an itinerant observer

~ Act II ~   A Letter to the Father Who Returned   Dear Father, You came back to the ER yesterday. Alone. Your eyes searched for the place where your children had been, as though the walls might still hold their shadows. You wandered, lost, and when the tears came, they came quietly at first; grief without sound, until they could no longer be contained. I stood there, silent, because what can you say in the face of such loss? Your grief took me back to 2019, when another father arrived; with his five children, also victims of phosphine poisoning. They had come to Karachi from Quetta on a short vacation, staying in a modest guesthouse. No one knew that a cheap fumigant, silently seeping through the rooms, had already marked them. They were Dead On Arrival (DOA in our lingo). Five small bodies laid side by side, from the youngest, a baby, to the oldest, a teenager. I remember the starched white sheets, how they barely moved as we covered those bodies. I remember dr...

Prologue I thought I’d prepared myself. My last shift in the ER, after 13 years, landed on Friday the 13th - the most infamous day on the calendar. It felt like a joke the universe was playing, so I leaned into it. I imagined the absurdities, the chaos, the dark humor that define life in a pediatric ER. I even wrote about it preemptively, anticipating the madness. But the universe had more to offer. What I thought would be a final hurrah of irrationality turned into something far heavier. A father, a family, a tragedy that echoed through time. This is my farewell to the ER in two acts. Act I – The chaos I expected. Act II – The weight I couldn’t see coming.   ~ Act I ~ 13 Years, Friday the 13th, and the Madness of the ER Coincidence or predestiny? After nearly 13 years of adrenaline-fueled chaos, sleepless nights, and a steady diet of chai and calamity, my last ER call lands squarely on the unluckiest day of the calendar. I could’ve chosen to laugh, but ...

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon when I came across the store. “Ai’s Cream!” the banner outside screamed in bold red letters. Scrawled underneath was illegible (to me) text 诶 艾 ' 娜 西艾伊 诶 , also in bold red, that I assumed referred to the English above it. There was no way for me to confirm it.  But, I was intrigued all the same. The name, as well as the store, seemed to be an anomaly in Hikkaduwa, the well-known beach resort along the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka, where I was sojourning for a week. Perhaps the Chinese have infiltrated Sri Lanka too, I mused. I had been told by my much better half that there were two reasons for being in Hikkaduwa then: (i) For Relaxation and Rehabilitation (or R and R, to be hip); (ii) Our friends accompanying us (or us them); in fact, they were the ones who had decided the itinerary.  Also, worth mentioning here is that it was a self-imposed vacation away from home, kids and work - an ‘away vacation’ happening a second time ...

Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal, AKU MBBS '18 “Is he in the Emergency Room to sleep?”- These words still resonate in my head. These words still affect me. They still cut deep into me and make me question the very basis of why I chose my profession. Times like these are when you understand the bitter truth of reality; of what medicine is. When I took the Hippocratic Oath 5 years ago, I had no idea. I had no idea of the position I was going to hold; of how many lives I was going to touch; of the power my white lab coat inherently held. I now understand. “Is he in the Emergency Room to sleep?” – These words not only show how important we are in society, but also how important we think we are. Across the country, working in the emergency room automatically offers immunity to medical personnel to do almost whatever they want, however they want, all under the rather overly used banner “we’re trying our very best”. Is this true? Or is this a façade? Do we care more about what we tr...