THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 27
to reach this moment, the news seemed
impossible.
“Are you happy?” Christine asked.
“It feels strange.”
We went to find my parents. My
mother was in the living room watch-
ing “The Great British Baking Show.”
Christine and I sat down on a sofa
at a right angle to her.
“Mummy, the news came.”
My mother looked at us silently. She
knew that we had been waiting to hear
about the hormone tests.
“Christine is pregnant.”
My mother remained silent.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“It feels like a shove,” she said. By
this, I later learned, she meant a shock.
My father came in. He looked at us
and sensed that there might be news.
He immediately turned around to leave
the room. My father likes to keep the
world at a distance and thus tries to get
family news filtered through my mother.
“Sit,” I scolded and pointed to the
place on the sofa next to my mother.
He sat down. My mother sidled up next
to him.
“Christine is pregnant.”
My father looked at his swollen, ar-
thritic hands.
“What do you think?”
“What can I?” he answered.
A few minutes later, Christine and
I left the room. My parents’ bodies were
pressed together. I had seen them do
this only when they were very happy.
And, after this, my parents became
very loving toward Christine. Every day,
the four of us played ludo, and my fa-
ther began wanting to let Christine win.
C
hristine and I returned to North
Carolina. There, we started to de-
velop stories about the daughter we
were going to have. It was strange to
imagine stories for her. Each time we
did, we felt we were being disloyal to
Suzuki Noguchi. We also felt a sense
of loss at letting him go. I had not re-
alized until then that I had begun to
love this child we had invented.
Because I am culturally Hindu and
reincarnation is part of this culture, it
seemed reasonable to me to imagine
that our daughter already existed but
was in Heaven, waiting to come down.
In our stories, our child was in her thir-
ties. She told us about the people she
hung out with in Heaven: “Abraham
Lincoln is always hitting on me. I tell
him, ‘You are the Great Emancipator,
but you’re a married man.’” Whenever
we talked about what our daughter,
whom we named Ziggy, for “zygote,”
would enjoy about our house—the birds,
the squirrels—Ziggy one-upped us: “I
have dinosaurs in my back yard.”Like
Suzuki Noguchi, Ziggy had a strong
mocking personality. She complained
about all the Christian martyrs in
Heaven: “Never have a martyr over for
dinner. Their stigmata start bleeding
and your napkins are ruined.” She also
had Suzuki’s covetousness. “Do you re-
ally need to spend so much money on
yourself? Buy some Amazon shares for
me.” But, whereas Suzuki Noguchi had
been a criminal, Ziggy abided by the
law. The fact that women live a life of
greater physical risk than men shaped
how our imaginations treated her. As
did the awareness that our daughter was
going to be a woman of color.
The prospect of having a daughter
made me realize how little I knew about
the experience of women. I began read-
ing biographies of female scientists and
politicians. Books on violence against
women. Books about how to help young
women develop a healthy relationship
to their own sexuality. Every time I read
news about a strong woman, I began
imagining Ziggy like her. I looked up
Janet Yellen’s educational history and
thought how wonderful it would be if
Ziggy ran a major central bank. I called
an economist I know who teaches at
Princeton and asked him what it would
take for Ziggy to run the Federal Re-
serve. “Are you joking?” he asked. To
me, my question seemed quite reason-
able: somebody has to run the Fed; why
shouldn’t it be my daughter?
I was aware that I might die before
Ziggy reached adulthood, and I began
thinking about how to help her be con-
fident and unafraid on her own. It oc-
curred to me that I should take her for
walks in the rain so she could under-
stand that things can be uncomfortable
and still be O.K. I wanted her to get
used to uncertainty, and I thought of
trying to get lost in an unfamiliar neigh-
borhood so she could see that things
“I saw no shadow ...only my demons ...”
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