Mixed Bag

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Of Cigarette Packs and Elephant Dung

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Where can you go to see the following? (1) Creative photography on cigarette packs. (2) Innovative co-existence with elephants. Answer: Sri Lanka. Last summer, my family and I went on a week-long sojourn to Sri Lanka. That it happened to coincide with the heat wave in Karachi needs further explanation, in case you think I created a respite for myself primarily because I wanted to get away from angry sun gods. Truth be told, I felt guilty that I was vacationing in a tropical environment while the heat-facilitated death toll rose in Karachi… Anyway, after that trip, there was a strong urge to write about the island. I'm not a travel writer, but after experiencing the ‘wonders of Sri Lanka’, I couldn't stop myself from telling you about that land. Although considered a ‘developing nation’, there were aspects to the country that completely defied that label. As I was visiting from Pakistan, the analogy thus created was insightful. A runner's tale "Are you a...
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Sitting at Nadir’s Table

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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...
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13 Years in the ER: From Chaos to Bearing Witness: A Farewell in Two Acts. Act II

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~ Act II ~   A Letter to the Father Who Returned   Dear Father, You came back to the ER yesterday. Alone. Your eyes searched for the place where your children had been, as though the walls might still hold their shadows. You wandered, lost, and when the tears came, they came quietly at first; grief without sound, until they could no longer be contained. I stood there, silent, because what can you say in the face of such loss? Your grief took me back to 2019, when another father arrived; with his five children, also victims of phosphine poisoning. They had come to Karachi from Quetta on a short vacation, staying in a modest guesthouse. No one knew that a cheap fumigant, silently seeping through the rooms, had already marked them. They were Dead On Arrival (DOA in our lingo). Five small bodies laid side by side, from the youngest, a baby, to the oldest, a teenager. I remember the starched white sheets, how they barely moved as we covered those bodies. I remember dr...
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