Behind the curtain

The first few days of parenthood are like another country far from where you once called home.

In my wife's hospital room there was a sign affixed to the ceiling, just above the foot of her bed, indicating the direction of the Kaaba. It was the sign that really brought me back to our surroundings - reminding me of where we were in the world, and how far from home. It was early in the morning on August 8, 2008, and Rose, my wife, had just emerged from 35 hours of labour at the Corniche Hospital in Abu Dhabi. Aside from a few kind mabrouks and inshallahs from the hospital staff, and the dim recognition that our doctors were sometimes squads of women in headscarves, we'd been scarcely conscious of time, geography or culture in our windowless delivery room. Just after our daughter was finally born at 5:33am, I was stunned to look out a window and see the sun. I barely registered that it was shining on the dunes of Lulu island.

Now the three of us - a family! - were succumbing to exhaustion on the recovery ward underneath a sign pointing towards Mecca, in a room we shared with another woman. Judging from her voice, she was young and in the early stages of labour. We had only her voice to go on: a blue curtain divided our side of the room from hers. After a while, between two intense contractions, the invisible woman asked me, weakly but coolly, "What time?"

"7:45" I said. Rose and the baby were already sleeping. I was stretched out on a stiff reclining chair, trying to do the same. But whenever the invisible woman went into a contraction, I shot bolt upright. My brittle reflexes were still attuned to the past 35 hours - each time I heard the other woman's breath quicken, I leapt up to help Rose. And each time, I was surprised anew to see Rose sleeping peacefully with a baby - our baby - by her side.

"What time?" the woman asked again, her voice even more thin. I fished in a pocket for my mobile phone. "8:30," I said. The nurses finally sent me home to sleep. When I came back to the hospital the next morning, the same woman was there, now a new mother, and her half of the room was busy with visitors. Crowding the narrow corridor that led to our half of the room, there was a fresh flower arrangement that must have been five feet tall, flanked by two amorphous towers of pink and purple balloons that stood even taller. So she had a girl, I thought to myself.

I went straight to Rose, who was sitting on the edge of her bed looking over our daughter. When I reached her, she started to cry softly - the first tears she'd shed since her contractions started three days before. But the woman's mother poked through the curtain and urged Rose to stop, using an urgent charade. No crying, she motioned, pointing at the baby. She seemed to be warning us that a mother's tears are somehow bad for a newborn.

It was the first of many visits, and of many charades. Whenever our daughter - whom we named Iola that day - would cry for more than a few minutes, the grandmother would emerge from her daughter's side of the curtain to help us. Once, while she was bouncing Iola in her arms, she motioned to the baby, then to herself and then stretched out all the fingers of her right hand, signing that she had five children. With her hijab, it was hard to tell her age, but she hardly looked older than 40.

Whether she helped us out of kindness or exasperation, I couldn't tell. Iola's cries were disturbing them; maybe she was just taking matters - and our daughter - into her own hands. Part of me resented it, I confess. I've always been a crab about accepting unsolicited help. But each time the grandmother took Iola, she succeeded in calming her down. We learnt only a little about them. The grandmother was from Syria. Her daughter, the invisible new mother behind the blue curtain, spoke a little English. Whenever I tried to say something to her, she gave a clipped response - much the same way she'd asked me for the time on that first morning.

"Sorry for all the noise," I said to the curtain after a long bout of Iola's crying, feeling sure that my voice sounded like a caricature of American boyish insecurity. "Repeat," she said. "The noise - uh, sorry about the noise." When the grandmother visited our side of the room, she conversed with her daughter through the curtain in Arabic as she held Iola. "These Americans have no idea what they're doing," I imagined them saying. "Pity this little girl." I was feeling my first self-doubt as a parent then. We would only realise later how much we owed to them: in our mute exchanges with the Syrian grandmother, we learnt more than we did from anyone else about how to care for Iola.

At night, after visiting hours were over and I was gone, the new mother and grandmother would pull back the curtain to visit Rose and coo over Iola together. The invisible new mother, Rose told me later, was a young woman with an exceedingly pale complexion who wore a modest pink nightgown, and she and her mother shared her tiny hospital bed at night. They told Rose she was lucky because our daughter was so beautiful.

I enjoyed a good deal less camaraderie with my fellow men on the ward. The young fathers in the hallways were quiet, proud and vaguely distracted presences who stayed for contained visits, riding the elevators in stark white kanduras, sleek mobile phones in hand. Or they were older fathers, busily minding the older kids in the hallways and waiting rooms, their robes' white a little more dull. One night I had to run back into Rose and Iola's room after visiting hours because I'd forgotten something. The Syrian new mother had partly drawn open the curtain that usually surrounded her bed, and as I ran in I accidentally glimpsed her for the first and only time. She was as Rose described her: pale, with reddish hair, in a doughty nightgown. But because she was unveiled, my cheeks burnt with embarrassment.

She was discharged from the hospital the next day, a few hours before we were. Her husband arrived. He was large, round and cheerful, and he wore an Emirati kandura. We exchanged mabrouks. He looked as nervous and euphoric about fatherhood as I did. We said a heartfelt goodbye to the Syrian grandmother, thanking her for all her help. My resentment had long since melted, and now I regretted not getting them a gift. I knew we would not see them again.

The curtain was finally drawn aside fully, revealing the full, parallel family tableau that had been screened off from us for days. The infant girl lay in her cradle with huge eyes, tightly swaddled and wearing a tiny flannel cap. But the new Syrian mother was still shrouded from view - now behind a black veil.
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