The Girl Who Taught Me Numbers | Bobby Pawar

Four days late.
Patience’s cupboard
now lies bare.
Six and forty games 
of mindless solitaire.

Two people wait 
for the water to break.
One trickle. One gush.
One, ‘Oh god!’, and one, 
‘did you get my stuff?’

Seven cabs go by.
Curses too, multiplied by two.
One stops, many pleases after.
Then, twelve minutes of, 
‘Can’t you go any faster.’ 

Two counters where sufferings line up. 
Fourteen or so patients 
prodded by impatient maladies.
Three forms to fill.
One, ‘Can I get a pen, please?’

Seven hours of labour.
One private room, with a 
two-tone colour scheme.
Several hundred contractions.
A couple of screams.

The doc asks, Is the pain 
at level four, or five?
Five being a lesson in agonisation.
One shriek echoes an answer 
open to interpretation.

Heart rate: one forty six.
Push, push, push, times twenty-eight. 
Zero dreams of chantilly and lace.
Nine and thirteen pearls of exertion
roll slowly down her face.

One timid ‘It’s okay honey.’
One manic ‘Shut up and hold my leg’.
Twenty-four minutes of mounting dread.
One pair of forceps, two hands,
to pull a crowning head.  

One quick snip of the cord.
Four smacks with a gloved hand.
Eight seconds of fearful silence. 
Then, one quivering cry.
Two prayers climb the sky.

Seven pounds, eight ounces.
Two blinking pools that 
plunge deeply into mine.
The tears in my soul are mended
without needle and twine.

Thirty one million,
nine hundred thousand seconds, 
give or take a few.
Each a blessing, 
since I first held you.

Storyteller. Poet. Engineering college dropout. Purveyor of f-bombs. And m-bombs. Former advertising-man. One of India’s most awarded creatives. If you Google ‘Bobby Pawar’, it will show three people. One was in prison. The second goes by @jesus_is_life on Insta. You will find him dangling somewhere between the sinner and the saint.