Srinagar, June 19 -- By Noorain Ansari

No one tells you that the first cry is the easiest part.

My daughter arrived two weeks late, after forty-two weeks of waiting. By then, anticipation had settled into my bones. Every hour felt longer than the last, and every heartbeat seemed to ask the same question: when will I finally meet you?

Then, suddenly, she was there.

The doctor lifted her into the air, and for a moment she seemed suspended between two worlds. Her eyes blinked against the brightness, mine filled with tears.

She looked bewildered by the light, the sounds and the movement surrounding her. I looked at her and felt something equally overwhelming: the realization that a person I had never met already occupied the entire lands...