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His mother had been in labour for eight or nine hours, starting late at night. He’d been put to bed somewhere far enough away from the delivery room that he couldn’t hear a sound, and he’d fallen asleep assuming – with a mixture of resentment and gratitude – that he’d miss out on everything. But in the morning his father had woken him and asked, ‘Do you want to see your sister being born?’

While the violence of the birth itself had unnerved him, even his mother’s suffering hadn’t been able to distract him entirely from the strangest part of what he was witnessing. Two cells that might as easily have been shed from his parents’ bodies like flakes of skin had instead succeeded in growing into an entirely new human being. That they’d done this deep inside his mother was clearly of no small consequence to her, but what struck Prabir even more forcefully than the realisation that he’d emerged in the same dramatic fashion himself was the understanding that he too had been built from nothing but air and food and ancestry, just as this child had been built, month by month back on the island, right before his eyes.

He’d long ago accepted his parents’ account of his own growth. He was not at all like a child-shaped balloon, merely swelling up with food; rather, he grew the way a city grew, with buildings and streets endlessly torn apart and reconstructed. A vast collection of templates inside him was used to assemble, from the smallest fragments of each digested meal, the molecules needed to repair and rebuild and extend every part of his body. Great fleets of microscopic couriers rode crystalline scaffolding, swam rivers thicker than treacle, and negotiated guarded portals to carry the new material to the places where it was needed.

All of this was astonishing and unsettling enough, but he’d always shied away from pursuing it to its logical conclusion. Only once Madhusree had emerged, staring uncomprehendingly into a room full of faces and lights that he knew she’d never remember, had Prabir finally seen beyond the vanishing point of his own memories. The thing he knew first-hand about her was equally true of himself: he had once not existed at all. He’d been air and water, crops and fertiliser, a mist of anonymous atoms spread across India, across the whole planet. Even the genes that had been used to build him had been kept apart until the last moment, like the torn halves of a pirate’s map of an island yet to be created.

While his mother cradled the child in her arms, his father had knelt by the bed, kissing them both, laughing and sobbing, delirious with happiness. Prabir had been relieved that his mother was no longer in agony, and quite smitten with his newborn sister, but that hadn’t stopped him from wondering what she’d actually done to deserve all this adoration. Nothing he hadn’t done himself. And that would always be true: however precocious she turned out to be, he’d had too much of a head start to be overtaken. His position was unassailable.

Unless he was working from the wrong assumptions. He’d always imagined that he’d somehow earned his parents’ love, but what if his sister’s reception was proof that you began life not with a blank slate, devoid of either merit or blame, but with a kind of unblemished record that could only be marred? In that case, the best he could hope for would be to slip no further while he waited for her to fall as far.

He’d felt ashamed of these thoughts immediately, and though that wasn’t enough to quash his jealousy, he’d resolved, there and then, never to take it out on Madhusree. If his parents continued to favour her – once the understandable fog of emotions brought on by the birth itself had cleared – then that would be their fault entirely. It was obvious that she’d played no part in it.

Nineteen and a half years later, Prabir wasn’t sure that any of these thoughts really had run through his head in the delivery room. He didn’t trust memories of sudden revelations or resolutions; it seemed more likely that he’d reached the same conclusions over a period of months, then grafted them on to his memories of the birth. Still, it made him cringe to think that he could have been so calculating and smug, however absurd it was to judge himself in retrospect by adult standards. And in one sense he couldn’t even claim to have advanced much beyond that child’s perspective: he still couldn’t untangle the reasons for his parents’ love.

On one level it seemed utterly unmysterious: caring for your children was as indispensable as every other drive for reproduction or survival. It might be a struggle to raise a family, the way it was a struggle to gather food or find a mate, but the end result was as unequivocally satisfying as eating or fucking, as self-evidently right as breathing.