I miss her.

I wrote about my beloved niece once before. When she was two I used to tell her a story (accompanied by dramatic gestures and eyebrow-waggling) about that unseasonably warm November night in Boston that she tumbled into this world:

Jub Emaan choti choti see thee aur janat sey naee naee aiee to uss ney kali kali ankhein khol kar idhur dekha, aur udher dekha, sub kee aankhon mein ankhein daal key dekha- khas taur pur Nano ke ankhoon mein, jo key dulhan kee tarah lal jora pehen key intizar mein beti hueen theen. Phir uss ney “chaan” kar key dunya ko salaam ke! Aur aapni muti choos kar keha, “Mama, dudoo dey!”

(When tiny Emaan was newly arrived from heaven she opened her black eyes and looked directly into everyone else’s – especially into those of her maternal grandmother who awaited her arrival dressed in red like a bride. Then she shouted her salaam to the world, noisily sucked her fist and demanded, ‘Mama, give me my milk!’)

A simple story, but she asked for it repeatedly, intently listening with eyes-wide attention. I loved the way she asked for the story, mashing her hands together to indicate her small size as a newborn and then hanging on every word – as if she was trying to learn and memorize the way the world was and should be, with her as the center of every story.

The ultrasounds always caught her with legs modestly crossed so we didn’t know the sex of the family’s first grandchild for certain until the birth. All we knew was that her father’s nose, like Aadam Aziz’s in Midnight’s Children, was the sort that spawned dynasties for there was undeniable paternity in that miniature profile, one that has graced every sibling since.

But I dreamt about a her anyway, assuring my sister of her coming daughter. In one dream my sister and I were traveling in a taxi together during her labor. But we couldn’t get to the hospital in time and there the tiny she was, born into my hands in the back of a cab, opening her black eyes to hold my gaze just before I woke up.

In reality they did make it to the hospital in time, but I wasn’t supposed to be in the delivery room. My sister had planned on going in with her husband and our mother while my father and I waited safely outside, but her husband’s tendency to swoon at the sight of blood and my mother’s to panic changed my sister’s mind at the last minute.

Totally unprepared, I was somehow calm enough to coach her through her breathing and to briefly overcome my own squeamishness in utter fascination of the birth process. My brother-in-law held her hand and faced the wall to avoid fainting, murmuring “Haan haan, chalo mera sher bacha!” (‘Yes, you can do it, my lion cub!’) as encouragement while mopping his own sweating brow.

My sister, always inspiring, was now a superwoman in my eyes, her body capable of jaw-dropping feats like creating and then bringing a perfect and ravenous human being into the world and being her sole sustenance for months to come. (Besides being miraculous, witnessing labor is also truly the most effective birth control method ever invented.)

Emaan was pushed by my sister and then pulled the last couple of inches by the doctor into this world with a wrench that loosed a guttural scream in my sister, forgotten in the next instant in her overwhelming desire for her child. So new that she was still attached by the umbilical cord, her little red face framed by shoulder-length hair, she turned toward me and opened her black eyes to gaze into mine – and in that suspended moment I was lost. I became hers and have never quite recovered, subhanAllah.

She’ll be five this November and still haunts my dreams every week. A connection that began through dreams before she arrived, continues that way now as she grows and thrives half a world away.

I see her once a year in Islamabad, if I’m lucky. I ache for her nestled close, for her pleading for stories past bedtime or musing on life from a shorter perspective. I thrill at her intelligence, and wilt in her four-year old tossed head disregard for a far-away Khala who is most often just a voice on the phone not worth tearing oneself away from Thumbelina for. But oh, those precious days when we are together and she wraps herself around my legs and says, “Don’t go back Khala, I’ll miss you too too much” and breaks my heart into a million pieces that only she can put together again.

She opened doors to a love I’d never imagined. Perhaps those doors formed and opened only when she herself came to exist. And though three more treasured nieces and a nephew have tumbled into the world after her, that first inscrutable black gaze, those first small red fists have never loosened their tight hold on my heart.

Each time a beloved child is born they break off a part of your heart and make off with it, scattering into the world with pieces of you, leaving you utterly vulnerable, yearning, growing not diminishing – and spreading love, everywhere.