for when I awoke I found that someone had carried me from the bathtub to the bed. How long had I been unconscious? Five minutes? Five hours? Jackie lay sleeping on the floor.

My friend Lou arrived later that morning in a penumbra of red-gold curls. Once a nurse in rural Newfoundland, skilled in low-tech labor support, she was now an anthropologist, psychologist, and harpist. One day I said to her, ‘‘ Lou if I get to that point in labor where I can’t continue, I think I will be alright if I can just look into your eyes.’’ Now her eyes held my gaze and her body held my form, moving together in the Tai Chi of ‘‘Love your baby down.’’ I shuddered through each season of pain, too much now and too long, and Lou absorbed it, sloughed it off, and fi led me with her melodic light. My child would not descend. Why? Was an elbow askew? Was her chin in her palm? We wound up the Hawaiian music box my brother had brought back from his honeymoon and swayed with the mechanical hula girl as I wept, ‘‘Come down, baby, please come down.’’ In Jackie’s notes she says that
Ammi
approached me around this time saying,
Beti, Allah se bhi maango,
‘‘Darling, also ask Allah.’’ ‘‘You ask Allah, Mum, please. Talk to Allah. Right now I need to talk to my baby.’’

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By the time Dr. Rachael arrived, the labor had been going on for 36 hours. She knelt beside me, ‘‘How are we?’’ I remember saying, ‘‘This is hard now, Rachael, really very hard.’’ Rachael was an advocate for midwives and home birth. She could not recall the last time she had needed a knife and a needle. Rather than telling women to push, she urged, ‘‘Love your baby down,’’ and called her work ‘‘catching,’’ not ‘‘delivering’’ babies. I knew the fi moment I had met her that I wanted her to ‘‘catch’’ mine. Though Rachael was herself five months pregnant, she had dropped in on her Sunday off just to see how I was doing.

A woman must open for a child to be born, open in every possible way. Medically, it is said, she must open 10 centimeters. After 36 hours of labor, I anticipated success, but somehow the examination revealed otherwise. ‘‘You have not yet begun to dilate,’’ said Rachael, ‘‘there are 10 centimeters to go.’’ My heart fell—after all that time! (Women are expected to dilate one centimeter per hour.) ‘‘But you are fully effaced,’’ Rachael added, ‘‘That’s the hardest part. You’ve done remarkably well.’’ Rather than noting my failure to progress, Rachael offered her dazzling approval and made me feel like a hero.

Rachael felt confi that in Jackie’s care we could continue to labor at home, but upon phoning the hospital we learned that a room had just opened in a new ward called Cedar where mothers could labor, deliver, and recover all in one suite. I had seen the windowless delivery rooms in the old basement wards and felt certain that I would feel caged and claustrophobic there. Cedar had spacious windows, pullout beds, endless hot water, and room for all of my companions. Room 7 was available and I did not want to lose it. How long would it take to get there? With green lights all the way and one red light on Broadway—two and a half contractions.

At one point, while preparing our birth plan I had become self-conscious. Women give birth every day in challenging circumstances. Why was I walk- ing, swimming, and meditating? Why did I need five companions? Was this not self-absorption? Then one morning before dawn prayer, I dreamt of myself within a vast tent, a circular tent of white skins. The skins were supported by four peripheral poles and one great central pole. Smoke ascended skyward through an opening in the roof. Waking, I knew with certainty: the four ‘‘poles’’ were Osman, Jackie, Rachael, and Lou. Without each one of them, the tent would collapse. The central pole was
Ammi,
her unceasing recitations opening up to Hazrat Maryam. At fi labor would be like ascending a mountain, later like plunging into a burning sea, but
Ammi
would blow into me the presence of Maryam. Without each one of them, my will would fall into absence. Without each one of them, my baby would not be released.

At first, I bore the surge and the retreat. I called upon the divine names
Al Qabid, Al Basit,
‘‘Contractor, Expander, grip and release me, draw this being from my being, let this child be born!’’ As the storm rose, so too did

The Birth of Aliya Maryam
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my endurance. The women told me, ‘‘Other pain is a signal of warning and danger, but not this pain. This pain is safe; it is the pain of creation, and you are safe with us.’’ Somehow, this made a crucial difference. I feared the sensation of pain, but I never feared that it would harm me. I loved its work and its effect. The women knew these contours of the ocean, islands of respite, and depths of the sky. I shivered, trembled, and cried out. They embraced me in the ceramic hospital tub, pouring warm water down my spine. They would not let the ark of my body shatter on any reef.

