All Sounds To Silence Come

Father's Voice

2011-12-18T10:04:00.000-08:00

"No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark."
He wanted me to be rich
the only way we could,
easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
easy gift, a wind
that keeps on blowing for flowers
or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.

- William Stafford

2011-11-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

Wishing you and your families a very mubarak Eid!

Reusing Words

2011-11-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Don't think you know everything,
Father said, just because you're good
with words. They aren't everything.
I try to say the smallest amount possible.
Instead of using them indiscriminately
I try to conserve them. I'm the only one
in this household who recycles them. I
say the same thing over & over again,
like "Who forgot to turn out the lights?
Who forgot to clean up after themselves
in the bathroom?" Since you don't listen
I never have to think of other things to say.

- Hal Sirowitz

3 cents a meal

2011-10-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,

2011-10-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

- Barbara Crooker

Our Lives Pass Away

2011-10-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

Summer sunlight
glitters on the water.

Sweet colors of fall
drift down and land
on my new woodpile.

Winter is full of snow
and cold, but inside
the woodstove glows.

Then spring again
Our lives pass away.

- David Budbill

Changing Genres

2011-10-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping,
another 75 of what you think staring out
a window. I don't care about the plot
although I suppose there will have to be one,
the usual separation of the lovers, turbulent
seas, danger of decommission in spite
of constant war, time in gulps and glitches
passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,
speckled eggs somehow uncrushed, the sled
outracing the wolves on the steppes, the huge
glittering ball where all that matters
is a kiss at the end of a dark hall.
At dawn the officers ride back to the garrison,
one without a glove, the entire last chapter
about a necklace that couldn't be worn
inherited by a great-niece
along with the love letters bound in silk.

- Dean Young

Retirement Home Melee at the Salad Bar

2011-10-22T20:13:00.000-07:00

They say it began with an elderly man
foraging through the icebergs and romaines.

They say another who prefers his salad
without a stranger's fingerprints

and Stop. From there, they say, curses
hissed through dentures. From there, fists.

They say it was a fracas, knocked bifocals
and clattering canes, the wooden screech

of chair legs, some to break up the scuffle
and some to shuffle off on a bad knee,

or pinned hip, or pace-makered heart.
One is bitten, they say. Another wears

a cut across his forehead, blood flowing
down the canals of his wrinkles.

Next day's the same old same old,
as they say. Back to the quiet swing

of living without velocity or fire.
Shuffleboard and Pinochle, the dull

click of knitting needles, their final
gray years going limp. Or so they say.

- David Hernandez

The Value of Words

2011-10-16T08:35:00.000-07:00

Stephen Kelman, whose book Pigeon English is shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, writes about his mother.

" . . . it was my mother who taught me the value of words: how the most prosaic, such as "family" and "duty" and "work", take the most living up to . . ."

I hope he wins it.

Watercolor

2011-09-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

A watercolor by my grandmother. This was painted in the early 1950s.

Eid Mubarak

2011-08-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

Wishing you and your families a very mubarak Eid!

Ramadan Mubarak

2011-08-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

Wishing you and your families a very mubarak Ramadan!

Bach and My Father

2011-06-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Six days a week my father sold shoes
To support our family through depression and war,
Nursed his wife through years of Parkinson's,
Loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
Never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
Was on the stereo. He listened with care—
Brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
Moving his right hand in time. He would have
Risen to dance if he had known how.

"Beautiful," he said when it was done,
My father, who'd never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
Just in time he said, "That's beautiful."

- Paul Zimmer

Gangsta

2011-06-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

I am stuck in a long line of cars queuing up at a tollbooth outside Chicago. It's a breezy spring afternoon and the sun collects inside my car warming it up against the air-conditioning. I am fumbling for change, counting all the coins in the cup-holder and still coming up short. There are a few tucked away in the crevices of the passenger seat and as I slide my hand into its various joints I am amazed at how many secret places a car can hold, places where the human hand, for all its purported dexterity, is utterly useless.

I am so busy in my prying that I don't notice a car has cut into the line in front of me. A sparkling white Range Rover with tinted windows, it has flashing silver rims that spin within the wheels. A car built for shining in the sun and shoving into queues. I don't mind and let him in. With the window down and the music from other cars wafting in the air, it is a pleasant wait, something that we achingly long for all winter when the season deadens us against the prospect of ever idling in traffic again. Chicago is just a few minutes away and, within Chicago, that small nest of culinary excellence, Devon avenue, with its nihari and ras malai, its sambhar and dosai, its endless curlicues of fat golden jalebis. I fish for coins and quietly convince myself that this may, in fact, be bliss.

The line thins out and the Range Rover exits the booth. I slink up, ready to hand the attendant a fistful of glory. She smiles at me and tells me I don't need to pay.

"The guy ahead of you paid for you, for letting him cut in line."

I blink stupidly at her. "Sorry? What?"

"He paid for you. You're all set. Have a nice day!"

I wish I could say that I was smart enough to hand her the change anyway and pass the surprise on to the next person. We travel so much among strangers, who knows what will bring joy to another. Maybe there was a child in the car behind me and the parents would have used the opportunity to explain to him the importance of being kind. Maybe somebody could just have used a smile.

Instead, I thank the lady and drive off, letting the coins fall on to the passenger seat, ready to scurry back into their hiding places. An act of human kindness shouldn't have to be such a shock. Hopefully next time I'll remember to be more generous.

Dabba!

2011-05-16T22:30:00.001-07:00

Reverence

2011-05-15T19:45:00.000-07:00

The air vibrated
with the sound of cicadas
on those hot Missouri nights after sundown
when the grown-ups gathered on the wide back lawn,
sank into their slung-back canvas chairs
tall glasses of iced tea beading in the heat

and we sisters chased fireflies
reaching for them in the dark
admiring their compact black bodies
their orange stripes and seeking antennas
as they crawled to our fingertips
and clicked open into the night air.

In all the days and years that have followed,
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced
that same utter certainty of the goodness of life
that was as palpable
as the sound of the cicadas on those nights:

my sisters running around with me in the dark,
the murmur of the grown-ups’ voices,
the way reverence mixes with amazement
to see such a small body
emit so much light.

- Julie Cadwallader-Staub

What Have I Got to Complain About

2011-05-07T07:40:00.001-07:00

We've got enough money now not to worry every minute
about where the next dollar is coming from.
We even go to the movies once in a while.
We've got a nice collection of friends.
Our house is sturdy and well built.
It keeps us warm and stands well against the storms.
The larder is full of rice.
There are plenty of potatoes down cellar.
The freezer is full of vegetables I grew myself.

In the face of all that, slights to my vanity
seem frivolous and nonsensical.

What have I got to complain about?

- David Budbill

Middle-Age

2011-04-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

The child you think you don't want
is the one who will make you laugh.
She will break your heart
when she loses the sight in one eye
and tells the doctor she wants to be
an apple tree when she grows up.

It will be this child who forgives you
again and again
for believing you don't want her to be born,
for resisting the rising tide of your body,
for wishing for the red flow of her dismissal.
She will even forgive you for all the breakfasts
you failed to make exceptional.

Someday this child will sit beside you.
When you are old and too tired of war
to want to watch the evening news,
she will tell you stories
like the one about her teenaged brother,
your son, and his friends
taking her out in a canoe when she was
five years old. How they left her alone
on an island in the river
while they jumped off the railroad bridge.

- Pat Schneider

Good Workers

2011-04-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

Let us praise good workers (you know who you are)
Who come gladly to the job and do what you can
For as long as it takes to repair the car
Or clean the house – the woman or man
Who dives in and works steadily straight through,
Not lagging and letting others carry the freight,
Who joke around but do what you need to do,
Like the home caregiver who comes daily at eight
A.m. to wash and dress the man in the wheelchair
And bring him meals and put him to bed at night
For minimum wage and stroke his pale brown hair.
He needs you. "Are you all right?" "I'm, all right,"
He says. He needs you to give him these good days,
You good worker. God's own angels sing your praise.

- Gary Johnson

Genius

2011-03-22T15:07:00.001-07:00

What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?

They have the same middle name.

Our Lady of Lawson

2011-03-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Pico Iyer writes about a Japanese convenience store

To live in Japan without eating Japanese food seems an advanced kind of heresy. My sushi-loving friends in California regard me as a lost cause; my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation - me dragging at some lasagna in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish - that I belong to an alien species. I grew up in England, I tell them, on boarding school food, no less; I like Japan at some level deeper than the visible (or edible). They look away and try not to scream.

Yet the habit that has won me complete excommunication on both sides of the world is my readiness to eat (twice a day) from Lawson, my tiny local convenience store in Nara, the old Japanese capital. A convenience store speaks to many of us of all that is questionable in modern Japan: a soulless, synthetic, one-size-fits-all lifestyle that the efficiency-loving country has perfected to the nth degree. It marks, most would say, the end of family, tradition and community as well as the advent of a homogenized future that has many people running for "slow food."

The convenience store is a model of Japan in miniature: the triumph of function over fuss and of ease over embarrassment. Just as you can buy whiskey, eggs, pornography and even (it is said) women's underwear in vending machines, so you can all but live in convenience stores. I pay my phone bills and send my packages through the local branch of the national Lawson chain (named after the defunct American Lawson); I buy my bus cards there and tickets for Neil Young concerts. I make the convenience store my de facto office, lingering by the photocopier for hours on end and then faxing an article, say, to New York. Yet the first law of Japan, even in Lawson, is that nothing is what it seems, and that you can find all the cultures of the world here, made Japanese and strange. Here, in the four thin aisles of my local store, are the McVitie's digestives of my youth - turned into bite-size after-thoughts. Here are Milky Bar chocolates, converted into bullet-size pellets. Here are Mentos in shades of lime and grape, cans of "Strawberry Milk Tea" and the Smarties I used to collect as a boy, refashioned as "Marble Chocolate." Were Marcel Proust to come to Lawson, he would find his madeleines daily but made smaller, sweeter and mnenomically new.

