Fatima…a common name. I could have written Yasmin, Nahid, Farha… the choices were many, but Fatima has such a musical lilt to the name, it speaks of  motherhood, which made Fatima the favorite child of the prophet Muhammed, it speaks of “mother of all Muslims” and yet my Fatima was barren.

The house was a ugly shanty, barely covered with a tin shed which leaked during the monsoons and tin walls, which could kill a person in the summer heat. The floor was uneven mud, packed tight, house to worms and prone to becoming slimy in the rains. The house was home to Shehzad, the rickshawpuller and his Shehzadi, who unlike the Mughal queen Mumtaz Mahal could only beget one child and fade into the oblivion that only the dead have. Fatima was born, on a burning afternoon, her pitiful cries sounding and rocketing off the tin walls and delivered to her dying mother. The young Shehzad, did what he thought practical after the mother died. He remarried for his Fatima’s sake – and the little girl, was soon mother to all her siblings, who came regularly into the world in quick successions.

I will not talk of Fatima’s father dying, and the woes that came upon them. I will jump to the day when Fatima got married and started her new life – mother to two children from a previous wife. She continued the routine she kept at her home. But this time, she glowed with the joy of being married and hoped secretly for a child of her own.

Three months into her pregnancy, Fatima lost her baby. Something that was her very own, got snatched  away from her. The sterile green cotton curtains in the hospital room hurt her eyes and the wail of babies in the other beds tormented her soul.

Years went by and so did Fatima’s hope of a child…she felt it getting sucked away and then one day her dream died. Her husband faded away into the polluted soil and Fatima stood alone, mothering her husband’s kids like she had done her entire life.

Yet, my Fatima, the mother of motherless kids remained barren when her children deserted her at one go. She lay on the hospital bed, laboring for breath, trying to expel from her life the virus her husband had embedded in her years ago. But terminal AIDS victims never stand a chance – do they?