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...

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 ...

It wasn’t an ordinary day at work. I’d been called into the proverbial ‘supervisor’s office’ for a discussion about my recent projects. Fair enough, I thought. I’ve led programs in emergency medicine, innovation, wellness, and research. But no. This wasn’t about any of that. Seated across from me were two senior colleagues, firmly rooted in the traditions of academic medicine; faces tight, as if I'd ‘Zalsa’ed’ over a patient chart. Yes, you read that right. Not a research misstep, not an issue with departmental operations - dancing. Specifically, the Zalsa sessions I lead, share about, and - horror of horrors - post on social media. “It’s unbecoming of someone of your stature,” one said, with a look so grave you’d think I had performed a Zalsa routine on the hospital helipad. The other nodded sagely, as if this intervention might save me from further professional disgrace. For a moment, I wondered if I was in a workplace sitcom. Was this an episode of The Office: Acade...

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...

Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free. -Rumi “Dhum-dhum-dhum…” The drumbeat started plaintively at dusk. I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. As I turned around, the sights were to behold; orange, purple, yellow, green and blue fairy lights adorned the tomb creating a riot of colors. The chadors being handed out for draping around our necks were lal – red – the color attributed to the Saint. It wasn’t just the sights and sounds that were captivating. Incense sticks generated a pleasant aroma. Typically, I would’ve been irritated by the cloying Metro Milan  agarbati  – but not this time. The nasal senses were heightened as much as the others, if not more. As if the sights, sounds and scents weren’t enough, a tingling sensation made itself felt all the way from my fingers and toes to my center. It felt like a warm embrace. ...