It's common to hear that Japan has created a promiscuous anthology of the world's best styles. And the convenience store is the center of this. Tubs of Earl Grey ice cream, sticks of mangosteen chewing gum, green-tea-flavored Kit Kat bars; they're all here in abundance (though, in fashion-victimized Japan, no sooner have I developed a fondness for KissMint chewing gum "for Etiquette" than it has been supplanted by ice creams in the shape of watermelon slices). And even the smallest chocolate bar comes with an English-language inscription that, in the Japanese way, makes no sense whatsoever, yet confers on everything the perfume of an enigmatic fairy tale: "A lovely and tiny twig," says my box of Koeda chocolates, "is a heroine's treasured chocolate born in the forest."

In modern Japan, the convenience store is taken to be the spiritual home of the boys in hip-hop shorts and girls with shocking yellow hair and artificial tans, who try with their every move - eating in the street, squatting on the sidewalk - to show that they take their cues from 50 Cent and not Mrs. Suzuki. The door of my local Lawson has badges to denote police surveillance, and where the great twentieth century novelist Junichiro Tanizaki praised shadows (nuance, ambiguity, the lure of the half-seen) as the essence of the Japan he loved, Lawson speaks for a new fluorescent, posthuman - even anti-Japanese - future. And yet, in the twelve years I've lived on and off in my mock-California suburb, the one person who has come to embody for me all the care for detail and solicitude I love in Japan is, in fact, the lady at the cash register in Lawson. Small, short-haired and perpetually harried, Hirata-san races to the back of the store to fetch coupons for me that will give me ten cents off my "Moisture Dessert." She bows to the local gangster who leaves his Bentley running and comes in the store with his high-heeled moll to claim some litchi-flavored strangeness. When occasionally I don't show up for six or seven hours, she sends, through my housemates, a bag of French fries to revive me.

The Japanese are so good at keeping up appearances that few signs are ever evident of the series of recent recessions. But over the years, I have seen poor Mrs. Hirata's husband (the store's manager) open his doors around the clock and take the graveyard shift himself. The place stared to stock tequila-sunrise cocktails in a can, and little bottles of wine. Soon even the Hiratas' two high-school-age sons were being pressed into service (unpaid, I'm sure).

It's no easier to understand Japan in Western terms than it is to eat noodles with a knife and fork. Yet it has been evident to me for some time that the crush of the anonymous world lies out in the temple-filled streets; the heart of the familiarity, the communal sense of the neighborhood, the simple kindness that brought me to Japan, lies in the convenience store.

Early last year, writing an article on paradise, I surmised that my modest neighborhood could be improved only by the addition of a cinema, but given the laws of human longing and limitation, such an arrival would probably mean the end of my favorite convenience store. Be careful of what you write. Days before my article came out, a sign appeared on my local Lawson, announcing it was going out of business. Almost everyone in the neighborhood was shaken, but no one knew what to do. (How to express your gratitude to a convenience store?) We'd watched the owners' sons grow up while their parents served up bags of chicken nuggets in three spicy flavors.

I went home, found a set of elegant bowls I'd bought in case of a sudden need for a wedding present, and returned to the store. They were being transferred to a far-off shop in the countryside, Mrs. Hirata said; she feared for her kids. She was even afraid of going out there herself. Then I handed over the box, and she realized why I had come. She began to waver for a moment, then turned away from me and put a calzone in the microwave. A true Japanese to the end, she wanted to protect me from her tears.

(This article was published in 2005 in the New York Times Magazine.)

Dong Gwai Soup

2011-03-05T15:48:00.002-08:00

I walked up the stairs of my house and unlocked the door. It swung open. Immediately a familiar, sickening odor swept over me. It was the smell of dong gwai, a medicinal soup that I drink every certain "time of the month." The smell made me sick to my stomach. I walked toward the kitchen, ready to face my fate.

My mother was occupied with preparing dinner. I said, "Hi, Ma wo hui lai le." (I'm home, mother.)

She still had her back turned to me. She said, "Kuai dian he tang kua liang le." (Drink your soup or it'll get cold.)

---

My mom is the most ignorant person in the world. And she's very traditional. She wants to do everything the old fashioned, Chinese way. During dinner, if one person is missing, nobody gets to eat. We're not allowed to lift or move the dishes of food off the table until everyone's done, because that's considered rude. And even though my mother knows I'm allergic to flower pollen, during the Chinese New Year she covers the house with flowers and I end up sneezing my brains out onto a tissue. Then there are the "lucky things" she buy, like the monthly case of fifty oranges - "because it brings us luck." I highly doubt a fruit will bring me any more fortune than a pencil sharpener can give me joy, but my mother was born and raised with these beliefs, and she plans on conserving them. I'm guess I'm OK with most of it, except for the "specialty fruits will bring good health and fortune" thing. And pretty much all that Eastern Medicine stuff.

When it comes to medicine, my mother will believe anything an Eastern doctor says. If any Eastern doctor told her to slaughter a pig under a full moon and stuff cow dung into it, promising her that any person who ate it would be immune to all cancers, I would have pork that night. If a Western doctor recommended Flonase or Claritin for my allergies, my mother would instead drag me kicking and screaming to the nearest Chinese herbalist. All my doctor appointments at clinics and hospitals are either close to or in Chinatown.

I hate seeing Eastern doctors. It's not because I'm afraid of them; it's because they are so fake. All the doctors do is look at my face, take my pulse, prescribe locust soup, and tell me I'm going to feel better in a few months when the allergy season is over. But out of respect for my countrymen I don't call it fake.

A few years back, I sprained my finger and my mom took me to an Eastern doctor. As usual, they asked me questions that were completely irrelevant to my condition, like "So how many times do you use the bathroom a day?" I sprained my finger, and they asked me how often I used the bathroom? I left the office with a week's supply of tree bark and a bottle of brown rubbing oil. I spent the following two weeks with a swollen middle finger that I couldn't bend.

I know that my mother means well, but sometimes it's ridiculous. I've been prescribed the most bizarre things, such as a root that tastes horribly bitter, and the ever-so-popular tree bark.

When one walks into any Eastern medicine store, the first things that one sees are the giant shark fins, usually hung on the wall like some prestigious trophy. Then there are hundreds of abalones packed into jars, which sit right next to the jars of seahorses. There are always antlers (from God knows what kind of animal) hung over the counter. Usually there are things piled in big barrels which smell exactly the way they look: disgusting. Sometimes I say to myself, "There must be some kind of law against this sort of practice."

Everything in these shops is done the old-fashioned way. The measuring, weighing - and sometimes even the calculating - are done the same way my ancestors did it. Believe it or not, one time my mother and I were about to pay for some medicine and as we put our purchases on the counter, the ancient-looking man took out abacus from behind the counter and started clicking away. I thought, My goodness, I can't believe we're not paying this guy with livestock.

Besides, Western medicine is very easy to take - they invented the pill. And you get to choose a flavor, like cherry or grape - a lot tastier. In Eastern medicine, you're lucky if you get to drink a pound of black thingy instead of green thingy. But because this is the old-fashioned, Chinese way of medicine, and what my mother was taught, this is what I have to put up with. It's all about tradition.

My family is a lot like any typical first-generation family; there is a gap between my belief and my mother's. We just don't think the same way. But I do respect what my mother believes in.

Through the years, I have learned to tolerate her absurd belief in strict tradition and Eastern medicine, even though I've never enjoyed or really appreciated it myself. I just grin and bear it. Maybe I'm over exaggerating, it's not really as bad as it seems. Possibly some day I'll even realize the importance of keeping traditions. But the most important thing is keeping this bond between me and my mother strong.

---

She pointed toward the bowl of soup on the kitchen counter. This was the moment I'd feared, but I had it coming for getting home so early. I walked to the counter, where my fate awaited. The soup was as black as could be. I brought it to my face and thought, "Maybe if I drink this really quickly I won't be able to taste any of it." I downed the whole bowl in one gulp. I felt myself make a disgusted face. But it wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be. At least it didn't kill me.

I turned to my mom and asked, "Ay, what's for dinner?"

- excerpted from Home Wasn't Built In A Day. The author of this piece, Ellen Gong, was a student at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco when this was written. Ellen was born and raised in San Francisco and, at the time of writing, wanted to grow up to be the future owner of a McDonald's or a Niketown. She described herself as the ultimate consumer.

Finding A Voice

2011-03-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

Kathy Evans writes about her experience with WritersCorps, a San Francisco-based initiative that places professional writers in community settings to teach writing to youth:

"WritersCorps got me out of the suburbs. I was in the inaugural WritersCorp, the San Francisco 1994-95 group, and Clinton had just been elected president. He had pledged money and energy to revive AmeriCorps, and WritersCorps was one of its tributaries. There were about twenty of us from all over the United States, diverse in age, background and skin color. I crossed the bridge four times a week to teach in the inner city, a world apart from the one I had come from, the world of Volvos, little league baseball and pressure for high SAT scores. My first assignment was in San Francisco's Tenderloin District, where I worked in a center for community resources and development, teaching immigrant children poetry, which was a way of also helping them to learn first-time computer skills. I loved those kids, the ones who lived in small apartments, sometimes ten to a family - or no family at all - some with very limited English, others, wise beyond their years because of what they had witnessed on the streets. One student, Alan Nyguen, had no concept of what poetry was or meant. Every time I mentioned "poetry," he thought I was talking about a "Poet-Tree." One day he typed this poem:

POET TREE

Today I went to the park.
I saw a tree.
I like the tree.
It's a different tree.
It spells words.
One day it grew my name.
Birds come on it.
I always come to that tree.

I just loved that little poem. It was selected not only for the first WritersCorps anthology, Flavors of the City, but also was made into a giant poster and placed all over San Francisco inside the fancy new kiosks that decked the city streets. Alan was about seven years old -I'm sure Alan was not his Vietnamese name - and had moved to San Francisco from outside of Saigon. He was so proud of the poem that he carried it around in a small window in his wallet next to the family pictures.

A few months after the WritersCorps assignment had ended, while I was working at a routine office job down on Folsom Street for a consultant firm, Alan's mother tracked me down and asked through an interpreter over the phone if she could come to the office. She showed up at the office at noon - Alan a step behind her - with dishes and dishes of home-cooked Vietnamese food. She wanted to say thank you from her heart, her hands and her kitchen for the poem. I told her that Alan wrote the poem, that there was no need to thank me. Nevertheless, her generosity was not forgotten."

Welcome to the Rileys

2011-02-05T18:25:00.001-08:00

Where has Melissa Leo been all these years!

