an itinerant observer

The morning after Karachi drowned, I did something I do not usually do. At 0700, I walked into Zahid’s room. He lay unresponsive, frothing at the mouth. Twenty-five years old, once trained patiently by my mother and later woven into the daily fabric of my household. Reliable yet often clueless, a boy who grew into a young man - always present, always willing. Now limp in my arms, his breath shallow. He had likely just seized. What if I had not gone? The question shadows everything that followed. The floodwaters of a climate-changed Karachi had receded just enough. The rain had stopped. The roads were empty, strangely permissive. Had they still been blocked; this story could have been another one entirely. Security guards from the neighboring house helped me carry him to the car. My sister-in-law hurriedly drove us to AKU Clifton ER , where competence was ready to act. My former residents, now instructors and SMOs, stepped forward with calm assurance. Nurses and staff I had once ...

I recently revisited One Hundred Years of Solitude —this time through Netflix’s lush adaptation. The series swept me into García Márquez's Macondo with its breathtaking cinematography and meticulous attention to detail. Though decades had passed since I first read the novel, its spirit of magical realism, woven into Colombia's historical fabric, felt familiar. The cycles of time, the endless loop of beginnings and endings, reminded me of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, the whirling dance of Sufi mystics, and Taoism's tranquil acceptance of life's flow. But the truth is, like the insomnia plague in Márquez's Macondo, the story had faded from my memory over the years. I don’t know if my first reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school truly shaped me. Perhaps it was that novel, alongside The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and even The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, that collectively left their mark. It wasn’t until last week, while watching th...