The Story of Leela's Birth

Two Christmas babies, Leaving Caladan, and Sushi

Birth stories are magical because they trace our origins back to the origins of the cosmos. This is the story of two Christmas birth stories, 35 years apart.

Three days before Christmas, 1988, my mother started contractions in the middle of the night. My father was staying all the way across town. There were no cell phones, and we didn’t own a car, so legend has it my grandfather flagged down a passing group of carollers to drive my mother to the hospital.

My mom’s labour was precipitous — I was born within an hour of reaching the hospital, at 5:32 am. My father writes, in his chronicling of my birth, my mother brought Kanasu home as if she went shopping for groceries. As he drove through the streets of Bangalore that morning, he was so overjoyed he thought everyone from the milkman to the bus conductor was celebrating my birth.

Leela was early — she wasn’t supposed to arrive until New Year’s Eve, but she decided to steal my thunder forever, and become my self-made birthday present.

The day before she was born, when my labour began, I was surprisingly nonchalant, watching the Dark Knight Rises (until Rachel dies 😢) and walking up and down the stairs, packing my hospital bag and calling the hospital to check if it was time to come in.

In the delivery room, I soaked in hot water to get through the contractions while the nurses moved me from one side to the other to keep an eye on my blood pressure and monitor the baby via ultrasound. I kept meditating on this line from Dune:

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

I will only be in labour once. I need to find a way to enjoy this experience; to live through it fully. I have to find equilibrium with labour, I thought.

After 16 hours, at 8 cm dilated, when the contractions got too close together, I opted for an epidural. My sister and my husband, loyal companions from the beginning, dozed uncomfortably in their seats while I passed out cozily on the hospital bed.

At half past twelve on December 22, 2023, it was finally time to push. No one tells you this but pushing a baby ain’t that different from pooping, or possibly, anal sex, as I commented to the nurses around me. (Being naked in front of a herd of strangers makes you eerily invulnerable to shame, and is starkly freeing.)

It was exhausting but there was a rhythm to it — breathe in while waiting for the stomach to bulge up, and then breathe out through the contraction for ten seconds. Years of my Sudarshan Kriya breathing practice helped me sustain the long breaths required to do it over and over again.

Near the end, when Leela was almost ready to come out, I relied on the collective essences of Hanuman, Tyagaraja, The Beatles, and Hans Zimmer to find my strength. (The nurses looked at each other as if I was mad! ) But I’d imagined Leela entering the world to the grandeur of Leaving Caladan, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

After 24 hours of labour, at 4:51 pm, her head appeared. The final push to get her out was akin to that last proofread before getting a novel ready for the publisher. Endorphins played havoc and I was overwhelmed by the enormity of making a human. 🥹

From the left: Kanasu, one year old, Leela, one month old

I will never forget the confluence of emotions that followed when they placed her on my skin — gratitude, relief, joy, an unshakeable certainty that I would never experience solitude the way I had until now, especially on my birthday… “There’s a human at the end of the tunnel,” I cried, my face as pudgy as hers. In running the marathon, I’d nearly forgotten that it was all for a purpose.

In the quiet hours that followed, when my husband and sister went home to rest after standing beside me like rocks for twenty hours, with Leela sleeping beside me in the bassinet, and Mom watching over both of us, my birthday felt utterly uncelebrated. I felt like a patient at a hospital instead of a new mother on a fresh adventure.

Just as I was feeling down, my wonderful brother-in-law surprised me with sushi and chocolate cake. 🤗

I devoured the sushi — nine months was long enough to go without — and licked every last bit of the chocolate off my fingers. I welcomed another year on Earth, perhaps for the last time, in quiet solitude.