This Morning In A Morning Voice

2011-01-24T07:59:00.000-08:00

to beat the froggiest
of morning voices,
my son gets out of bed
and takes a lumpish song
along—a little lyric
learned in kindergarten,
something about a
boat. He’s found it in
the bog of his throat
before his feet have hit
the ground, follows
its wonky melody down
the hall and into the loo
as if it were the most
natural thing for a little
boy to do, and lets it
loose awhile in there
to a tinkling sound while
I lie still in bed, alive
like I’ve never been, in
love again with life,
afraid they’ll find me
drowned here, drowned
in more than my fair
share of joy.

- Tod Boss

In Treatment

2011-01-04T16:27:00.000-08:00

I don't watch much TV but these past few days I've been riveted by a series on HBO called In Treatment. I'm sure most people know about it but I came to it only recently and with little expectation only to be completely stunned. The series centers around a therapist, Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and his sessions with a group of five patients as well as his own therapy with a former mentor, Gina (Dianne Wiest) to repair a faltering marriage. Both Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest are seasoned, spectacular actors but what I've really enjoyed are the narrative arcs of the therapy sessions and the individual portrayals of the patients. Because the whole episode is based in a room and is centered pretty much just around two people talking, dialogue and the enactment of a character are what drives the show and the performers have done a great job fleshing each individual out. I particularly enjoyed watching Mia Wasikowski as Sophie and the relationship that is sculpted over the course of the series as she and Paul spend time trying to help her. There's a tenderness that plays over Paul's face as he interacts with Sophie that echoes something very human and Gabriel Byrne brings this out so well. I don't want to gush all over this page but watch the series if you get a chance. Most of prime time television is choked with entertainment contrived to make us laugh at its gags or be shocked by the antics of individuals who bear no relationship to our lives, people we cannot really relate to being paid to do things that almost never happen in real life. In Treatment is exceptional because it brings alive the potential of human connection by making us watch ordinary people talk to each other. The prospect that mere words, and a kind, compassionate ear, can help repair broken lives is almost too much to resist.

Moral Stamina

2010-12-19T08:20:00.001-08:00

A well-developed conscience does not translate, necessarily, into a morally courageous life. Nor do well-developed powers of philosophical thinking and moral analysis necessarily translate into an everyday willingness to face down the various evils of this world. I was once helped in the effort at clarification by a black woman whom I suppose I would have to call illiterate. She pointed out that "there's a lot of people who talk about doing good, and a lot of people who argue about what's good and what's not good." Then she added that "there are a lot of people who always worry about whether they're doing right or doing wrong." Finally, there are some other folks: "They just put their lives on the line for what's right, and they may not be the ones who talk a lot or argue a lot or worry a lot; they just do a lot!"

- Robert Coles

Korean Lasagne

2010-12-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

Chang Rae-Lee on the lasagne his mother made:

"Her lasagna is our favorite of that suite, though to taste it now I fear it might disappoint me, for the factory sauce (which I demand she use, this after noticing jars of Ragu at both the Goldfusses’ and the Stanleys’) and the rubbery, part-skin mozzarella, the cut-rate store-brand pasta, the dried herbs. But, back then, it’s a revelation. Our usual dinners feature salty fish and ginger, garlic and hot pepper; they are delicious in part because you can surgically pick at the table, choose the exact flavor you want. But this is a detonation of a meal: creamy, cheesy, the red sauce contrastingly tangy and a little sweet, the oozing volcanic layer of the pasta a thrilling, messy bed. Maybe I first have it at Ronny Prunesti’s house, or Mrs. Churchill delivers a show model, but all of us are crazy for it once my mother begins to make it. We choose our recipe (was it on the box of macaroni?), our tools. I remember how she carefully picked out a large Pyrex casserole dish at Korvette’s for the job, a new plastic spatula, two checkerboard wooden trivets, so we can place it in the center of the table, and for a few years it becomes a Friday-evening tradition for us. She makes it in the afternoon after dropping me off in town for my junior bowling league, and when she and my sister pick me up I hardly care to recount my form or my scores (I’m quite good for second-grader, good enough that my father decides I should have my own ball, which is, whether intentionally or erroneously, inscribed “Ray”) owing to the wonderful smell on their clothes, clinging to my mother’s thick hair – that baked, garlicky aroma like a pizzeria’s but denser because of the ground beef, the hot Italian sausages she has fried, the herbal lilt of fennel seeds."

Three Persons

2010-12-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

That slow person you left behind when, finally,

you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,

where is he while you

walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,

organizing with an electric clipboard

your big push to tomorrow?

Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once,

coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian.

Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished

not just in themselves but by the stories

we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises:

the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet

or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother

flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,

dragged down by her woolen skirt.

He doesn’t see you as a story, though.

He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,

he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops

and the thunderheads gather,

he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with

the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.

He asks me to look out for you.

- Vijay Seshadri

The Coming of Light

2010-11-30T06:05:00.000-08:00

       
        Even this late it happens:
   the coming of love, the coming of light. 
   You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, 
   stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, 
   sending up warm bouquets of air.
   Even this late the bones of the body shine 
   and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.
    
   -          - Mark Strand

Letters to Michelle Obama

2010-11-28T12:07:00.000-08:00

Dear Michelle,
Can I borrow some money so we can move into an apartment and buy a new Mustang convertible? I don’t mean to waste money. I will use some of the money to buy a drum set and have a cool pool. Can I have $10,000 to buy my passport to go to Las Vegas? Send me a picture of the White House and the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

Read the whole article

Take everything

2010-11-25T12:23:00.000-08:00

"Look you're not out on a four-year picnic at that medical school, so stop talking like a disappointed lover. You signed up for a spell of training and they're dishing it out to you, and all you can do is take everything they've got, everything they hand to you, and tell yourself how lucky you are to be on the receiving end - so you can be a doctor, and that's no bad price to pay for the worry, the exhaustion."

- William Carlos Williams' advice to a medical student

Old Joke

2010-11-24T07:44:00.001-08:00

A traveling salesman, seeing a farmer holding a large pig up to an apple tree to feed him an apple, stopped and asked, "Wouldn't it save a lot of time just to pick the apple and give it to the pig?"

Replied the farmer: "What's time to a pig?"

Who can ever foretell

2010-11-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

Robert Coles writes about Anna Freud:

"A year later I was in medical school, where I fastened my hopes on pediatric work with children. During internship and residency in pediatrics and child psychiatry, I became especially interested in the ways children struggle with severe illness - their moods, their hopes and worries, as they lay sick in the hospital. It was then that I had occasion to hear Miss Freud again. She had come back to America, and was now talking about her work after the Second World War with children who had survived concentration camps. This talk was less "public"; it was given in the seminar room of a Boston hospital. I had been invited to attend by an older physician, a surgeon who had taken an interest in psychoanalysis and, as a matter of fact, had been analyzed by a prominent colleague of Anna Freud's father, yet another "refugee" who had found his way during the late 1930s to the United States.

The small room was crowded with about forty people, almost all physicians. I was once more struck by the directness of the speaker, her evident command of her subject, her willingness to share her knowledge with us in such an accessible manner. Each sentence seemed a perfectly formed jewel, sparkling and delightful to contemplate. An uncanny mixture of relaxed self-assurance and intense dedication emanated from this small, still, thin woman, plainly dressed, her voice strong but not insistent. I still remember the talk, and I still remember a sudden desire, afterward, to ask a question about a girl I had come to know, a patient at Children's Hospital in Boston. This girl had a serious diabetic condition, and yet seemed so resolutely cheerful and confident that all of us - nurses, social workers, doctors - wondered what "really" crossed the child's mind when she was alone, when she was not putting up such a valiant show of outgoing optimism. I didn't expect Miss Freud to say what our young patient was thinking, but all of us at the hospital were worried about her future psychological prospects, and so I did ask about prognosis - about the likelihood of psychopathology developing in a year, two years, or even farther along.

Even now, I can see as well as hear Miss Freud's response. She put her hands on her papers, moved them slowly, deliberately, but with increasing animation. Her message was pointed - and a real challenge for the young doctors in the audience who were accustomed to receiving categorical or specific advice: "Who can ever foretell what a child will be like in the time ahead?"

I wrote the words down, and found them quite unsatisfying - the kind of remark actually, one of my grandparents would make out of the stoic surrender of old age. I was convinced that she was the very one who could with reliability and accuracy do such prophesying. But she persisted and reminded us, at length, how difficult it can be for even the best-informed observer of any given child to know what tomorrow will bring in the way of psychological adjustment, or the lack thereof."

e e cummings writes about his mother

2010-11-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

"It isn't often you meet a true heroine. I have the honour to be a true heroine's son. My father and mother were coming up from Cambridge to New Hampshire, one day, in their newly purchased automobile - an aircooled Franklin, with an ash frame. As they neared the Ossippees, snow fell. My mother was driving; and, left to herself, would never have paused for such a trifle as snow. But as the snow increased, my father made her stop while he got out and wiped the windshield. Then he got in; and she drove on. Some minutes later, a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing - dazed but erect - beside a mangled machine; with blood "spouting" (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling of her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away."

- i , six nonlectures by e e cummings

2010-11-15T21:14:00.000-08:00

Eid Mubarak, everyone!

The Scene Before Me

2010-11-14T15:37:00.000-08:00

(translated from the Chinese by Simon Patton & Tao Naikan)

One evening during the Spring Festival
after some friends and I had eaten and drunk
to our heart’s content at a hot-pot restaurant
we moved on to a café
Along the way
smack in the middle of a slow traffic lane
we came across a legless beggar sitting on the ground
talking to someone on his mobile phone
He shouted as if there were no one else around
You could hear that he was wishing someone a Happy New Year
‘I’m sure he’s making a long-distance call
to a beggar in another province’
‘Maybe it’s an international call
to a beggar overseas’
I’m sorry! I apologise for the way
my friends and I shot our mouths off like that
It’s not that we’re heartless or numb in our feelings
No, we’re not prejudiced, contemptuous or
trying to offend
It was a way to hide our shock
Really, we just didn’t have time
when confronted with a scene of this type
to equip ourselves with the appropriate feelings

- Yi Sha

Acts of Beauty

2010-10-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

I read this story in the New York Times and was intrigued by Maggie Doyne and the work she's doing so I went over to her website and found this video. It's the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long while. Make sure you watch it.

Maggie Doyne — Why the human family can do better from The DO Lectures on Vimeo.

