an itinerant observer

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. ...

“Tell you where I’d go. Ziahuatanejo…a little place right on the Pacific. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory….”   So, the protagonist, Andy (played by Tim Robbins), tells the narrator, Red (played by Morgan Freeman), in the movie Shawshank Redemption . Although I have seen the movie countless times since it came out in the 90s, it was while I was a teenager in medical school, that it charmed me completely. Perhaps it was the concept of freedom and justice that connected with the younger socially driven individual within? Later in life, as an adult, the above conversation between Andy and Red as well as the ending of the movie remained with me. The last scene in particular was etched in my mind; where Red walks across the sand on a pristine beach along the Pacific towards his friend Andy, who is fixing a boat. For years on end I wondered how an ocean could have no memory. Fast forward to today and the reason for writing this essay: ...

My daughter Alaiyah was born in Karachi and she was born with Down syndrome. We had received a post-natal diagnosis, although there had been some suspicions before her birth. She had a cardiac arrest a few hours after she was born, had to be resuscitated and was put on a ventilator. Countless complications and blood transfusions later, she finally managed to pull through. We held her for the first time exactly twenty days after she was born. We brought her home after she spent a month in the NICU. She's had several surgeries - some major, some minor, and quite a few hospital admissions in the past 6 years but for the most part, is doing very well.   If you ask any parent of a child with special needs, they will tell you that having such a child changes you in ways you could never have imagined. You start looking at the world from a different lens. There are many joys and many rewards. But there are so many more challenges too. There are reminders in every day of what could h...

“Aren’t you glad that you left Houston when you did?” I was asked recently. In the wake of hurricane Henry’s devastation, perhaps that was a valid question - not an insensitive one. However, on further introspection, I realized that I was neither glad that I had left Houston when I did, nor could I wish that I was still there. Au contraire, I was pensive about family, friends and former work colleagues having to deal with this newest water-related calamity of Houston. That Houston is flood-prone is not news to me. During my 15 year-long ‘sojourn’ in Houston, I had to deal with several flash floods and hurricanes. Allison, Katrina, Rita…. I can rattle their names off in my sleep. In June 2001, within a year or two of moving to Houston for graduate school, I confronted Allison, a ‘freak’ tropical storm that dumped so much rain on Houston in just a night that I was flabbergasted. I woke up to find my car flooded and the apartment complex grounds in disarray. At that time, I ...

One fine day, Cyto, the white blood cell, was on his merry way through the blood stream. His job was to look for anything unusual that could become a menace for Biloongra , the kitten in whose blood Cyto lived.  While he was going about his work, distracted by thoughts of some relaxation at Pool Plasma, Cyto noticed something rather peculiar. There was a large lump forming off the side of Arty, the artery he had been born in.  He immediately called his best friends, the twins Leuko and Lympho. LL, as they were fondly called since few could tell them apart, were better than Cyto in communicating with unusual cells that the three would encounter while guarding  Biloongra’s   blood stream. The three cell buddies looked very closely at the mysterious creature. None of them had ever seen something like that before but they all knew that it definitely should not have been there. Cyto called out to the unusual being. “Who are you and what business do you...

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...