atolluk
This is a poem written on 30th January 1992, just a day after the birth of my lovely daughter Jadine at the private Joseph Fraser Memorial Hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka (her first-ever photo taken on that day is featured here). Just prior to and just afterwards, my wife Nahida and I had been staying in a nice rented apartment for 2 months over-looking the Indian Ocean just north of Colombo.
The back story to all this, is that about five year earlier in 1987, at that same hospital, I had had removed all four of my wisdom teeth under general anaesthetic. The only reason for this procedure had been my spurious claim to be suffering from severe pain from impacted wisdom teeth with my Maldivian employers in order to facilitate a free medical flight to Sri Lanka. My real motive was to enable a clandestine rendezvous with my then girlfriend (and now wife) in Sri Lanka. Ironically, as it turns out, she was unable to make the trip in the end due to her work and finances, and so the extraction and all the post-operative pain proved totally in vain .
Given my deceit, this was my just desserts (and one I still pay for to this day in my 60's - where four extra back teeth would have been very useful). The moral from the first part of this sorry tale is that quite rightly crime doesn't pay in the end. Second moral is that only fatherhood and family in the end focusses the mind away from preoccupations with yourself - towards something much more important.