Nonreading

2010-10-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Bookstores don't provide
a remote control for Proust,
you can't switch
to a soccer match,
or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.

We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.

We travel faster, farther, more often,
but bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that's my ex.
Here everyone's naked
so this must be a beach.

Seven volumes -- mercy.
Couldn't it be cut or summarized,
or better yet put into pictures.
There was that series called "The Doll,"
but my sister-in-law says that's some other P.*

And by the way, who was he anyway.
They say he wrote in bed for years on end.
Page after page
at a snail's pace.
But we're still going in fifth gear
and, knock on wood, never better.

* The reference is to the Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus (1847-1912), whose most famous work, The Doll (1890), later became a popular TV miniseries.

- Wislawa Szymborska

Beautiful people do not just happen

2010-10-07T21:50:00.000-07:00

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

- Elizabeth Kubler Ross

The Marsalis Family

2010-09-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what it is but something about jazz makes sense in autumn. Maybe it's the clear, crisp cold that lifts music out of the air. I was rummaging through iTunes for something to listen to and came across this. Notwithstanding the fact that I've been thinking a lot about fathers and sons lately and the thought of a whole family playing together, creating such beautiful music, is very poignant to me right now, I think the CD is one of the best I've ever heard. The musicians jive really well with each other and the jazz itself is playful and sophisticated, suffused with such a sense of joy it's a pleasure to listen to. I particularly enjoyed "Syndrome"; it's been on constant repeat in my car for the past two weeks.

2010-09-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Eid Mubarak, everyone!

Ghar ki sabzi pasta barabar

2010-09-09T18:37:00.000-07:00

It's kind of sad and funny when the alu ki sabzi Abbu makes at home tastes better than the $40 pizza and pasta at the Italian restaurant

Hunger

2010-08-31T09:44:00.001-07:00

This morning I was watching TV when a news story about some Pakistani boxers came up. They used to be employed by the Karachi Electrical Supply Corporation (KESC) until a few weeks ago when they were summarily fired without explanation. Now they are starving. Their families have to borrow food from the neighbours to stay alive. Some of them are able to find work doing odd jobs making pakoras or fixing bicycles. Mostly they are just destitute. The children sit miserably against a bare wall, too haggard to even cry.

There are so many millions like them, both in Pakistan and around the world, families dying slowly from the corrosive effects of poverty. This Ramadan, as we sit with our own families and enjoy our iftaars, let's also remember them and their suffering. As hard as it is to stay hungry yourself, it is probably harder to watch your children starve. The captain of the team recently burnt all the gold medals he had earned for his country. "If things don't get better," he said, "I will burn myself along with my whole family. What use are these medals to me."

Poverty

2010-08-16T18:09:00.000-07:00

"With Madhukar, we visited 3 homes with suicide widows. One woman had a blind father-in-law, an old mother-in-law, and 3 obviously malnourished children to look after. She pointed to a heap of stale rice and chapatis in the middle of a room. She said they were leftovers from a village festivity, and if she kept them from spoiling, the family could use the food for the next 2-3 days."

A really good article. Read the whole thing.

The Very Old

2010-08-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

The very old are forever
hurting themselves,

burning their fingers
on skillets, falling

loosely as trees
and breaking their hips

with muffled explosions of bone.
Down the block

they are wheeled in
out of our sight

for years at a time.
To make conversation,

the neighbours ask
if they are still alive.

Then, early one morning,
through our kitchen windows

we see them again,
first one and then another,

out in their gardens
on crutches and canes,

perennial,
checking their gauges for rain.

- Ted Kooser

Grandmother

2010-08-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

The bright needles clicked;
The old woman's hands,
Quick, dextrous, expert,
Were a blur of colour.
"Your new gloves are finished."
She eased them on to my short plump fingers.
"Now you can play in the snow."
I ran into the street, excited.
The gloves, soft, warm and dry
Were a magical source
Of safety and love.
Time drew on;
The winters grew colder;
The snow fell thicker.
Today my gloves
Are faded and thread-bare;
Her needles lie silent
And my hands are so cold.

- Robert McGregor

---

My grandmother passed away about a month ago. She had been sick for a while, losing weight inexplicably, skin carefully sculpted around bones. The doctors diagnosed an occult malignancy and in a few days she stopped breathing. I could no longer call her on the weekend and wait for the delight in her voice when she recognised me on the phone. Her physical presence had started to diminish long before her death but she retained a spry and inquisitive mind. We spoke often about books and history, about politics and moral values. The last time we met had been in March. My room was next to hers and she would often sit me by her bedside and share her life's experiences with me. Sometimes we would even get up together for morning prayer. In spite of a crumbling spine and fingers knotted with arthritis, she would unfailingly get up at Fajr, wash up and perform her prayers. She always made it a point to say a dua for all her family after the prayer, asking for each person individually. Usually I wouldn’t wake up on time and her voice, raised in supplication for her children, would draw me out of my sleep. It is the absence of that voice, clear and unbent by age, that I miss the most. My grandmother no longer wakes up in the dark to pray for me, one door down, listening to her under the bedcovers.

May Allah have mercy on her soul.

Ramadan Kareem!

2010-08-10T13:22:00.001-07:00

Here's wishing you and your families a very mubarak and blessed Ramadan. Have a great month!

Storycorps

2010-08-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

Lynn Weaver talks about his father, Thurman Weaver, who worked as a janitor and chauffeur and was the most influential person in his life. Dr Weaver is Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Morehouse Medical College in Atlanta.

2010-07-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."

- Nick Hornby

2010-06-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Watch it for the last ten minutes. Truly beautiful.

Don't Text While Driving

2010-06-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

Please watch this . . .

And then read this.

Gifts

2010-06-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

"Hi! How are you, stranger?"

I turn around to find Hala smiling at me.

"Hey, how are you?"

"Good! Where have you been?"

"Just busy with stuff. Congratulations on the fellowship! I read Dr Andrews' email. You must be so thrilled!"

After many years of single-minded, almost zealous devotion to research in pediatric cardiology, Hala will be going on to a fellowship in Chicago. Her passion for pediatric cardiology is phenomenal. Almost any time you want, Hala is ready to discuss EKGs, talk about congenital heart defects or teach echocardiograms. She was an adult cardiologist before she made a career change and went into pediatrics and for the past three years, at least as long as I have known her, she has invariably been involved in some cardiology project or the other, spending her spare time visiting the major pediatric heart centers around the country.

"Thank God," she says simply.

"Make sure you get a big apartment. I'll be crashing with you whenever I'm in town."

"Any time. You have my number. Hey wait, I have something for you. Don't go away, I'll be right back."

She comes back a few minutes later with a yellow bag.

"Congratulations on your graduation!" she says, handing it to me.

I'm a little embarassed by the gesture, partly because it is unexpected and I don't know what to say but also because I don't have anything to give her.

"I'm so proud of you," she says, reaching over to give me a hug. I hesitate and she starts to laugh.

"I'm old enough to be your mom!" she says, squeezing her arms around me.

"Thanks, Hala," I mumble out.

"You're welcome!"

Milestones

2010-06-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

Time flies by so fast you hardly notice. I graduated from residency last night. There was a convocation ceremony, speeches were made, photographs taken. I wore a brand new suit with a lime green tie that I had been saving for a special occasion. We ate chocolate cake and went up, one by one, to the podium to receive our diplomas. I sat next to Arif and watched Saniya glow with pride when his name was called. Cameras flashed around us all night. I can't believe it's been three years.

Chanela

2010-05-08T11:36:00.001-07:00

I've only heard Paco de Lucia perform as part of a group before but this one, with his brother Pepe, is amazing. Everybody should have a brother called Pepe.

The Speak Mum Speaks

2010-05-01T21:42:00.001-07:00

the speak Mum speaks
when she’s on the phone
I asked her one time
where it comes from
she says it’s the speak
of her friends from home

the speak Mum speaks
like floating and laughing
and the words are bubbling
whispering hurrying
she says it’s the speak
of where she comes from

the speak Mum speaks
like singing and dancing
like friends holding hands
going out to playtime
like a playground
with everyone jumping

I sit small and say nothing
I listen and listen
to the speak Mum speaks
flashing and shining
like jewel diamonds
and I want some

- Helen Dunmore

My Neighbours

2010-05-01T05:47:00.001-07:00

My neighbours are beautiful people. She is a sprightly old lady who always greets us with a warm smile. He is a gentleman, immaculately dressed in a button down shirt and trousers with creases so sharp you could cut your hand on them. They live on the ground floor. Every evening he walks out of his door and climbs one floor upstairs and then down again. He does this eight times.

They have a red car that is gleaming and kept in a state of perpetual polish. Sometimes I see them drive away and then come back, carrying a basket of folded laundry or a small grocery bag. I don't know if they have any children. I'm sure they do but I don't remember ever seeing anyone. Whenever I pass their apartment, I hear silence. No sound of either quarrel or laughter, no grandchildren tumbling out of the door. The inside of their house looks like a photograph from a catalogue, everything artfully preserved in its place. I was there yesterday to make a phone call and I saw a patchwork quilt on the dinner table. She was working on it, moving a needle in and out of the cloth, like minutes ticking away on a clock, like sand easing through an hourglass.

We don't know each other's names. They call me "doctor" and I call them "sir" and "ma'am". After so many years of moving around and making friends only to watch them fade away, I'm not so careful about collecting names. It is the essence of beauty that is attractive and I try and retain that. My neighbours are beautiful people.

Is There A Reader In The House?

2010-04-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not trying to tell teachers news about their children - how could there be any news they don't know? - but, being asked, I could report something about children that was news to me. They don't read. The way I found out was their invariable response to my invariable response to a question asked me as a writer about the best way to learn to write. "Read," I replied. To which they replied, "Read?" They were incredulous that reading had anything to do with it. And the implication was that if it had, then that was just too high a price to pay.

- Eudora Welty, Is There A Reader In The House? (1955)

Oranges

2010-04-24T16:44:00.000-07:00

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted -
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickle in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn't say anything.
I took the nickle from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady's eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl's hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

- Gary Soto

A half shoulder soaked through

2010-04-10T13:46:00.000-07:00

from Ha Jin's book of short stories, A Good Fall:

"He remembered that when he was taking the entrance exam fourteen years back, his parents had stood in the rain under a shared umbrella, waiting for him with a lunch tin, sodas, and tangerines wrapped in a handkerchief. They each had half a shoulder soaked through. Oh, never could he forget their anxious faces. A surge of gratitude drove him to the brink of tears. If only he could speak freely to them again."

