an itinerant observer

“How do you possibly endure these journeys?” Family, friends and others keep circling back to the same question. Ten-hour overnight coaches across Turkey. Greyhounds on the U.S. West Coast and across Texas. And now, twenty-five hours of steel and scenery from Chicago’s Union Station to New York’s Penn Station. “I would take the train every time.” My short answer. Airports have long lost their allure. Domestic U.S. air travel is misery disguised as security: endless ID checks, fingerprint scans, facial recognition, shoes and belts stripped off, dignity reduced to whatever the conveyor belt spits out. You don’t fly, you flee. Amtrak felt different. No one asked for documents or biometrics. I could step off at Cleveland, grab a snack, stretch, and hop back on without fear of being flagged as an outsider. For once, travel felt like belonging. That sense of contrast sharpened when I thought back to Greyhound. I had done my share of long rides there too - up the West Coast and acro...

The morning after Karachi drowned, I did something I do not usually do. At 0700, I walked into Zahid’s room. He lay unresponsive, frothing at the mouth. Twenty-five years old, once trained patiently by my mother and later woven into the daily fabric of my household. Reliable yet often clueless, a boy who grew into a young man - always present, always willing. Now limp in my arms, his breath shallow. He had likely just seized. What if I had not gone? The question shadows everything that followed. The floodwaters of a climate-changed Karachi had receded just enough. The rain had stopped. The roads were empty, strangely permissive. Had they still been blocked; this story could have been another one entirely. Security guards from the neighboring house helped me carry him to the car. My sister-in-law hurriedly drove us to AKU Clifton ER , where competence was ready to act. My former residents, now instructors and SMOs, stepped forward with calm assurance. Nurses and staff I had once ...

I didn’t think much of it back then - Konya. A few days carved out from a longer trip. A loosely held plan. But now, years later, I can still recall how it felt. Getting to Konya wasn’t easy, or at least not emotionally. I took a ten-hour overnight coach from Gaziantep. It wasn’t just a geographic shift. It was me, testing myself. Years ago, on my first trip to Istanbul in the late 2000s, I was mugged; trapped, manhandled, left shaken . That experience embedded a quiet anxiety whenever I thought about returning to Turkey. But this trip was different. I needed to reclaim something. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be in this country, move through it alone, and feel safe. And I did. Nothing happened. Not in Konya, not elsewhere. That, in itself, was a kind of healing. Now mind you, Konya wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunderclap, no burning bush. Just presence. And silence. Not empty silence, but the kind that listens back. I stayed two nights. Walked between Rumi’s tomb an...

We shared beginnings - different years, same places: Karachi Grammar School and Aga Khan University. A thin but sturdy thread in the doctor fraternity. We also shared the country club in Karachi, and in its gym is where we often crossed paths. Not to spot each other’s lifts but to swap maps of the world. Like the time I was heading to San Francisco for a conference and Nadir, between sets, gave me a street-by-street guide to the city, covering both work and after hours. He could have been moonlighting as a tour guide. That trip of mine went fantastically.  He was never my official career counselor, yet we had enough one-to-one sessions in the club’s garden to make it seem otherwise. He would talk about being at AKU, then moving away, shifting between academic medicine and private practice. When I spoke about my own trajectory in similar terms, he was always gracious in his mentoring. Later I realized he was like that with many others too. His funeral, with its sea of people ca...

There’s a cat. There’s no dialogue. There are no humans. That’s how Flow begins; quietly, like a breath held underwater. A world submerged, not just in water, but in silence, memory, and what’s left when the Anthropocene folds in on itself. The cat doesn’t meow for help. It doesn’t explain. It moves: hesitant, curious, sometimes afraid. We follow. And perhaps, like me, you start seeing yourself in the cat. Not in some mystical reincarnation way, but in the way it stares at a collapsing world and keeps moving forward. Alone. Until it isn’t. Flight Time, Liminal Time It’s not the first time a film has gripped me midair. Something about that altitude - between departure and arrival, held in suspension - tunes the soul to a different frequency. Last time, it was Mother, Couch and Lost Lake Confessions during a layover that stirred meditations on mortality and the tragic absurdity of family (as I wrote in “ Under the Weight of Absurdity ” ). This time, it was Flow: silent, surreal...