Breech Position (Maya Krishnamurthy #1)
She stood still, staring at the entrance of the hospital. ‘City Towers Maternity Hospital’ – the neon name-board gleamed in the pitch dark surroundings. It was a quaint little hospital situated away from the bustling city. Maya Krishnamurthy’s eyes travelled up to the third floor, where room no. 303’s window was tightly shut. Lights were on, indicating that a patient was inside the labour ward. She wondered whether the woman inside the room had a natural childbirth or a caesarean operation.
It was the same room in which her mother had given birth to her vaginally. She had always wanted to be inside the room to see how her place of birth looked like and to see the doctor who had touched her for the first time. She remembered her mother telling her that she was in active labour for seventeen hours and that she, baby Maya, was in breech position. It was just before the pushing sensation that she had turned head-first. Maya always wondered about that miraculous moment which saved her mother from a C-section.
“It was like God had sent a signal to the baby to turn. I felt so relieved,” her mom had said.
“What if God had indeed sent me a signal? After all, it is said that babies can see God,” Maya had replied.
“Haha! Silly girl! Babies are Gods.”
“No, Ma. Babies cannot be Gods. Gods don’t give you so much trouble, but I did. I swallowed all your dreams and I was a difficult child. So, I wasn’t God.”
Her mom had embraced her then and had replied, “You were difficult, yes. But that doesn’t mean you weren’t God.”
As Maya recollected the conversation and stared at the hospital room, something heavy pressed on her chest. Her hands immediately flew to her bosom. She began having palpitations and she gasped for breath. She shut her eyes tight, as she felt something engulf her. The conversation in her head turned into a faraway echo. Her surroundings swirled while she clenched her fists in an effort to stop the peculiarity.
The next moment when she opened her eyes, all she could see was red. She was confined to such a compact space that she couldn’t even wriggle properly. Something like heartbeats pounded in her ears with a Dolby Atmos effect. Then a lone wail pierced the pin-drop silence. A woman’s cry.
“Aaaaaaa! Someone help me. I don’t want this pain.”
“Don’t wail, Shreya ma’am. Your baby is in breech position. We have to wait till it turns head-first. If not, we have to operate on you.”
Epiphany washed over Maya as she realized what happened to her. Her 25-year-old self was trapped in her yet-to-be born self’s body. She somehow wriggled and looked at her right hand. Teeny-weeny fingers covered in vernix. Though she couldn’t comprehend how it was possible to travel through time, she realized that time was running out. So she delivered a ferocious kick to her mom’s belly.
‘Mumma, I will help you!’ She thought. With all her energy, she swivelled and did a somersault. She heard her mother gasp and then, “I think the baby has turned.” There was, indeed, relief in her mother’s voice.
Few minutes later, Maya heard voices that chanted, “Push, push, push!” Without any further ado, she squeezed herself out of her mother’s birth canal. Gloves-adorned hands picked her up and exclaimed, “It’s a girl!”
A sudden fear attacked baby Maya, as she realized that she should start her life all over.
‘No, no, that’d be so difficult. Imagine a 25-year-old acting like playing with toys and learning ABCs in kindergarten. I’d rather get trapped in the body of my 16-year-old self and relive my life from that point. Never from my baby-self. No, no, no.’
Terrified immensely, she turned to the doctor for help. She just glimpsed at the doctor’s face, before she was engulfed by the same force that had brought her back to her birth moment. The next second, she was the 25-year-old Maya staring at the entrance of the hospital.
To this day, Maya Krishnamurthy wonders how she had travelled back in time just like that. Also, it had created a paradox. Did she turn herself head-first because she knew the information from her mother? Or did she know it because she had turned head-first and her mother had informed her about it? The same chicken-egg theory.
Even though she knows that it would never happen again, she sometimes stands in front of her school and college, wondering whether she can involuntarily travel back to those days.
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FOOTNOTE: This story was written for Half Baked Beans’ Annual Microfiction Contest (2019). The version is that anthology has just 500 words. I have expanded it here. This flash fiction is a part of A Time Damsel (Maya Krishnamurthy series).
