SELF

My mother didn't believe when, in 1945, I appeared to her in a dream and told her I would be born to her the following year. My father recognised me as soon as he saw the mole below my left thumb. But mother believed to the very end that someone else had been born to her masquerading as me. Father and I pleaded with her, but dreams are not reliable witnesses. She went on waiting for that promised son till she died Only when she was reborn as my daughter did she admit it had really been me. But by then I had begun to doubt: it was someone else's heart beating within my body. One day I will retrieve my heart; my language too.