- In The Crossfire, Ha Jin

Song of the Wind

2010-04-10T13:44:00.001-07:00

I heard this one a few weeks ago and haven't been able to shake it off.

One Man's Egg Foo Yung

2010-01-30T14:47:00.000-08:00

I am standing at the local Chinese restaurant waiting for my takeout order. It's a cold day and outside the streets are slick with ice. Every time the door opens a bell chimes and then a gust of cold air cuts through the room. I wonder if the staff is not sick of listening to the bell. I've only been here five minutes and already it's beginning to annoy me. I don't know how they stand its interruptions. Maybe they've learnt to tune it out and the chimes have become mere white noise, a backdrop to to their lives much like the ice and slush has innocuously become a backdrop to mine.

The lady at the counter asks me what I'd like today and I order the usual. Egg Drop soup, Shrimp Schezuan (she pronounces it for me) and Vegetable Lo Mein. I discovered this restaurant recently on my way back home from work one day and have been coming by frequently since. The staff are helpful, the food is freshly cooked and there is a sense of flavor to what you eat. They actually prepare the food in front of you. It's interesting to watch the chef cook your meal. He stirs some oil in a wok and throws in a fistful of vegetables; baby corn, scallions, mushrooms and a few others I don't recognise. His wife scoops up some sauce from a container and hands it to him. She fries some crab rangoon while her husband stirs in the shrimp. The air is saturated with the smell of food. I feel like swooning.

It is a family restaurant and the children are occasionally there. They have a boy and a girl who sit at the counter and watch the customers. The daughter is the older one and she helps her mother pack the food into bags. Her little brother just sits there, trying to pick fights with her. He is losing his milk teeth and has a wide grin that extends all the way back into his throat. He enjoys baiting her but she doesn't give in. She just works quietly with her mother, acquiring efficiencies like other kids pick up hobbies. Although she is probably only eight or nine years old there is a sense of composure about her that is impressive.

Today the kids were at school and they've just come in. They walk to one of the tables at the far end of the dining area and shrug off their schoolbags and their jackets. The girl goes over to help her mother. The boy takes a box out of his schoolbag and brings it to show her. It is a box of cake mix. Pillsbury's Funfetti Valentine Cake Mix. The cover is decorated with two large pink cupcakes shimmering with sprinkles. The Pillsbury man stands in the background holding a swollen red heart that reads "Be Mine." The children place the box on the counter and stare at it. Behind them their father raises a sudden burst of flames from his wok as the Schezuan Shrimp sizzles inside but the children continue to look at the cupcakes, turning the box over, admiring the pictures on the cover. A few minutes later the girl returns to her mother. Her brother picks up the box off the counter and hugs it. It is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Public Ko Hasao

2010-01-26T02:03:00.001-08:00

I've been trying to upload music to the blog for a while now but didn't know how to do it. I know brimful occasionally uploads songs to her blog so I asked her and, voila, we have a first. For your listening pleasure: Public Ko Hasao from O Darling Yeh Hai India!

Movies

2010-01-19T11:23:00.000-08:00

In lieu of writing a real post, I just wanted to share some movies I enjoyed over the past couple of months. One of the perks of having a job is that I can now indulge my love of cinema. I've been watching movies ever since I can remember and even now, after what must be thousands of films and many countless hours of misspent youth, they continue to fascinate me. Some of the more recent ones I've seen are:

Away We Go: Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) is someone who is good at capturing emotional trauma and watching it ripen into tragedy. His films are usually bleak studies of human despair with unhappy people and grim endings. This movie is the exact opposite. It is tender-hearted and luminous, a work of art so lovely you want to take it home with you. Please watch it.

Rocket Singh - Salesman of the Year: understated and elegant, this one has charming performances from a quiet Ranbir Kapoor as well as a very smart, sharply written supporting cast. Naveen Kaushik is amazing.

Paa: I didn't want to watch this film simply because of Amitabh Bachchan. I remember him as an actor, someone who did Chupke Chupke and Zanjeer and Anand, and I hate the franchise he's now become. Thankfully, this film is not about Amitabh Bachchan. Paa is a simple tale told exceedingly well, without much artifice or cynicism, but sensitive to small details. I wish I had seen it in the cinema, if only to be delighted once again by the opening credits. (Incidentally, for those who've seen Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Bawarchi, Amitabh Bachchan does the same thing there.)

Paromitar Ek Din: a friend brought this one back from India for me. Aparna Sen's film about the enduring relationship between a woman and her daughter-in-law is a sharp contrast to both the villainous caricatures from 80's Hindi cinema as well as the self-righteous saccharine toadies on Star TV.

Everybody's Fine: I know Robert De Niro is supposed to be this great American actor and Mean Streets, Cape Fear and Raging Bull are frequently cited as classics but to my mind the best De Niro film is Stanley and Iris. The second best film is probably Everybody's Fine. It's about parents and children, about loneliness and crying in the dark. I think everyone should watch it.

A Gentle Man

2009-11-15T09:51:00.000-08:00

When I first came to the United States, I lived with some friends in the Great Lakes area. We don't have any family here and I needed somewhere to stay while I interviewed for residency. I was relatively new to the country, didn't have much money and had no idea what interviewing would be like. I just knew that I wanted to be a pediatrician and that I needed a residency. It was October and the trees were were still dressed in amber. I had never before been in that part of the country and was instantly enamored of all the beauty that I saw.

Baji's family and ours have known each other for a few generations. They moved to the same city after Partition and have stayed within a few minutes of each other for the past sixty years. When I was looking for a place to stay, Baji immediately offered to have me stay with her. I knew her only briefly, as a shadow figure from my childhood. She was much older than the rest of us children and usually kept to herself. She had an enviable stack of Archie comics that we were always trying to break into but, short of petty thievery, our interactions had been limited. Prior to coming over, I had asked her sister what she was like now, as a grown-up.

"She's the same" Sana said. "Make sure you make your bed every morning. Baji's obsessive about keeping the house clean."

It was a beautiful house. Set in its small plot of land with a rolling lawn and deer in the distance, it felt idyllic to be there. Baji and her husband, Kashif bhai, were friendly and caring and in all the time I spent there, and in spite of my curmudgeonly ways, they went out of their way to make me feel at home. The first night I was there, I got up at four in the morning. New to jetlag and curious to explore their massive fridge, I put on some socks and went to get something to eat. The kitchen lights were on. I thought it must be Baji getting a late night snack. I walked in and found an old man, sitting at the kitchen table, eating cereal and almonds. Sana had told me Kashif bhai's father lived with them for part of the year but I hadn't expected to find him so suddenly, at four in the morning! I introduced myself and asked him how he was.

"What did you say your name was?" he asked me.

I told him again.

"And who are you?"

I explained how Baji's family and mine had known each other for so long.

"Oh," he said, smiling. "You're Khursheed's grandson?"

"Yes," I replied, grateful for the recognition.

"Of course I know you," he said warmly. "Your grandfather is one of my friends. Here, sit down, have some almonds." He took some in his fist and passed them to me.

"How is your grandfather?" he asked.

I explained that he was fine, just getting older. His Alzheimer's was getting worse and he would have trouble remembering who we were.

"It happens to everyone, son," Uncle said. "We all pass through the same stages. Would you like some fruit? The apples are very good."

"No, thank you. I think I'll just get some water and try and go back to sleep."

"It's going to be Fajr in a little while," he said. "Pray and then go to sleep."

He was my grandfather's friend.

----

Yesterday, as I was browsing through Facebook, I found out that Uncle had passed away on Thursday. He had been diagnosed with colon cancer and it was terminal. He spent his last few months at home, with his son and daughter-in-law. I didn't know him very well but the news upset me. In all the time I spent in his home, he was very kind to me. Always infallibly courteous, he shared his experiences and gave me advice about life. I was too preoccupied at the time to try and remember it but now I wish I had written some of it down. People come and go but it's the kindnesses that remain. A gentle old man and a young fool, sharing almonds in the middle of the night. I don't think I want to forget that.

True Love

2009-10-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

Even more awesome

2009-09-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

Awesome

2009-09-23T06:11:00.000-07:00

To Be Surprised

2009-08-29T20:02:00.001-07:00

After two months of loitering around and doing outpatient work, I started a floor rotation last week. For those who don't know, floors are used to refer to wards and a floor rotation means inpatient work, or, in my case, inpatient pediatrics. I am in charge of a team of five people, plus or minus a few medical students, and together we take care of all the children admitted to the general pediatric unit. Sometimes we also take care of kids in the ICU. It's an exhausting rotation. The day starts at seven and ends around the same time in the evening and in those twelve or so hours you are pretty much on your feet all the time, taking admissions, speaking with parents, coordinating care between the specialists and the general physicians, teaching the residents and students, following up lab results, planning discharges and home care. It tires me even as I'm writing about it right now.

Last week, in addition to my supervisory work on the floors, I had a couple of presentations to give to the interns. I was working even longer than normal, first on the floors and then later on in the library, preparing for my talks. By Friday morning, when I was done with the second discussion, I was completely drained. As we were walking out of the conference room, one of the attendings stopped me.

"Hi, KK!" she said. "This is for you."

She handed me a small shopping bag.

"Iftaar Mubarak!" she smiled.

There was a box of food inside the bag.

"Thanks, Dr Andrews!"

"My niece made some biryani. I thought you'd like some for your iftar tonight."

"Thank you, ma'am. It's very kind of you." I was too surprised to say anything.

Later that day, I went into the physicians' lounge and shared the story with one of the other residents. He grinned when he heard this.

"Yeah, she's great," he told me. "A few years ago, when Ramadan was in winter, I was going into clinic one afternoon when I noticed Dr Andrews sitting in her car eating. I thought it was a little strange so I asked her about it later that day. She said that, because some of the residents were fasting, she thought it was be disrespectful to eat in front of them. So she ate her lunch in the car before coming in to work."

