Hey,

It has taken me months to pen this down—a letter I suppose I’m writing to you, to me, to her. I remember reading Chughtai’s Dust of the Caravan over coarse stitches around my rectal reservoir. The insides feel hollow, my organs dwindling amongst windy spaces. The torn muscle fibres post delivery screams of inflammation, puckered and raw. The stench of the bloodied scabs mixed with the cloying sweetness of my just-born just became unreal under the eerie glow of the birthing instruments overpowering the room. I remember Chugtai’s words that I wrote for you, me and her to revisit:

We were so many siblings that my mother felt nauseated by the very sight of us. One after another, we had tumbled to the earth, pummelling and battering her womb. Suffering endlessly from vomiting and labour pains, she looked upon us as objects of her punishment. 

There is this chasm, vast and deep, carved by the violence of a 36-hour introduction to motherhood that literature didn’t really prepare me for. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but Chughtai came to you, me, and her much later. The books, blogs, and whispered encouragements from older mothers painted a picture of labour as a warrior’s journey. Painful, yes, but meaningful. The urban legends spoke of endorphins kicking in, the first cry erasing the agony. They spoke of connection, immediate and electric. And so, I believed in this myth, walked into the theatre of childbirth expecting to come out battle-scarred but victorious, holding the banner of eternal love. 

Instead, I came out hollow. 

I think it began around hour 12. By then, the soft glow of resolve had dimmed. The pain was relentless, not wave-like as they’d described, but all-encompassing, like being crushed under a Sisyphean boulder. The room, too bright, too clinical, buzzed with voices I couldn’t attach to faces. Hands had prodded me, voices instructive and I—obedient, giving myself away fragment by fragment. They broke my water. They administered drugs. They promised progress. But progress is a cruel word in labour. It sounds linear; it isn’t. It is circular, a cruel, mocking circle. 

Hour 20 came and went. Somewhere in that haze, I lost track of who I was, my books had now dissolved into primal screams. I remember feeling an unshakeable rage—at the nurse for her calm, at my body for its betrayal, at my books that waited undisturbed back home, at my unborn for being the centre of this horror. I know this wasn’t what you, me and her were supposed to say, but it’s true. 

By hour 30, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give birth anymore or if I simply wanted to cease existing. And then, finally, she emerged, limp and purple. She wailed, but after a while, one of the stationed nurses suctioned out the mucous from her nasal corridor. Euphoria was absent. Pain, omnipresent. My soul, silenced. 

You, me and her might think it ended there. Trauma should have a neat, final act, shouldn’t it? She came out like a blueprint from a machine and I was supposed to feel this surge of joy with her conical head placed on my chest. But it felt like a punishment of excess. No burst of love, no cosmic connection, just an overwhelming alienness. The parasite was out of me. 

What do you do with that feeling? Where do you put the absence of maternal warmth when the world expects you to overflow with it? I wanted to pause time and talk to “her” about my trauma. Not the loud, dramatic kind but the quiet, insidious kind that childbirth often is. The kind that is brushed aside because “at least you have a healthy baby”. I wanted the tools to process it. How was it possible that my books hadn’t disclosed any languages for the trauma of birthing, no acknowledgments of its dissonance with the romanticised narrative? Why wasn’t there a single book on my shelf?

Dear diary, this needs to change. 

My daughter is six months old now, and I have learned to perform motherhood but I’m still searching for a way to live it. I’m still searching for literature that won’t shrink beneath natural expectations of motherhood. I still can’t find stories or documentation that will show the fault lines of this profession. If you are still reading this letter a few thousand hours later, it is proof that you still haven’t been able to unburden yourself of the shame you feel for not being the mother that you thought you would be. You, me and her know that our wombs are quiet custodians of our body’s secrets, a sombre sentinel, the unspoken epilogue of lives we are meant to brave, a crude latticework of emotions that is unparliamentary, unregistered and the scarlet letter of emotions. 

With “her” in my arms, I have searched and researched a lot to find answers in books. I found a few and am listing the same for you, for me and for her. Virility retells the tale of man’s pride and his vanity. You, me, her, might feel uneasy towards the end when his wife passes away during childbirth. Sink into that feeling. The story will unpack a gory demystification of the woman’s body and will leave you, me and her with a cruel, ambiguous humour, “But after she passed away, when people came to tell me that she had a smile on her lips at the moment of her death, my heart found some peace.” 

…she is scared to death of dying…. The reason she hates me is that still-born child whose skull is still visible, protruding through the bones of her belly, and who is the reason she is dying. Who could have known that my wife would hate me in her dying hours, but no, I ultimately turned into the cause of her death.

You see, the book was banned after its release but it showed you, me, her, how the womb is a mysterious space, dwindling between a rather convenient “visible” and the “invisible” in the Indian fictional scenario. You, me, and her will be relieved to discover that childbirth and labour was a site of silent struggle even then. Then, for a brief moment, Gloria Steinem’s words—“if women didn’t have wombs we’d be fine” during one of her conferences in India—might knock at you, me and hers’ door to remind that the womb will actually shape your life. There’s no escaping that. Men will retain the right to sexual and reproductive autonomy, and to place restrictions on freedoms, childbirth and labour, which will deny complete autonomy to women. 

You, me, her—distanced, objectified and trapped in nostalgia, shaped by fictions that celebrate, mystify or degrade us as the moment demands. The womb remained silent. I saw no mainstream literature ever entered debates through abortion, reproductive rights, custody, childbirth, surrogacy and sterilization. It was also not found under any anthologies; nor were these narratives found in books that had the term “family”. You, me, her discovered that the womb was a duty-bound space. You, me, her learned from fewer books that the loss of a child is not about a lost maternal object but about a labour that is controlled by patriarchal beliefs. Thus, you, me and her must remember that the womb becomes a double-enclosed space for the woman (within the home and within the womb). 

You, me, her  found a few  stories penned by Mahasveta Devi and Mrinal Pande in our attempts to unearth existing writings on birthing, abortion, (mis)use of the space of the womb. It became important for ourselves to understand how these experiences had possibly touched women but only in the margins. 

So, you, me and her will now create a catalogue for womb literatures in India. It will be a long-drawn battle but it will be my gift for “her”. I would categorise the books according to shame, labour, wombs as sites for struggle, understanding reproductive choices that a woman can take—within the fictional space in India. The exclusivity of womb literatures will be communicated strongly for it is extremely important to understand that childbirth is a process and not a moment. The womb does not know the pleasure principle; the womb is the space of the aftermath. Wombs may be celebratory but for some it might also mean “prisons”, “brothels” and “tombs”. Wombs are abundant; wombs are limiting as well. You, me and her will tell “her” that these narratives in the margins are for “her” to hear and understand. You, me and her will leave these books for “her” to see, read and think where you, me and her couldn’t. Our books for “her” won’t be confined to language, translations or regions. 

This catalogue will be for the keepers of those wombs.