Propped on the desk at Radhika Bhirani’s workspace is a pretty pot, its terracotta exterior hugged by a vivid flower design. Despite her penchant for all things artsy, Radhika is biased towards this particular piece of décor; the bond they share is allegorical.

The pot, you see, is a metaphor for hope.

On 22 April 2024, Radhika, in her first trimester of pregnancy, was attempting a design on the pot for a World Earth Day competition at work.

And then she felt it. A trickle on her underwear.

“A loo break later, all hell broke loose in my head,” she recalls the torrent of what-ifs that exploded in her mind. “I had tears; my hands were shivering.” The genesis of this paranoia lay in the three miscarriages she’d had over the past decade. The bleeding, the shock that followed in the aftermath of it, and the trauma of being told she had lost her baby were scarily familiar feelings.

In the moment that she felt that trickle of blood, a terrible déjà vu had crept up on her; it kept her company all through the ride to the doctor, the tests — the ultrasound revealed that she was experiencing a subchorionic haemorrhage (bleeding between the uterine wall and the baby’s amniotic sac), and the advised month-long bedrest.

While Radhika did carry to term, delivering a healthy baby, she couldn’t shake off the anxiety that would tug at her relentlessly during the remaining two trimesters, until it got her attention. It always had the same question for her: What if we miscarry again?

What if it doesn’t work out? It would follow up.

What if it does? She’d counter-question it.

Perhaps the reason why Radhika loves the pot is that it is a reminder of the quiet power of believing she can brave any storm.

Grief doesn’t wear a single label

There are over 6,00,000 words in the Oxford Dictionary. Radhika, a journalist whose work hinges on articulating things perfectly, can’t find the right one to describe the feeling of holding her infant for the first time. How do you verbalise a moment that has been a lifetime in the making? How do you describe the cataclysmic love your heart feels when, after loss upon loss, you hold joy in your arms?

“There is no feeling that matches it,” Radhika adds.

“After a delivery, you’re surrounded by people, and so rarely do your raw emotions come out. But when everybody retires for the day and the husband, baby, and the mother are in the room alone, you have that first moment of shared joy; you release all the grief that you’ve accumulated all these years.”

Acknowledging that

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