To Kill A Mockingbird

2009-08-10T19:51:00.001-07:00

It occurred to me this evening as I was watching Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird that the first time I ever heard of the book was in the fourth grade. Our teacher was a tall and volatile English lady, prone to violent tempers at the slightest provocation. I am surprised now that we stood for it, that we took her abuse without ever complaining to anyone. But I suppose we were just children and we reacted like most kids would to an abusive adult; we cowered around and tried not to incite her. Miss Williams would walk around the classroom monitoring our work, hands behind her back, sometimes nodding her approval, sometimes making a snide remark. It occurs to me now that she may have been ill, that this was a form of mental illness expressing itself. Why her colleagues didn't do anything about it, why no one brought it to attention, I don't know. I was a child a long time ago and I guess back then these things were still a stigma. People talked about depression in hushed tones. Going to a psychiatrist was unheard of. People like Miss Williams suffered in silence, occasionally dragging us along with her.

It seems almost ironic now that this lady would keep by her desk a copy of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. Every time we went up to her to have our work checked, I would look at its orange cover, trying to pry meaning out of the words. I didn't know what a mockingbird was or why anyone was trying to kill one. I almost never saw her pick up and read the book. But it lay there all year, its simple tale of childhood innocence, of strength and moral courage, locked inside the pages. I wonder what sustenance she derived from it. How much of her life did she find reflected in the narrative. Whose skin did she wear? And where did we, the children she taught and bullied and screamed at, figure in that association. It's easy now to see her as a kind of Mrs Henry Lafayette Dubose, the old lady hurling obscenities at the children while battling her own private demons. Did she know what she was doing? Did she feel any remorse? At the time, I both hated and feared her. As an adult, though, I find it intriguing that she would keep that book by her side. Maybe it restored a sense of balance within her that was otherwise difficult to obtain. Maybe she wasn't Mrs Dubose. Maybe she was Boo Radley.

I remember at the end of the school year she bought gifts for all the kids in her class.

Choti choti baatein

2009-08-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

My parents are over for a vacation and, between working and spending time with them, life is crazy busy right now. Yet, for all the action, time seems to have slowed down somewhat. I feel like there are more minutes in the day now than there were before, when I used to live alone. I work eight or ten hours at the hospital but as soon as I walk through the front door, a new life takes root. Ammi's usually in the kitchen cooking something, Abbu's at the dinner table, studying for an exam. He has a mess of books spread out in front of him from which he makes notes, diligently, meticulously, as if it were his very first time. Actually, after a long time, it feels as if everything is happening for the first time, all over again.

Well, are you?

2009-07-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

I like to sleep with the windows open and this morning I was woken up by a thunderstorm, by raindrops trickling on to my face. What's interesting is that before actually waking up, I was dreaming about being caught in a thunderstorm. The rain was braided into the script of the dream.

----

The promise of a good educational experience is that it introduces you to possibilities that you didn't even know existed. It may be in the form of lectures or hands-on experience or even something as innocuous as a simple conversation in the hallway. You just need to be ready for it.

----

Are you searching for a reason to be kind? - A R Rahman, Pray For Me Brother

Tuition

2009-06-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

In my final year of medical school, as part of the surgery rotation I spent four weeks on the Pediatric Surgery service. It was a relatively light assignment, at least compared to the other surgical specialties and we spent a fair amount of time just reading in the library. Most of the work was done by the surgeons and the surgical fellows. The medical students did, however, on occasion go to the OR and sometimes we were allowed to scrub in and assist. This usually meant holding a retractor and standing uncomfortably for hours on end watching the surgeon finesse his way around the body. I remember we were in there once, operating on a choledochal cyst. I was scrubbed in with the division chief, a tall and fastidious Punjabi doctor who worked like an artisan and spoke with a thick rustic accent. It was a long procedure and about two or three hours into the surgery, Dr Chaudhry looked up at me and asked, "So, do you want to be a pediatric surgeon when you grow up?"

My back was hurting, my arms were cramped and the hot air from my breathing kept fogging up my glasses. No, I did not want to be a surgeon.

"No, sir, not at all," I told him.

He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. A few seconds later I saw a smile break out behind his mask.

"So what do you want to do, son?"

"I want to be a pediatrician," I informed him.

"Good choice," he said. "I wish you good luck."

We continued dissecting out the cyst. He was one of the rare surgeons who didn't play music while they worked. Dr Chaudhry preferred operating in silence and while we worked it was only the clatter of the instruments that broke the monotonous pace of his hands dissecting through the abdomen.

"You know, Dr Siddiqui," he said, addressing the anesthesiologist, "when I was young there was no school in our village. I spent the first few years of my life just playing in the fields.

"My family were landowners and I spent the day herding cattle or roaming around our orchards. In the summer, we would sit under a tree and eat mangoes chilled on ice. Then one day my grandfather decided I had had enough loitering around and that it was time for me to go to school."

"He took me to the next village which was bigger than ours and had a school and handed me to the schoolmaster. "Teach him something, sir," my grandfather asked him."

"For my school fees he brought sweets, fruits, cannisters of desi ghee and a cow," Dr Chaudhry said. "How much tuition do you pay now?"

I told him.

"You should have gone to school back then," he chuckled. "There, almost done"

He had begun to stitch up the abdomen. Emboldened by his sudden friendliness, I asked if I could close the belly.

"No, I don't think so," he said and went back to his meticulous work.

Mulch

2009-06-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

There where the punk stump marks
the end of our yard we've strung
chickenwire around a six-by-six
plot of crabgrass In theory
we apply a nice layer of leaves
a layer of leftovers like eggshells and coffee grounds
and then another layer of leaves
ad infinitum or nauseam whichever
comes first In practice of course
we just toss in whatever's at hand:

sawdust and guacamole corncobs
and grass cuttings willy-nilly
in gross disorganization where
they decay and ooze together
like some vegetable Dorian Gray
until in spring and fall we spread it
below allamanda and oleander
camellia and azalea choking the weeds
holding in moisture making
spectacular over-achievers of them all

If only we could mulch our own mistakes
before they harden and stain
dropping the rinds of argument and affair
shells of dead dreams nasty shocks
skins of bad habits lumps of neglect
and sad pride into a pile
that bubbles and burns in the dark
until it's usable and by using
we'd learn for a change
and open and soar like
hollyhocks in a country garden


- Peter Meinke

Up

2009-05-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

Another charmer

This is to say

2009-05-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

As tired as you all must be of following my prolific blogging activities, I feel I must not stop now. My mind is exhausted from churning out post after post, my fingers worn to stubs from typing typing typing. But the words will not relent and the need of the soul to express itself overwhelms the other paltry demands of living, of buying bread and making beds. I cannot fold laundry any more. The blog is waiting. Let the dishes fester in the sink, the furniture dust itself, the car purchase its own gasoline. Let deadlines self-destruct and may roses rise out of the ashes. This white space, this nourishing canvas of limitless possibility, needs to be filled. Let the blog live.

---

Strawberries are back in fashion. So are mangoes. Both make excellent smoothie material.

---

Last Sunday my friends and I went out for lunch and found ourselves in a roomful of mothers. Not having our own present we crept shamefacedly around the buffet and pretended not to enjoy the mango dal. The lady in front of us had a tremor in her hands and her plate kept wobbling as she tried to serve herself. Noticing this, her daughter left her own lunch and came to her mother's side. Steadying the plate with one hand, she chirpily talked her mother through the menu and filled her plate with the other. They walked back to their table together.

The Straight Story

2009-04-05T14:20:00.001-07:00

This film is a work of art

Cancer Plea

2009-03-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I received a request from one of my friends about a young man who was diagnosed with leukemia and has suffered a relapse. He is in Singapore right now, awaiting a stem cell transplant at Singapore General Hospital. Due to the side effects of the chemotherapy, his white blood cell count is dangerously low and they are looking for potential blood donors to help replace that. If you, or anybody you know, is in Singapore, has O+ blood and would be willing to donate, I am sure the family would be very grateful. Their contact numbers are: 00-65-811-97-904 and 00-65-82-07-4232.

Thank you!

----

Sunday, March 21, 2008: The young man passed away yesterday. I didn't know him personally but from the kind of tributes his friends are sharing, he must have been a remarkable human being. Please remember him and the family in your prayers.

Poem

2009-03-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

from March 1979

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language,
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions.
I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.
Language but no words.

- Tomas Transtromer

Intern

2009-02-10T23:35:00.000-08:00

It's one o'clock in the morning and I'm wide awake at work. The patients are resting, the ER is quiet and the whole hospital seems to have curled up and fallen asleep. At the computer terminal next to me, a resident is wrapping up the last of her admissions. We talk for a while as she jots down a few notes in the chart.

"My intern tonight used to be an orthopedic surgeon in India," I tell her.

"Wow," she says. "So what's he doing here?"

"He worked in England for a few years and then decided to move over because they wouldn't let him be an attending."

"So he's doing Pediatrics now?"

"Family practise, actually."

"Wow, it's amazing the things people do. He must be old?"

"I didn't ask how old he was," I tell her. "He's got a couple of children, though. The oldest is eleven, I think."

"Poor guy," she comments and returns to her notes.

It's been a tricky evening for me. Arun is much older than I am but because of the situation I'm senior over him. He doesn't have much experience with children and almost everything he does needs to be supervised. I hesitate when speaking to him, alternating between a casual use of his first name and the more respectful Dr. Rai. In different circumstances he would have been my teacher. Tonight he is my intern.

"This recession is hitting everyone hard," the resident comments.

"Fifteen thousand jobs a day, someone was telling me," I reply.

"We're lucky to have jobs at all."

"Absolutely. And to do something that we actually enjoy. How many people have that?"

"Hmm . . . ." she says, opening up the internet to check her mail.

My phone rings. A young asthmatic in the ER requires admission. I go down and evaluate the child. He looks good but needs to be admitted for steroids and some breathing treatment. I discuss the plan with the parents and tell them I'll see them upstairs.

"Dr Rai will be coming in to see the child once you're up on the Pediatric floor," I tell them.

"Who is that?" the mother asks.

"One of my colleagues. We work together."

Sixteen

2009-01-27T19:23:00.000-08:00

Iffat tagged me with this meme recently. The rules are:

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Almost every day, I am humbled by the human body, by the study of God's creation

I used to collect neckties. The first tie I ever bought was bottle-green one with Daffy Duck faces on it. I still have it.

I wish I could fold clothes as well as the people at Macy's.

I love bananas. Sweet, simple, versatile - I wish more people were bananas.

