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Divya Manikandan always wanted to be a doctor. The defining moment of that decision came to her at a Sri Lankan clinic, where she witnessed a stranger’s birth — a birth mundane to the doctor, yet extraordinary to Divya and to the stigmatized mother who elicited the nurses’ whispers.

Divya still remembers every detail from that day: the yellow daal stain on her top, the numbers on the faulty heart rate monitor, the baby’s room-shattering roar. But nothing made a stronger impression on her than the violence that brought this newborn into existence. “You were made to come out,” Divya writes, “just the way you were put in — by force.”

This “Letter to a Stranger” — from a young girl to a rape victim bracing for motherhood — is a tender postscript to a brutal backstory of trauma and survival. Thanks to the empathy of this talented young writer, the life force of the moment pulses through every word of the text.

The OA Editors

"At that moment, she knew that even if you had his eyes, your heart bore her strength. Although I was too mesmerized by you to be looking at her, in the soundtrack of that Sri Lankan night that plays repeatedly in my mind, I hear how with your first tears, her last ones ceased." 

Divya Manikandan, "To the Baby Who Was Forged of Fire"

OA: How did you find yourself working in a maternity ward as a teenager?

I always knew I wanted to go into medicine, even when I was a little kid and I’d play doctor. But I knew it was just a childhood fantasy, and that if I really wanted to do this I’d need to go and see what it was like to be in a hospital. So I went online and looked up medical internships. This website popped up that let you volunteer in different countries as a sixteen-year-old. I convinced my parents to pay an exorbitant amount of money (which, in retrospect, I can’t believe I did), and I asked them to send me to Sri Lanka for an internship. One of my shifts there was in the maternity ward. 
 

OA: Your blue moleskine holds a prominent if understated — position in this essay. What strikes you most when reading your notes from that era?

When I read my notes from that time, I definitely think about how poor my grammar and spelling were, but I can also feel that sense of awe that was building in me. Every day I was there, I took four or five pages of notes. I wrote down everything medical there was to write. But I didn’t write down an ounce of anything emotional. I tried to be objective, which is what I thought a doctor should be. So from this event that I write about here, I only have objective notes — for example, the times that the nurse came in. But I didn’t really write about how the woman was feeling, how I was feeling watching her. All of that imprinted on my brain as a flashbulb memory.
 

OA: Your essay is just as much about the birth of the baby as the rebirth of the mother. What did this experience teach you about resilience and trauma recovery, and in what ways has it given you strength in your personal life?

Before this experience, I don’t think I ever realized what it was to feel solidarity with another woman. But in that moment watching her, watching what she was going through, I think I learned what it means to be a tribe of girls, that sense of understanding you have with another woman without knowing anything about her, without even speaking to her. I think that was the first time I felt that. That gives me strength, even today: understanding that I have this unspeakable bond with other women on this earth. The fact that she survived everything that she had been through taught me that there is a strength in the female spirit that can overcome, that will overcome. 
 

OA: The worlds of art and science are frequently seen as separate. How does being a writer make you a better doctor? Why is it important to you to do both?

I'm a junior in college — pre-med but an English minor — and for the longest time, people didn't understand why I was so fascinated by the humanities. “Medicine is science, you’re not supposed to like art!” was the general reaction I got. And I had thought that very thing myself for the longest time, which is why my notes from Sri Lanka were very, very objective. But the more I write, the more I realize that English is not the study of language so much as it’s the study of humans, how we express ourselves, and how we exist in this world. And that is essential to being a clinician. You’re not just treating a body, you’re treating the whole human. 
 

OA: Do we know what happened to the child? 

I don’t know the facts. However, it’s likely that the woman would not have been accepted back into her own family, especially if she was unmarried. As for the child...in India and Sri Lanka, last names matter a lot, so the child didn’t have anything to go off of in that sense. It’s possible that the woman had a supportive family that took them in.

I really do think about that kid every single day. I guess I could just tell from the mother’s eyes that day that she was going to keep him and that she loved him. I was there with her beyond the story I tell here: I came back the next day, and I don’t think she planned on giving him up for adoption. But I don’t know.

 

OA: What are you reading these days?

A lot of creative nonfiction, but also short stories like Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” And a lot of magazines on the internet: AGNI, Subterrain Magazine, Hobart Pulp, The Offing, Confrontation Magazine.  

 
"Faking Optimism is Hard. But Then, It Works," R.O. Kwon, Elle

"Why the Alt-Right's Most Famous Woman Disappeared," Daniel Lombroso, The Atlantic


"Making Meaning," Garth Greenwell, Harper's Magazine

"Frontera," Trevor Ritland, Nowhere

"The Complexity in 'Where Are You From?'" by forthcoming OA contributor Vanessa Hua, The New York Times
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