an itinerant observer

"Happy Birday , Baba !” The emphasis on the chicken in that birthday wish was not lost on me. Although I appreciated my kindergartner’s signature artwork, I couldn’t help but cringe inwardly when I thought how fast the fortieth was approaching.  When I am in a thoughtful mind frame, especially on my birthday, words are conceived. I tend to shy away from too much fanfare on my birthday. I feel that it should be a subtle rejoicing and reflecting of what I have gone through the previous year and preparation for the next. The icing on the cake, no pun intended, would be to spend that day quietly with a few near or far, but dear ones. But then that’s me. For some, birthdays are of grave significance: to be CELEBRATED and indulged in—decadence then has no limits. Thus, conventional wisdom for me would be to give it the importance it deserves on a case-by-case basis. Should I be sad that there is one less year to live or be happy for the potential opportunity that still exists ...

“ Baba , what are you reading?”, Noori peered over my shoulder to get a look at the book. All my reading life I have been much irritated when anyone has tried to peer into my book, especially by the over the shoulder route. It’s as annoying as someone peering over your shoulder to catch a glimpse of your email, while you’re working at your desk. Yes, I accept the double standards, but it’s okay for me to look over the shoulder of the other, but I certainly cannot tolerate it when I am the recipient. I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and very patiently told my 5-year-old kindergartner, “It’s a book called ‘the forty rules of love’”. It vaguely occurred to me, given the nature of the book, to pat myself on the back for not being short-tempered with her. “Is it about love?”, Noori asked. “Yes and no”, I said, “It is about love and no love for the other person”. “ Baba , when there is no love for another person then is there hate?” She wasn’t going to let go of this rare disp...

Apologies : Event postponed till further notice as a precautionary measure owing to road blocks on Thursday evening. 

The economy class of the domestic flight from New York was stifling, cramped and nauseating. Luckily I was in the aisle seat. On boarding I made myself as comfortable as I could and had resumed reading the mystery that Adelia was trying to solve. Adelia happened to be a ‘doctor of the dead’ (likely a pathologist) in twelfth century Cambridge, hot in pursuit of a psychopath killing children in that rustic part of England. The gruesome manner in which the kids were being massacred is a story for another day. “Aha!” that was Adelia about to make a crucial discovery.   “Arrrghhh”…hmmm, that sounded a bit off. That was not in the book. I looked up and saw an elderly white man approaching my seat. “Arrrghhh”, that was him clearing his throat. “Great!” I thought to myself, quite unkindly, “I’ll have to share the space next to me with this sick man”. I didn’t want to catch the flu, swine or otherwise, on a domestic flight. Not that catching it on an international flight would...

  “If you ever had to adopt a baby then whom would you settle for?” This was the question that I posed to myself recently. Not that I had to nor wanted to adopt a child. I have two of my own (biological ones, so my wife tells me), and they are more than a handful. It all started in Karachi one fine morning while I was working in the ER. A young couple had brought a two day old baby girl to me. The ER triage slip simply stated “baby adopted” as the reason for coming to the ER. I had never come across that as a presenting complaint in the ER, so my curiosity was piqued, irrespective of it being early moments of my ER shift without adequate caffeine in the system. It turned out that the baby had been picked up half an hour before, from a major orphanage in Karachi. The baby had been delivered the day before, per the orphanage staff’s speculation, and she had then been left at the doorstep of the orphanage. Although babies being abandoned there might have been a normal occurre...