Henana Berjes

“The third daughter is like a blunt knife. She tears more than she cuts,” thought Naji, looking away from the child’s face.

On the bed next to him lay his wife, Maryam, in a deep sleep after nineteen long and tedious hours of labour pains. He had expected a son for the last two labour pains had been like hot butter melting on warm toast, and both had been daughters.

“This child has to be a boy,” he remembered telling his wife the day before, and now his words hung like icicles on a frosty morning. He didn’t care to notice the look on her face as she went into a panic on hearing those words, and then labour had made her forget everything else. Daughter or Son, it didn’t matter as long as this terrible pain would just come to an end. She simply wanted it to be over.

The child, a mere four and a half pounds in weight, purred incessantly as she came out of the birth canal, ripping it at a place or two. And then the thick, twisted purplish umbilical cord detached from the seed where it had been sown nine long months ago, the reddish-brown placenta, which, maybe cats would eat up later on, and now she slept peacefully. Things would eventually sort themselves out in the next few days, and life would go back to normal.

‘A third daughter,’ Naji smoked fiercely as he lay down beside his wife that night. The other two daughters were with their grandmother, and the third one was here, on the bed next to him, huddled in a small blanket between the two parents.

“You could have been a son, instead,” he whispered, pinching a little white toe that peeped from beneath the tiny quilt. The child had just been nursed and was now in a deep sleep. She seemed not to care. Sleep was more important.

“That’s the problem with your gender. You don’t care, and we toil for you. We bear your burdens. You don’t deserve it; you don’t.” He added, a bit loudly this time. His wife sighed in her sleep. Her long hair was a mess, but she looked beautiful in the pale moonlight. The little baby was no beauty but had a reasonably light complexion and long lashes inherited from her mother. Her upper lip overlapped the lower and gave her the impression of being eternally angry.

Newborns aren’t pretty at all, he realised. But they turn out to be beautiful later on.

The other two had, despite the fact there wasn’t much to eat, and he was sure that it would be no different even this time. He had married a lovely woman. Beauty in a girl that belongs to a poor family is more cursed than anything else.

Naji drifted off to a dreamless sleep with troubled thoughts in his head and a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers.