I may have had an inkling earlier, before he was born, maybe when I met his mother, but at some point I realised that bringing into the world a boy with my skin colour, but who would speak a mother tongue different from mine, would add one more trouble to his life’s journey. I think to myself, how enviably beautiful is that skin that came out of the mother’s womb; yet even that beauty does not come close to what I glimpse in his heart. Neither his beauty nor his heart will protect him, though. He will suffer.

Some of the suffering cannot be helped; it comes with being alive. All we can do is hope he can bear it well. Some of it will come from the choices we have made that led him to where he starts making his own choices. Some of the suffering, after that, will be of his own making. But there is also the suffering that will occur just because he was born a boy like him in this place, in this time.

He was three years old when the thought, steeped in a great fear about what was coming, pushed itself into my mind. I do not recall exactly what he was doing.

He is going to get hurt, this one, I thought to myself.

Perhaps it was one of the times when we went to the beach, which we did often, and as he was walking to the edge of the water I would hover close behind him. What to the other beachgoers was just another boy had become the reason for my joy, which intimates the reason for my greatest cares.

It could have been when I saw him spending time with his friends, and at a moment when I saw how free and full of life he was.

It might have been one of the times I dropped him off at the play-school.

What I know is that on one of the evenings, I put down some of my fears in my journal. I wrote that I watch as my three-year-old son walks to a place where he is going to get badly harmed.