Dhaagey: The Ties that Bind Us [Tere Bin FF]

65. meesam

Epilogue 1 (of 3) focuses on our Meesam and her parents! See y'all on the other side!

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One Week after Meesam's Birth

Meerab's world had shrunk to their suite in the Khan Haveli. There was a total of three inhabitants in her world – her, Murtasim, and Meesam.

Meerab had thought she was prepared to take care of a baby.

She had read the books, or rather Murtasim had read them to her, the ones that were recommended and the ones that Murtasim had found at two in the morning with varying degrees of panic.

She had nodded when the doctor explained the feeding schedule, filed it somewhere in the organized part of her brain: every two to three hours. It seemed manageable. That was six to eight times in a twenty-four-hour period, which sounded like a lot, but she had handled difficult things.

What the books had failed to explain, in the particular honest way that would have been helpful, was what two to three hours actually meant.

It meant thirty minutes of feeding. Then another thirty of burping and settling, of pacing the room in the dark and murmuring soft nonsense and adjusting the swaddle and checking the swaddle and readjusting it.

Then, if they were lucky – if Meesam cooperated, if the stars were aligned, if nothing had agitated her between burp and bassinet – she would sleep. And Meerab would lie down. And close her eyes. And for approximately twelve minutes she would feel the edges of actual rest.

And then Meesam would be hungry again.

She felt a kind of tired she had never encountered. Different from studying late, from staying up too long, from the particular exhaustion of a difficult day. This tired had roots that went somewhere deeper, it settled in the bones.

And then there were the other things.

The bleeding had genuinely shocked her. Days of it, heavy and relentless, her body settling some enormous debt it had apparently been accumulating. She had, in hindsight, been entirely too pleased about nine uninterrupted months without her period. She had even, at one point, declared it one of pregnancy's more underrated blessings. It now felt like her body had taken that enthusiasm personally and was collecting, with interest.

Her breasts were constantly full, always one wrong movement away from leaking through whatever she had on.

Her moods swung with a velocity she didn't recognize in herself: she had cried that morning because Meesam's tiny sock had slipped off her foot, and in that particular moment it had seemed like the most heartbreaking thing that had ever happened.

She had cried last night because she was angry...at nothing, at everything, at the specific injustice of being awake at three in the morning when all she wanted was eight consecutive hours of sleep.

She had cried in the afternoon because Meesam wasn't crying and she worried that meant something was wrong.

But the worst cry, the one that had lasted a full hour and required both of them to get through, had come on day four.

She had been sitting up in bed, back aching, shoulders slumped forward slightly as Meesam nursed, the room dim and quiet except for the soft, rhythmic sounds of it. Murtasim had been somewhere nearby, he was always somewhere nearby, and for a few moments, everything had felt... manageable.

And then the thought had come.

Quietly. Slipping in the way the worst thoughts always did, without warning, without announcement. About women who did this alone.