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...

T oday heralds the beginning of an era Not of interest to meaningless minds  Regardless, the story must be told. Narcissus was fond of looking into mirrors, That perhaps comes as no surprise. But recently his attention had moved to photographs Unlike images in mirrors, photos didn’t talk back (as yet). What great photos! He marveled at what he saw: A plethora of well-dressed young pretty women and handsome men Smiles, frowns, joy, mirth, silliness. All captured for eternity “Ah! The unending possibilities of youth”, said his heart “But wait! Did you not notice that there was something missing?” said his head. For you see, there was a dearth of old people in the photographs Where did they go? Were they whisked off to someplace momentarily? Maybe a nursing home? One voice inquired, the loudest in the cacophony. His heart mused but for a few seconds and then kicked in, “More likely that the old folks have been relegated; To dark corners of the...

Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal, AKU MBBS '18 How do you tell an eight year old the worst news she will ever hear?  What can you say to her, to make her feel that the idea of dying isn't that bad after all? Marium doesn’t have her parents with her. She’s with her phuppi aur phuppi ka susar (aunt and aunt's father in law). Wow! Worthy intimate relations present to offer emotional support? As these initial medical interactions usually go, I take the full history from the 'close' relatives and perform the exam thoroughly just to go the extra mile to impress my attending. In all the forty or so minutes it takes for me to gather information and study scans, Marium keeps drawing my attention. She's sitting in a corner, just observing everything I do with those big eyes, those big katora (cup) eyes. Every time she blinks, they look bigger than before. The eyes are full of fear and confidence at the same time, asking me so many questions. Yet, she's ...

Illustration / Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal We are told it is an ‘angel’ who takes lives. Maybe that is a good thing. But there’s nothing angelic about it when it happens to 28 year olds. Recently married 28 year olds. Syed Iftikhar Hasan (not his real name) used to bring his ‘wet, wobbly and weird’ father to the Neurology clinic. The said man was old, rigid and irritable. His bulging ventricles on cerebral CAT scan settled down when he got a VP shunt placed and his visits stopped. In all this time no one paid any attention to the son. Of course he was a good son bringing daddy dear religiously for his checkups, but no more than that. Then a year later, Syed Iftikhar Hasan presented as a patient to the same Neurologist with the complaint of new-onset headaches. This was the first time he revealed his own medical history, being an ‘initial patient’. It was late evening and I was immensely enjoying the Neurology clinic. I learnt how to ‘pull myself together’ that day. I stood t...