an itinerant observer

The manager behind the hotel counter in Lagos looked up, paused for a second, and then flashed her lovely smile. It was not the polite, transactional kind. She remembered me. I remembered her. “Welcome, Dr. Mian. Welcome, Sir!”. There was a familiarity to it now. It had moved beyond routine. Over the next few minutes, between check-in formalities, she told me more of her story. How she had grown into this role. How those early opportunities had come her way - one in particular resonated because the person behind it was well known to me. He also stayed at the same hotel during work trips; during one of which he had quietly opened that door for her to become the manager. She spoke simply about how things had unfolded. These moments had started to matter more to me over time. The repeated trips to Lagos. The same roads from the airport. The congestion curling through the Mainland, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, and Lekki. The faces shifting from familiar to expected. And somewhere alon...

Back in 2020, while COVID-19 was peaking during its first wave, as a front-line emergency physician I was frustrated. It was not just my hectic work routine in one of the busiest emergency departments of the megapolis   of Karachi to blame. The unavailability of my gymming routine because of the pandemic-mediated lockdown was adding to my woes. To keep sane, I, therefore, settled into a nice daily home-based exercise routine: 2.5 km of outdoor running followed by 15 minutes of indoor creative movement (aka Zumba-like dancing, to be precise). The fact that I went overboard with my routine and ended up fracturing my right ankle is a story for another day .  After I had reflected enough on my intra-pandemic/post-fracture predicament and my ankle (with a metal screw inside) had healed enough, I resumed my home-based Zumba routine. But this time I added Salsa steps to it so I could make it a high-intensity/low-intensity workout. Although I became quite happy with my workout, I ...

The day I started believing in bucket lists coincided with the day salsa became a potential need, not just a want, for me to become adept at. Well…perhaps not salsa initially…it was really the tango that I fell in love with when I first saw it performed by Al Pacino in the much acclaimed ‘the scent of a woman’ .  Over the subsequent decade or so I felt a really strong urge to learn the tango. It remained an urge at most. I never proceeded to the stage of learning it in order to become a tango expert. Perhaps it was the lack of an equally excited partner to get me to actively pursue the most elegant of dances. After all, it does take two to tango. Photo credit: Riaz Khan,  a photographer based in Houston One fine night I was chatting with a friend at a restaurant in Rice Village in Houston. We were discussing ‘ the itinerant observer project’ , a potential book of short stories for which my friend, a freelance photographer, was going to provide a visual piece. We both had our i...

Jack did not have much of a childhood to write home about. That obviously did not hinder his meteoric rise; as a young professional, he was already on top of his game. He was quite successful, with a salary in the six digits, vacations pre-planned for a year in advance, and stocks and bonds neatly sorted out. While he could hold on to investments with alacrity, what he couldn’t hold on to, for dear life, were relationships. Friends, men or women, would come and go from his life, with surprising frequency. To him even his biological family, the little he had, felt like it was on borrowed time. I think the lack of long-term connectivity with human beings wasn’t particularly bothersome to Jack. I gathered this over the course of half-a-year when we crossed paths several times. Notwithstanding our differences as obvious as night and day, including our respective skin colors, we shared a common interest: salsa. It was over salsa that we first met. We were both enrolled in a week...