an itinerant observer

My daughter Alaiyah was born in Karachi and she was born with Down syndrome. We had received a post-natal diagnosis, although there had been some suspicions before her birth. She had a cardiac arrest a few hours after she was born, had to be resuscitated and was put on a ventilator. Countless complications and blood transfusions later, she finally managed to pull through. We held her for the first time exactly twenty days after she was born. We brought her home after she spent a month in the NICU. She's had several surgeries - some major, some minor, and quite a few hospital admissions in the past 6 years but for the most part, is doing very well.   If you ask any parent of a child with special needs, they will tell you that having such a child changes you in ways you could never have imagined. You start looking at the world from a different lens. There are many joys and many rewards. But there are so many more challenges too. There are reminders in every day of what could h

“Aren’t you glad that you left Houston when you did?” I was asked recently. In the wake of hurricane Henry’s devastation, perhaps that was a valid question - not an insensitive one. However, on further introspection, I realized that I was neither glad that I had left Houston when I did, nor could I wish that I was still there. Au contraire, I was pensive about family, friends and former work colleagues having to deal with this newest water-related calamity of Houston. That Houston is flood-prone is not news to me. During my 15 year-long ‘sojourn’ in Houston, I had to deal with several flash floods and hurricanes. Allison, Katrina, Rita…. I can rattle their names off in my sleep. In June 2001, within a year or two of moving to Houston for graduate school, I confronted Allison, a ‘freak’ tropical storm that dumped so much rain on Houston in just a night that I was flabbergasted. I woke up to find my car flooded and the apartment complex grounds in disarray. At that time, I