MOTIVATION

They congratulated me on my new development. I already had two girls to hold my turf but from where the third one came I didn't surmise. My husband was also averse to a third child.

I dug into my memory for that fateful encounter with my husband which produced the third offspring, but didn't get any result. We had a plethora of dates having the potential of producing the reproductive result. We had our anniversary, his promotion day, then came the birthday of our two daughters. I dug into it to find when and on which impulse I decided to abandon my career prospects and jump into an unplanned pregnancy. It didn't happen. It didn't happen, I told myself, but the results were evident.

I had morning sickness, bouts of vomiting and by all means knew that life was present inside me.

It could have happened unknowingly. Nobody knew the exact impulses we went through. It could be that by fatigue and exhaustion the accident could have happened.

I tried to think but I couldn't get even a single episode of intimacy. I and my husband were living in a way like brothers and sisters live, platonically. I had some sort of amnesia but I had always prided myself on having an excellent memory, but this one time was as if the shreds which formed the connection between the memory and the incident were missing.

I scratched my head and nodded while in deep conversation but my mind was elsewhere. I never thought about other things while doing a particular thing, but was never in such a mess. I messed up my desk in the workplace, stayed awake while taking a supposed, and answered nonsensically in the meetings. I even walked up to my mother's house instead of going and picking up my kids from school. It was not much, but that she had passed away five years ago.

It came coming back to me with increasing bouts of nausea and morning sickness. With every pang that i felt I thought it couldn't have happened. I had this delirium even when holding the ultrasound sca showing mild sensation of the foetus's sexuality.

It definitely waas a boy but I was not thrilled. I dug in my mind, for a touch, for a feeling, for a caress which could have produced this offspring, but no!

My mind was blank. There was a missing piece somewhere, and I wanted to find it.

I tried to think, to remember what could have prompted e on that fateful encounter. I tried to find out by myself. Iwent into deep meditation and tried to remember, the place, the date, the time"the everything! But nothing came. I had nothing but a blank memory. I had nothing! I had nothing! But wait... there was one more thing: self-hypnotism.

I had seen how people responded to certain suggestion when hypnotized. I had seen people crawling like dogs or behaving like monkeys when in the hypnotist's spell. I had seen women truning into men and men truning into women at the end of the session the hypnotist had mentioned something like-self hypnotism. In it the subjecty self-hypnotised oneself. This can be done if the subject wants to remember along forgotten occurrence and it was the same in my case. Self-hypnotism was my tool. I could easily find out!

I lay on my couch and prepared for suggestion.

"Your eyelids are beoming heavier. You want to go into slep...

I closed my eyes with heaviness.

"You want to sleep. You want to sleep. You will not be able to open your eyelids even if you want to. Just try...

I tried but I couldn't open them. I had entered into the hypnotic haze.

" now remember, the past, what happened in the past

I had recollections of what had happened in the previous day. I lived my life backwards remembering every flicker of emotion in the people's eyes around me. I saw yesterday in slow motion.

"Now go further of what happened day before yesterday."

I got up at 5 am, readied my children for school... I recollected everything!

Now was the fatal moment. Now was the moment of finality. I decided to test my knowledge of past sexual experiences.

"Remember, when was the last time you and Rick got together."

I recollected having a bundle in my hand, and my husband by my side. It was a moment just after our second child was born. After I had put the baby to sleep my husband closed the door and we had each other. I came back from my trance.

Well that was eight years ago. I was pregnant now and wanted to know the reason for the enigmatic reply my husband gave me. Was it a joke, a double entendre or just a sarcastic point? Or was he just plainly distracted? I couldn't know because when he sipped coffee, he brushed it aside.

Meanwhile my tummy was growing and self doubt lingered what actually had happened and was going to happen. But I welcomed he new kid as it would again use up the vast resources which were left on the planet. We were only of a hundred inhabitants of Mumbai City and it was a good sign that there would be a new addition to the family and the population of the world.

Deep in outer space a spacecraft lingered leisurely at the outer corners of earth's gravity. A greenish looking creature said: "Subject insemination successfully completed."