Of late, most of his thoughts had been morbid, lingering somewhere between forced forgetfulness and reluctant reminiscence. As he sat in the balcony of his apartment, the thought fell on him, pricking like cold rain. The very thought that he had been guarding his heart against.

Gradually, it pierced his flesh and touched his marrow. What qualifies or defines a man as a father: sperm or sweat? The carnal pleasures climaxing in a momentary gloopy ejaculation, or the sacrificial parenting with its painstaking, committed and unselfish love? Genitor or Pater?

SPERM. SWEAT. Five-letter words, both.

Abbas sat deeper into the chair in the balcony, sipped vodka, threw his head back and closed his eyes. The spiralling violence in Gaza didn't trouble him; the grainy videos of Taliban, shot in some monochrome hideout, did not rattle him either. Neither the impending fall of Saddam Hussein, nor the suicide of the pregnant woman affected him.

The thought slid into his mind. Droplets of sweat gleamed above his brows.

Sperm vs Sweat.

Like Ali vs Foreman.

Pleasure vs Hard Work.

He put himself in the first category and Bhaskar in the second.

Abbas vs Bhaskar.

How could he lay claim over his own child, Abbas wondered. He knew that DNA tests may help prove his claim as the biological father, but the heart doesn't always align with scientific inference. Does it? Love cannot be proved, or claimed, based on laboratory charts, nor can it be derived from the twisted, ladder-like strands of chromosomes.

He sipped again.

The cold drink worked its way down. The silence in the apartment had permeated into the balcony, but it was often broken by the many noises of quotidian traffic.

If sex leads to life, and sin leads to death, what about sinful sex? After all, what he had had with Ratnam was illegitimate. She had cheated on her husband. Bhaskar could have killed him in a fit of anger. But the sudden U-turn he took that day, fifteen years ago, was the worst punishment he could mete out to Abbas, the young colleague who had slept with his wife and impregnated her.

Was it a boy or a girl?

TWO YEARS after Bhaskar and Ratnam left the country for good, with Abbas's baby in Ratnam's womb, Abbas received a courier from India. He opened the brown envelope and a black-and-white photograph slipped out of it. Abbas picked up the photograph from the ground and read the word written in black ink: 'Thanks!'

He quickly turned over the photo. It was of a toddler, lying on its stomach, its head lifted. It was smiling.

It was his baby. His heart pounded. He smiled at it. 'My baby ... my baby!'

Along with the photograph came a tuft of soft hair. He took it in his hands, delicately, as if he were holding the baby, and kissed it. Then, he brought it close to his nose and smelt it, desperate to get a whiff of his baby's scent.

He left office early, and back in his apartment, he kept looking at the baby. Is it a boy or a girl? There was no way he could find out. All babies looked the same. In photographs in which they were fully dressed, at least.

Abbas doubled his drink and, lying on his back, held the photograph against the bedroom lamp and kept watching it – smiling at it, sometimes laughing. It filled his heart with joy until reality hit him: he was being teased by Ratnam. The promise remained. He was not supposed to spill the beans; he could not go in search of the baby either. Then why did she send the photograph and the tuft of hair? Why?

He tried to unravel Ratnam's intention, trace her thoughts behind sending the photograph. What was she trying to communicate? Did she want Abbas to know that he had become a father, or did she want to inform him that the Reddys had become parents to a beautiful baby? After all that she had done to him, had she not had enough of making a fool out of him? Did Bhaskar know about it?

Lying on his bed, next to the photograph of the baby, Abbas went through a sweep of emotions – from joy to anger to self-pity to frustration to sorrow. Sometime in the watches of the night, he drifted off to sleep in a state of inebriation. He woke up the next morning with swollen eyes. He put the photograph back into the envelope and kept it in the drawer in his cupboard. He had hardly taken it out since.

ABBAS GAZED nonchalantly at the night traffic around the Corniche. He continued to drink, as usual, until late at night, slumped on his balcony chair.

When you get older, things will be taken away from you. You will just watch people walking away with your possessions – one by one, a little at a time, until you are left with nothing but your own old age and its predicaments. The lust with which you chased things – women, wealth, keepsakes – loses its vice-like grip on you. And desire its mesmerizing, fey edge.

'But my own child was taken away from me when I was as young and bright as the morning sun.' Abbas rued his decision to let Ratnam and Bhaskar walk away with his child, and soon regretted his own sexual proclivities.

Was it a boy or a girl?

He wanted to drive the thought away, and wished he could scream at the top of his lungs until the last bit of anguish had been drawn up from the innermost depths of his heart. Unlike bile and undigested food, you cannot vomit sorrows out of your system. You cannot thrust your fingers into your throat to bring it all out. Memories and regrets linger deep inside a person's heart.