That Sound

"Bring the baby to my mother's house, so he can at least die in a home, rather than in this orphanage", your Indian female physician friend says to you.

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"Do you know that sound that dying babies make?"  you ask  me.

No.  I don't know it.

This is a sound you knew from your work in  India and from Africa.
You had worked in maternal fetal medicine for years, combating prematurity, promoting prenatal care.
You had seen many hopeless cases before.

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You sit on the floor in the tiny home of your physician friend's mother.  They take the baby to an adjacent closet sized space, where they have an alter.  You can hear their utterances, as you sit praying.

You hear that sound come from your infant son, and you are sure he has died.
You sit helplessly on the floor, waiting for them to return.

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You heard the sound come from the mouth of your own baby, the Indian infant you had been in the process  of adopting for months, as you prayed for his life, from the other room. The Hindu women uttered their prayers from their alter nearby.

After a while they returned, baby in their hands, and said "He is going to be OK now".

Miraculously he lived.

You tell me how you would later joke with them about the prayers - asking whose prayers and whose God saved him?

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The Hindu grandmother continues to help to nurse him back to health.
As she does so, she continually tries to reshape to straighten his nose.

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He has a beautiful nose today.