I have read that even elephants give birth like this—elephant
doulas
and midwives stroking their elephant sisters, murmuring secrets remembered from ancient elephant times. Here is an elephant secret: at the height of labor, in a time called ‘‘transition,’’ a time of vomiting, terror, and delirium, if a woman is held and comforted she can fall into a restorative sleep in the single minute between contractions. I had been awake more than 40 hours. Now, I slid to the bottom of an ocean, slept with strange aquatic angels, waking and slumbering, conscious and gone. Lou and Jackie sailed my body back and forth in their arms. My baby swam down, down, finally engaged.

Aliya did not want to be born in water, and I wanted strength beneath my feet. I crouched on the linoleum floor. Glancing up, the hospital bed seemed as remote and unstable as scaffolding or aerial wire. The urge to bear down became the most powerful instinct I had ever known, seven worlds thunder- ing down into the depths of my abdomen. Though my friends surrounded me, I arrived at the place where Hazrat Maryam had begun and retreated into a wilderness where no one could find me. The Maryam who had arrived at this place was not the Queen of Heaven. She was a woman like every other woman—spirit, yes, but also fl and blood, milk and bone. ‘‘The birth pangs drove her to the trunk of the palm tree’’ (Qur’an 19:23). She cried out in a voice so intimate, so colloquial, ‘‘I wish I had died and been forgot- ten!’’ It was the desire to become oblivion itself, to fall away traceless and unremembered. I could neither proceed nor retreat.
Ammi
had read the Sura of Maryam and blown its blessings over us unceasingly for one night and two days. In her murmuring, I heard the fugue of all my scattered kin. Sherif Baba would be reading from the Sura of ‘‘He Frowned’’ (Qur’an 80), ‘‘And then [God] eased the path’’ (Qur’an 80:20), but I knew now that nothing could ease this path. My child would never be born, nor would I survive. ‘‘I am dying now,’’ I said, ‘‘I am going to die.’’ I began to disappear but was drawn back by someone whispering, ‘‘If you have seen the door of death, then you are ready to have this baby. No woman can give birth, Seemi, without wit- nessing that door.’’ Then there was screaming, a body rent, and Rachael exclaiming, ‘‘What a sweet face!’’ and our small slippery daughter crying out in my arms.

A root grows in the hills outside of Medina. The Bedouin women harvest small bunches of it and bring it to the graveyards of the Muslim martyrs.
Ammi
remembers it from her Indian childhood. The Hajj pilgrims would

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return from Mecca on great wooden ships, disembarking to garlands of marigold, jasmine, and rose. In return, they offered their loved ones vials of healing
Zam Zam
water and bunches of the root known as
Panja-e Maryam,
‘‘Mary’s Fist.’’ They said that this same root grew in the hills near Bethlehem and that Maryam grasped it when she was overcome by birth pangs.
Ammi’s
aunts used to soak it in a bowl of water until it was soft and grasped it in their own labors, calling upon Hazrat Maryam to stand by them in their pain.

My sister Saba had bought two Fists of Mary at the graveyard of Badr near Medina when she was but 12 and I was 17. Since then, they had accompanied her to Chicago, New York, and North Carolina. She used one root for the birth of her children and the other she saved for me. She told me how she had watched the ‘‘fist’’ unfold in her first labor, gradually tinting the water a delicate amber color. I too witnessed those deepening hues, and held the root in my hand, folding Maryam’s strength within mine, sending
salaams
to her spirit.

Two nights and days had passed striving to give birth to Aliya. Night had come once again before she was finally born. It was December 19, 1999, the eleventh night of Ramadan, two hours before yet another midnight. As the postpartum nurses settled our daughter to rest, I turned to the glass bowl at my bedside and glanced at the Fist of Maryam, still floating carnelian and serene. Once gnarled, desiccated, and closed, it had slowly unfolded and softened in the animating medium of water. The fist had become a pliant hand, and now after 48 hours, it revealed something that no one had intimated. The root of Maryam had traveled from its ancient home to my daughter’s land and become a tentative garden. On this, our last
Layla
together, Maryam’s palm opened, offering green leaf and blossom.

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