It took ten days for my daughter Jinaki to start looking human. At birth, she looked more like ET the extra-terrestrial.
I shouldn't have been surprised. I'd always remembered the comic writer PG Wodehouse noting in a short story that all babies looked like "a homicidal fried egg." But I read that story many years ago and Hollywood, with its images of newborn babies who, right out of their glowing mothers' wombs, were fat and calm and also glowing, had brainwashed me. Which tells you how powerful media are, since my brain is not easy to wash.
Jinaki had pretty much stopped growing in the womb for the last month and was born, induced, at five and a half pounds. I was not in the nursing home when she was born, at 9.43 am, because I'd gone to drop my wife's family back home, thinking there was plenty time still to do. But Afi, my wife, called me when I had just come round the corner and said, "Come and see my daughter." Were I an insecure man, I might have gotten worried about that "my," as though I hadn't contributed my bit, but her phrasing was understandable after 23 hours of labour.
The little scrap of human the midwife showed me when I went into the delivery room was thin, squalling, and the back of its head was elongated like the creature from Alien. (So, between ET and Alien, Hollywood had at least given me an alternative reference point.)
What fascinated me in the first days was how different her face looked from day to day, and even hour to hour. Even her complexion seemed to vary, from yellowish brown to light chocolate. And her features would seem to change too, the eyes swollen, the nose almost bulbous, then become neat. Then, in her tenth day, her features have stabilised at neat (most of the time).
Some people find she resembles me, others Afi, and some people have said that she looks entirely like Afi. These last I suspect are influenced by their perceptions of race, since Jinaki is a dougla who, so far, inclines more to her African side. But her features are like mine when I was a little boy, while her 10-week-old brother Kyle, who looks more Indian, has features more like his mother.
Anthropologists have surveyed parenting in many cultures, and have found that, in most societies, people more often say that a child resembles the father than the mother. This is not an objective opinion most times, however, since most babies tend to have features from both parents. Jinaki has her mother's mouth shape, for example, and my brow.
So why do people mostly find this resemblance to the father? One hypothesis is that this is a cultural trait which was invented in response to the biological fact that a man is rarely entirely sure he is father to a child. And, since males in several species (including humans) are more likely to kill a child which is not theirs, this cultural trait evolved as a mechanism to help children survive.
This is also true of monogamy, apparently, but I'll deal with that in another column.