I'm not quite sure how it happens but sometimes, when I meet someone, I tend to see them as the child they were. It's usually not very difficult. A lot of people retain that essence.

I love daal chawal

When I was younger, I used to read indiscriminately, just swallowing books whole. Now I get into arguments with them. It's amazing how much of modern literature is centred around this general predatory obsession with sex and misery. This annoys me. (And what makes it worse is that, a lot of the time, people, especially young people, come to a book for consolation or advice and they make themselves impressionable to the book's opinion only to absorb its cruelty.)

I like driving through the car wash

The lady who cuts my hair is an ICU nurse

While I think money is important, I don't think I'm particularly materialistic. Me and mine are words that dissolve societies, not make them.

As a family, we watch a lot of movies together. It's one of my favorite things to do when I'm home, watch a movie with my parents. The last one we saw was Taare Zameen Par. I remember my father, who was educated at boarding school, say that it was one of the best and worst experiences of his life.

Have you hugged your mom today?

I get migraines

Gol guppay are irresistible

I like myself when I'm working hard

I love to laugh

I don't think I know 16 people but if you want to tag yourself please feel welcome.

Mother

2009-01-27T02:33:00.000-08:00

It's almost 5 am and I'm on call finishing off the last of the night's admissions. It's been a light night and I've had a chance to catch some sleep so I'm awake now. As I walk by one of the rooms I notice the sound of the shower running. The child is sleeping comfortably but the mother's cot is empty. Maybe she's having troubling sleeping, I think to myself. I was in the child's room at midnight when he tripped over his pyjamas and bumped his head. Mom was up then, fretting over him, simultaneously trying to console him and make him finish his homework at the same time. "I don't want him to be missing no school," she told me.

A few minutes later, I happen to walk into the room to see the child in the next bed and Mom is putting on a jacket and gathering her things. She leans over the child and kisses him. "Ok, Zach, Mommy's gotta go to work now. You be a good boy. Mommy loves you." The boy mumbles something back. She strokes his hair.

The sky is still dark outside. It won't be dawn for a few more hours. The mother wraps a scarf around herself and leaves for work.

Baby Mine

2009-01-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when you least expect it, things have a way of surprising you.

Last night I dreamt I had become a father. A pair of twins, named Amina and Wafa, had been bequeathed me and I was their dad. They were fat and gurgling and when they laughed it made my heart ripple. I called my dad to share the good news and we were both incredulous. I couldn't explain their provenance. There was no wife in this dream. (Maybe they came from eggs.) But there they were, a pair of chunky babies with roses in their cheeks, emanating a pure luminous joy. I carried the feeling around with me all day. It's strange but I've never really considered myself dad material before. Yes, I love children and I'm excited about spending my career taking care of them. But to be a father? I don't think I have the necessary wisdom yet to raise a child. And yet, when I walked into a room this afternoon and saw a baby girl with chubby cheeks, swaddled in that milk-soft smell, I couldn't say it wasn't Amina. Or Wafa.

But it wasn't.

Dudh malai, kukkar shukkar, ghar ghar burger shurger OYE!

2008-12-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

Today is the first official day of winter. As if on cue, there is a snowstorm raging outside. The evergreens are shaking, snow whirls up into thick flurries and the ground is calf-deep in white. I wanted to drive over to the mall to watch Slumdog Millionaire but inclement weather discourages the plan. Instead, I stay at home and try to write. This is how far I get.

----

It's been a busy couple of months. I learnt how to drive, got a car, got a house. To furnish that house, I got in the car and scoured the land for furniture to fill the empty space. On one or two occasions (more, if you're not a family member reading this blog) I almost got myself killed due to inept driving. But that's all in the past. I am now sitting in the house with the new furniture watching snow fall on the car. Or almost the car, as the carport protects it from the ravages of the storm. I drove into the carport last week.

----

When people ask me what's new, I usually have very little to tell them. My days, and every fourth night, are usually spent at work. Whenever I'm home, I'm usually asleep or watching TV. I didn't imagine it would be like this. When I was younger I had resolved never to buy a TV because it epitomised the death of the imagination. Instead, I would live in a house filled with books and cosy yellow light. The floors would be decorated with warm rugs, art would hang off the walls and the whole atmosphere would be incandescent with an aura of intellect. This would be my life, a lambent expression of the state of my soul.

Last night I spent two hours on the couch watching a Cosby Show Marathon.

Remember

2008-12-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

(I'm writing this not so much for the blog as for myself, in an effort to remember.)

When you're interviewing for residency people often ask you to describe a memorable patient, someone who made an impression on you and changed the way you thought. When I was interviewing, I had Salma, a plucky eight year old I took care of in one of Karachi's inner city clinics. She used to wet her bed and every morning would be predictably beaten by her mother for it. We did some tests and found out she had recurrent urinary tract infections. There was a pro bono referral to a specialist, some antibiotics and the bed wetting and beatings ceased. It was almost mathematical in its progress from diagnosis to cure.

As you progress through your career, your list of these patients grows. You may remember someone for their resilience, how they fought and recovered. Or for their kindness, their patience with you as the fledgling physician. Or even for your failure, how you were unable to help someone. The practise of medicine isn't as mathematical as all our algorithms would suggest. There are, of course, guidelines and standards of care but the patients, or diseases, don't read textbooks and there are times when a diagnosis is elusive and difficult to make. Sometimes you can make the diagnosis and the pathology doesn't respond to the treatment. Other times the disease is so widespread that treatment is redundant. The new age of genetics and molecular biology may make our knowledge of science cutting edge but the practise of medicine, and more importantly, the care of patients, still remains for the most part an adaptible combination of both knowledge and humanity, or the art of medicine as people like to call it. To dissect one out from the other is to do the patients a great disservice.

----

I was on the Hematology Oncology service last month. The general perception people have of cancer medicine is that it is a very depressing field. How can anyone spend their days watching children die. In truth, it's not actually like that. Pediatric cancers are, for the most part, a different species from adult cancers and a lot of them respond very favorably to treatment. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, for instance, has a cure rate of more than 80% and most children are expected to survive. In the month that I spent on the service, there were no fatalities.

And yet, throughout the month, I found my eyes uncomfortably moist. It is difficult watching children suffer and a lot of that comes from the treatment of the cancer itself, the chemotherapy. I'm not going to describe the individual details but it's an experience that, even as observer, takes you outside of yourself and sharply puts things in perspective. Often I would sit and talk with the parents and the specialists, trying to cull, for my own consolation, perhaps, stories of their experience with the disease. It is those stories, more than anything else, that both humble and embolden you as a physician. Like the boy who didn't have hair. Or the family who, after the death of their teenage son, adopted the clinic and made sure that all new patients receive a basket of toys or anything else they might need. Or the man who, even when he found out at the time of transplant that he wasn't the father of his daughter, still took care of her. Her own mother abandoned the child but this man stayed with her, steadfast until the very end. The girl died in his arms.

It is humbling to be around such people. I cannot say how I would react were I to be placed in their situation and, frankly, I am grateful that I am not. But having met them and having been acquainted with their example, I think that I am a better physician and a better person. They set a precedent for me for how to behave under what can only be excruciating circumstances and for that invisible gift I am grateful.

Baby Doctor

2008-12-13T06:13:00.000-08:00

I was on call a few weeks ago when we admitted a young boy with fever. He had a short history of severe muscular aches and pains and difficulty walking. As part of the preliminary workup we decided to get viral cultures to try an isolate a pathogen. One of the ways this is done is by collecting a sample from nose. You take a sterile swab, a thin plastic instrument that resembles a long Q-tip, introduce it into a nostril and gently rub it along the walls. Once you think you have a good sample, the swab is removed and snipped off, inoculated in a tube of transport media and sent off to the lab for analysis.

I went into Bryan's room with the test kit. He was laying in bed, tired from all the bloodwork that had already been done. I showed him what I was going to do, told him it wasn't going to hurt and asked for his permission. He looked at me and then at the paraphernalia I carried in my hands.

"What's it for, sir?" he asked.

"We want to make sure there are no bugs, or viruses, at the back of your nose." I simplify it for him.

He looked again at the swab I was holding. It was about the length of a tongue depressor and probably as ominous as a spear to the child.

"Don't worry, not all of it is going to go in your nose. Only a small portion, just enough to get get some bugs," I reassure him.

He looked at me hopefully. "Is it OK if I just sneeze on it?"

Home Sweet Home

2008-12-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

I have a cousin back home who recently graduated from medical school. She's quite a few years younger than I am and over the years we've kept in touch sporadically over MSN. I remember when she was a first year student, struggling with anatomy and biochemistry. We used to talk about what texts to read and how to cope with exams. She's an intern now, a house officer, just done with a three month rotation in OB-GYN. It's amazing how quickly time passes. From a fledgling first-year student to a house officer, it's been six years. Her self-confidence has increased remarkably. She now manages her parents' medications herself. They are both severe diabetics. Her father has heart disease, has had a coronary bypass in the past. Aliya takes care of them both, adjusting the doses of the medications, taking them for doctors' visits, gently shaming them into controlling their diet - her father has a particularly incorrigible sweet tooth. Aliya's brothers are both abroad. She lives alone with her parents.

It makes me think about my own parents. They are both getting older, moving imperceptibly into a frail age. Like Aliya's parents, they too have their own chronic illnesses that they live with. There must be hundreds of families like ours, scattered throughout the country, dependent on their children, this natural role reversal that mimics the gifts of childhood. Unlike a lot of them, our parents are lucky in that they have someone to take care of them. What about those families where nobody has stayed back? Financial circumstances sometimes make these decisions incumbent. Children have to leave home to be able to support the family. The nest is emptied. What then of the parents?

It's hard to make a decision, to balance exigencies against a vacuum of imminent loneliness. I know why people leave. Just from observation I know how dramatically the life of a family improves with remunerations sent from abroad. I also know how sometimes you have to go away to be able to restoratively come back. But, really, how far can you go when heart is tied to heart?

Listening is an act of love

2008-10-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

Listen to the podcast

Dads

2008-10-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

Speak

2008-09-27T05:23:00.000-07:00

One of the most important things I've learnt this past year is how crucial it is to communicate well. Caring for patients involves planning out a course of treatment and this needs to be communicated not only to families but also to nurses and social workers and healthcare reps and, of course, your colleagues. So, in the course of the day, I end up talking to several different people, each of whom require me to adapt the conversation based on their level of engagement. For an introvert like myself this was a hard thing to learn. I prefer to just do stuff and leave the talking to others but now I can't afford to be so passive. Miscommunication, or an absence of communication, runs the risk of lost opportunities and the off-chance that a patient may actually suffer from their stay in the hospital. So not talking is not an option.

