an itinerant observer

I watched The Life of Chuck on a flight out of JFK. The plane had just lifted, and the movie found me. No distractions, no wandering thoughts. It landed inside me faster than Flow had on another journey . I came of age reading Stephen King. From the haunting darkness of Salem’s Lot , The Shining , Cujo , and It to the unexpected humanity of his short stories adapted into The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me , King shaped my sense of how worlds can collapse, and how small, luminous acts still matter. The Life of Chuck felt like the natural continuation of that arc: not horror, but mortality seen through wonder. The story runs backward. Death first. Then middle age. Then childhood.  The world itself collapses into darkness, only to reveal the celebration of one man’s life, Chuck’s. Thirty-nine years written as if they were the span of a cosmos.  When he dies, the lights go out. That is the point: each of us carries a universe inside, and when it ends, so does the world ...

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...

Seven years. That’s how long it’s been since he left - though it’s a complicated kind of absence, more presence-in-absence than true departure. My father, Abu, was not the type to explicitly guide or advise. He was not a mentor, and certainly not a friend in the typical sense. We did not have those deep, heart-to-heart conversations. Instead, he was this quiet, steady presence in my life, sometimes maddeningly so. A provider? Yes. But as a father, in the conventional sense - someone I looked up to, leaned on, shared my struggles with? Not really. And yet, in some strange way, he was always there, quietly shaping my life choices without interference, accepting whatever I was doing, however unremarkable. I have often wondered if he would approve of the decisions I have made, like the time I signed his code status as Do Not Resuscitate . I remember standing by his side, grappling with that decision, feeling both alone and strangely anchored by the quiet figure he had always been. An...