As I think about it now a lot of this applies outside the hospital as well. In any relationship, one of the most important things is the ability of individuals to communicate well with each other. Self-help guides abound with platitudes about understanding the other person, about talking things out but I notice that in South Asian, or desi, culture people seem to be somewhat averse to the idea. Some of this has to do with an innate stoicism and the need to shield our feelings from others but a large part of it is just a passive-aggressive attitude to relationships. Instead of openly discussing problems with one another, people internalise their aggravation and vent it out in subtle, less obvious ways. An example of this would be someone inviting me to their home for dinner for an important occasion, say his wedding anniversary or a child's birthday. If I'm busy that night and casually brush off the invitation without deference to that individual's feelings or emotional investment in the situation, my inappropriate response will insult him but he won't confront me about it. I won't even realise I've done something wrong. However the next time we meet, he may ignore me or may make some stinging remark in response to an innocent question which act is meant to alert me to the fact that he has been wronged. This is a dysfunctional social dynamic and, truth be told, it pisses me off. I think that, by indulging ourselves in these convoluted forms of expression, we waste a lot of time and emotional energy over what are essentially misunderstandings. We also run the terrible risk of ruining precious relationships as misconceptions multiply and the rally of passive-aggressive responses escalates into a permanent rift.

I don't have any easy answers to this. I know how hard it was for me to start communicating and I can understand that reluctance in others. At the same time, I think that if you really care about a relationship, it's important to sit down and talk things through when differences arise. By opening yourself up you do run the risk of being hurt, especially by the other's locked-up resentment and reactionary criticism, but at the same time you also admit the significance of that association. Even on a less personal, more societal level, I think we could all benefit from being clearer in expressing our expectations and disappointments, if only to articulate and make public the standards of good behavior we all privately acknowledge to be true.

Professor

2008-09-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

A friend and I were sitting and reminiscing about our medical school days. Arif was talking about oral exams, or vivas, which all medical students are required to take at the end of each year. Vivas are, or they used to be, the bane of a medical student's existence. There were usually two or three examiners, one external, from an outside institution, and one or more internals who would all be sitting behind a desk waiting for you as you walked into the room. The external would usually begin the questions and after a few minutes, which either went by very fast, if you knew your subject, or painfully slow, if you didn't, the internal examiners would take over. The whole process was fairly subjective and very stressful and we all dreaded it.

"I remember when my wife was going in for her final year surgery exam," Arif said. "She walked into the room and sat down. The internal asked her name and then asked the external examiner to start the viva."

"Saniya was very nervous. We had just got married two days before and with the wedding and everything, she hadn't had much chance to prepare. You remember how brutal those surgery vivas could be. It was like those surgeons were operating on you!"

"So she sits down and waits for the examiner to start questioning her. He's an old man, a professor from a big medical school, dressed in an immaculate suit and tie, like the old British surgeons. The examiner looks at her hands and asks her "What's this?"

"Mehndi, sir," she tells him. "I got married two days ago."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I'm here for the exam, sir."

"No you're not," he says. "Hogaya exam! Chalo bhago yahan se!" (We're done! The exam's over!)"

Arif grins. "She passed."

Hair

2008-08-31T17:09:00.000-07:00

I was on call a few nights ago, admitting a 4 year-old for some chemotherapy. David* had been diagnosed with cancer in infancy and had been successfully treated until a few months ago when the cancer recurred. The nurses on the floor all knew him well. They had seen him grow up and, like all the cancer patients, they spoiled him lavishly. It was my first time with David, however, and I had to take a complete history starting from the beginning.

In the middle of the interview, I noticed him touching my forearm. I was wearing half-sleeved scrubs and my arms were bare. He ran his hand up and down my forearms, apparently fascinated. I asked him what he was looking at.

"What's that?" he said.

"That's my arm."

"What's on it?"

I looked at my forearm. He was feeling the hair.

"Hair," I said.

David looked at it thoughtfully for a moment. His own arms, much like the rest of his body, were devoid of hair.

"Who put it there?"

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was such an innocent question from a child whose chemotherapy had left him smooth and bald.

"It just grew out," I told him.

He ran his hands up and down, still mesmerized by the sight.

"Will you cut it off?" he asked.

----
*Not his real name.

Ramadan

2008-08-30T08:32:00.000-07:00

When I was living in Karachi we had a housemaid who would come for a few hours in the day and do the cooking. I say housemaid but Shahnaz was really my mother's age, maybe slightly younger but not by much. She used to make the most awesome parathas. They were layered and crumbly and Shahnaz had this little trick of hiding the ghee in the folds of the dough so that the paratha, when it was delivered to you, would be dry and crisp on the outside but would melt on your tongue with the first bite. It was sheer breakfast heaven and my only complaint was that they were too small, each paratha a diminutive fist-sized portion that disappeared in two or three quick bites.

Shahnaz lived in a squatter settlement some distance from our house and would walk to work every morning. Ours was one of several houses she visited during the day and, by the time I got up, she would already be done with her work and on her way to the next home. The parathas would be wrapped up, warm and toasty in the hotpot. I'd say a quick hello, maybe ask about her health, and then dive into the spoils, occasionally complaining about their size and how I had to eat so many to get my fill. She never said anything and the parathas stayed small.

It occurred to me a few days ago that maybe that was the size of the chappati she made for her kids. She had seven or eight young children - I never asked - and how she fed them I don't know. She worked hard enough but Shahnaz was the only one earning for her family. Her husband had passed away. Keeping portions small would have been one way to keep the children from starving. It embarrasses me now to think of my puerile complaints. What did she go through to maintain that silence, to choose to protect her dignity by abstaining from an explanation of her poverty, her need to willfully deprive her children of the foods she prepared in other people's homes.

What comfort can my words bring her now.

Let a place be made

2008-08-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

Let a place be made for one who draws near,
The one who is cold, deprived of any home,

Tempted by the sound of a lamp, by the lit
Threshold of a solitary house.

And if he is still exhausted, full of anguish,
Say again for him those words that heal.

What does this heart which once was silence need
If not those words which are both sign and prayer,

Like a fire caught sight of in the sudden night,
Like the table glimpsed in a poor house?

- Yves Bonnefoy

La Vita E Bella

2008-07-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

Today is a beautiful day. In fact today is the best day in a long time because today I have found her. I'd been looking for her for almost a year, asking friends and acquaintances (Do you know anyone? Would you recommend someone?) and come up only with disappointment but now my search has borne fruit. Or biryani, to be more precise. Afshan Aunty has agreed to cook for me. She lives about an hour away with her son and daughter-in-law and she makes meals for starving bachelors. I spoke with her this morning and we went over the menu. They're from Hyderabad and soon my life will be filled with Hyderabadi biryani, mirchon ka saalan and bhagaaray baingan. Also seekh kababs and pulao with the occasional bhaji (or bhujia) thrown in for delight.

My world feels complete again.

2008-07-02T07:14:00.000-07:00

Simply stunning

Blessings

2008-06-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I've noticed about being a resident is how often we're apt to complain. Walk into any conversation and invariably the topic will come around to how stressful things are. It could be a difficult patient, a busy call or a tough attending who grills you remorselessly over insignificant details. Residency is hard work. A lot of the time you're on call every fourth night which means every fourth day you come home exhausted and ready to collapse. It's a challenging life and it extracts a lot from you, physically and emotionally, without offering any immediate, commensurate dividend. And the rising gas prices don't help . . . .

And yet, when I sit down and think about it, I don't really think I work that hard. There are so many people who work a lot harder than I do, and for a lot less money, who go unnoticed in this world. I remember an incident last year that helped me to understand this. I had gone home for my annual vacation and was out shopping with my mother. This was my first time back after I had started earning and I was naturally flush with money, dropping dollars at the slightest excuse, eager to both indulge and impress. We were at the vegetable market - my mother needed someone to carry the bags - and, feeling hungry, I stepped into one of the small cafeterias for a quick sandwich and something cool to drink. As I was waiting for the cook to make my paratha, I noticed a man come in. He must have been middle-aged, with a stooped back but very muscular, probably one of the porters at the market who carried your purchases back to the car. He looked tired and, as he walked in, the scent of sweat, dry and heavy, pressed off his body into the surrounding air. The man went over to the fridge and pulled out a small carton of yoghurt. He then asked the waiter to get him some bread and, while he was waiting for that, emptied the carton of yogurt into his plate and sprinkled some pepper over it. When the bread came, he broke off a large piece, dipped it into the yogurt and ate it in quick, hungry bites. That was his dinner. (He may or may not have also asked for an onion to add savor to his meal. It doesn't matter.)

When I am tired and exhausted, I like to think of that man, the one with the body odor and the large circles of sweat drying on his back, eating his simple meal. It replenishes me instantly with a perspective that I am grateful for. I feel blessed.

who are you

2008-06-21T19:47:00.001-07:00

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of November sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

- ee cummings

Notes

2008-06-08T00:21:00.000-07:00

It is almost midnight as I write this. There is a thunderstorm raging outside and flashes of lightning streak through the window from time to time. I woke up a few hours ago, pleasantly sore from being up all night taking call. Post-call sleep is the most refreshing because your body sorely needs it, is greedy for the rest, and thus you wake up refreshed, your mind clear of last night's clamor. I walk over and open the terrace door. A scent of wet earth is carried into the room. I love rain. There is something inherently, exquisitely beautiful about it. How it looks, how it sounds, how it changes the landscape in small footfalls of water. I don't know how to describe it. Sometimes it is enough to just sit and listen.

Decencies

2008-06-07T17:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Person Who Took My Clothes Out of the Dryer,

I just wanted to thank you for folding them. I had put them in two days ago and gone to work, completely forgetting that they needed to be removed. Imagine my joy, then, after returning forty-eight hours later to rescue what should have been an insensible mess and finding them all placed in a neat pile, the socks matched and tucked into each other, on top of the dryer. We don't know each other - the laundry room, churning and rumbling in detergent frenzy, is hardly a place to discover new friends - but yours was a wonderful gesture and it made my day. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

kk